That's Funny Youtube

Youtube tweaks its algorithm to laugh at users

All of the below videos have appeared in my feed, in the last couple of days.  This cannot be a coincidence.  Youtube must be doing this on purpose to have fun with people who do not buy into the narrative they are pushing.  I can just imagine some blue-haired, tatted-up, 20-something, with a nose ring, sitting in a Google cubicle somewhere, thinking this is hilarious.

Memo to the adults at Youtube:  This is not helping your cause.

Note:  There were at least a dozen more before I started grabbing screen shots.

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Internet Portal

How do you face the internet?

Here is a slightly edited version of how I do it.  I have found that if you want a portal that works well for your needs, you have to create your own.

News Fox News New York Post Wall Street Journal New York Times Washington Post Opinion & Commentary Tucker Carlson Network City Journal DailyWire Frontpage Magazine Instapundit The Spectator Bruce Bawer Theodore Dalrymple Dinesh D'Souza The Free Press Glenn Greenwald David Horowitz Andrew Klavan Michael Knowles Heather Mac Donald Douglas Murray National Review The New Criterion Jordan Peterson Prager University Dave Rubin Christopher Rufo Ben Shapiro Mark Steyn John Stossel Matt Walsh Technology 9to5Mac Judner Aura Marques Brownlee Lewis Hilsenteger Dave Lee Apple Apple.com AppleID iCloud Support | Profile System Status _______________________________________

Reference American Heritage Dictionary Britannica.com Cambridge Dictionary Chambers Dictionary Collins Dictionary Dictionary.com DuckDuckGo | Bing Food & Recipes (Dropbox) Google | Maps | Translate IRS.gov Merriam-Webster OneLook.com OED.com TimeandDate.com Wikipedia.org Web Tools Disqus DocuSign ExpressVPN Google Voice Name.com Twitter Video Acorn TV ITV.com Netflix Rumble YouTube Email Gmail ProtonMail Shopping & Banking Amazon Shipping FedEx UPS USPS

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The Substack Controversy

There are three political writers who I sometimes disagree with, but nonetheless enjoy reading.  All three would describe themselves as left of center.  I think what I enjoy most about these writers is that they are consistently honest.  And frankly, I just don't think that about many writers on the Left.

One other interesting note about these three:  Two are gay men and one is a bi woman.  Now I read and enjoy other gay writers who I mostly agree with.  For example, Douglas Murray and Bruce Bawer.  Murray is far and away my favorite political commentator today.

But here, I would like to call your attention to these three:

Glenn Greenwald

Andrew Sullivan

Bari Weiss

Why?  Well these three have each had run-ins with woke establishments seemingly controlled by a small minority of far-left children.  In the case of Greenwald, he left The Intercept, an outlet he founded.

So what did they do?

Well they fled to Substack.

You'd think that would be the end of it.  But no, the children continue to hound them.  They want Substack to deplatform writers they disagree with.  And short of that, they call for a boycott of Substack.  Of course they do.

I only point out that these writers are gay and bi to emphasize how ridiculous the children are.  These are not far-right extremists.  Rather they are center left and far from homophobic.  But the children demand lockstep adherence to their far-left wokeness.  Otherwise, banishment and cancellation.

Now I don't know much about Substack.  I certainly don't know whether the owners have backbones or whether they are invertebrates like Dean Baquet.

I for one hope they withstand the noise.  But either way, some good will come out of this.  Because they have proven their business model.  And others are copying it.  When the children chased Donald McNeil out of The New York Times, he re-emerged at Medium.

That is, today I can subscribe to individual writers I enjoy without having to support some larger institution that I find unworthy.  If Substack folds, surely someone like Ben Shapiro will happily step into the void.  In any case, as with book publishing, the gatekeepers are losing their hold over public content consumption.  We no longer have to rely on Dean Baquet and his woke newsroom kindergarten to read Bari Weiss.

No doubt there are writers on these platforms that I intensely disagree with.  But so what?  Speech is not violence no matter what the children believe.  Let everyone have their say; if we must, we can judge the winners by their readership and subscriber counts.  It is a rather old-fashioned and liberal viewpoint, but I believe that the most appropriate response to speech I disagree with, is more speech.

How is it that the Left lost its liberalism?

This morning I noticed yet another writer I like appear on Substack:

Mary Katharine Ham.

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A Disciple of the Written Word

A friend emails:  You should start a YouTube channel.  A colleague on an email forum that I started says:  You should move this forum to Facebook.  A relative asks:  Are you on Instagram?  A client asks:  Will you come on my podcast?  And why don't you start your own?

The truth is I am an unapologetic disciple of the written word.  I am comfortable here, with this medium and on this platform and in this format.  I belong here.  I am happy to leave all the modern alternatives to others.  I like writing and then reading what I have written.  And thinking about it.  Revising it.  Correcting it (although I can be a terrible editor).  Sometimes I even print it out...on paper.  Or, in a book.

Look, we are not talking about a Gutenberg press here.  When I publish to this blog, anyone in the world can read it, instantly.  Or not.

But will I miss out on some potential audience?  Without doubt.

As I wrote in About this blog, I often write to help me determine how I should think about things.  Even sometimes, if I should think about things at all.  It really is a journal.  So if others read along, great.  It is a bonus.  But the writing you find here is primarily for myself.  If you are reading along, I hope it makes you think as it does for me.

Surely that is a worthy goal for all of us.

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What Happened to my Newspaper?

I woke up this morning, put the coffee on, and like every morning for the last 20 years, went outside to get the newspaper.  Alas, there was no paper to be found.  Of course it might have something to do with the unpaid renewal bill still sitting here on my desk.  For $183.  For another year of the Raleigh News & Observer.  Let me look at it again; yes, my subscription expired a week ago.  No doubt my carrier was hoping I’d get around to paying it and gave me a week’s grace.

But I am not going to pay it.  In fact, I decided not to renew it months ago.  Now, don’t get me wrong, I enjoy the ritual of sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and the paper.  Tangible news.  Well tangible newsprint anyway.  It’s a comfortable ritual and it used to be the very first thing I did in the morning.  But in recent years, its become the second.  These days, the first thing I do is, well, read the news…on the internet.  Okay I confess, email first, then news.

Sure, reading news articles on the internet takes a little getting used to.  But just like the printed newspaper, most articles are not very long.  I used to print out long articles from the internet and read them on paper.  And, I still do that occasionally – a recent New York Times Magazine cover story comes to mind.  But over time, I have come to read longer and longer articles online.

Now, we all know newspapers are in trouble.  Their problems are real:  An outdated business model, diminished advertising, and falling subscriber base.  But, I have long resented paying for the newspaper.  For me, it is a quality issue.  They just do not do a very good job.  Simple as that.  And objective journalism is an oxymoron.  The only people in the world who do not recognize this fact seem to be the so-called journalists themselves.  But I paid anyway.  I wanted to know what the heck was going on, and regardless of what I thought about their competence or fairness, they were able to inform me who won the election yesterday.

But I no longer need them for that.  Consequently, I no longer feel compelled to give money to the undeserving.

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On the Mess that is Craigslist

I detest CraigsList.  Any yet, like millions of us, I use it regularly.  Not because I want to, but rather because there is no alternative.

I often complain about the arrogance of tech companies like Microsoft.  They have become so rich, they no longer really care about their customers.  CraigsList also has incredible arrogance towards its users, derived from monopoly power.  But this is a monopoly based on price zero and size.

Gary Wolf writes about the service in Wired Magazine:

The glory of the site is its size and its price.  But seen from another angle, craigslist is one of the strangest monopolies in history, where customers are locked in by fees set at zero and where the ambiance of neglect is not a way to extract more profit but the expression of a worldview.
...
The current strategy for growth—a slow, bloblike, seemingly unstoppable accretion of new craigslist cities, each an exact clone of the others, launched with no marketing or publicity.  Sometimes a new site grows very slowly for a long time.  But eventually listings hit a certain volume, after which the site becomes so familiar and essential that it is more or less taken for granted by everybody except the distressed publishers of local newspapers.  Revenue from newspaper classified ads is off nearly 50 percent in the past decade, a drop that comes to almost $10 billion.  Only a fraction of this loss is because of Newmark's company, but as the largest online classified site, craigslist is easy to blame.
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It is difficult to overstate the scale of this accomplishment.  Craigslist gets more traffic than either eBay or Amazon.  eBay has more than 16,000 employees.  Amazon has more than 20,000.  Craigslist has 30.
...
The long-running tech-industry war between engineers and marketers has been ended at craigslist by the simple expedient of having no marketers.  Only programmers, customer service reps, and accounting staff work at craigslist.  There is no business development, no human resources, no sales.  As a result, there are no meetings.  The staff communicates by email and IM.

Now I love the fact that they don't have marketing types.  But they have a tin ear when it comes to user needs, in no small part because their customer service is a joke.

The CraigsList people argue that they are not a business, but a community service.  But what do you get when you cross a free community service with a business monopoly with a hundred-plus cities?

Evidently the answer is:  Monopolistic anarchy.

I found this article thanks to my friend and blogging mentor, Craig Newmark (no, not the CraigsList idiot savant, but the economics professor).  On his blog, he has pointed out more than once, that if you don't like what you find there, he will gladly refund your money.  And sarcasm aside, his point is so true that it needs no further comment.  And he argues, this applies to CraigsList as well.

However, if I don't like his blog, or any blog, I can go elsewhere.  If I don't like CraigsList, where do I go?  The newspaper?  God forbid.

In fact, I often rail against newspapers on this site.  It's ironic that a company largely responsible for their demise, is so wholly undeserving.
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Rosenberg on Journalist versus Bloggers

Scott Rosenberg offers an extended excerpt from his new book on the rise of blogging, Say Everything.

Chapter Nine:
Journalists versus Bloggers

My take:  Traditional journalists with their press passes, phony neutrality, and monopoly on the public narrative, showered bloggers with invective, condescension, derision, and ridicule.

Rosenberg argues that traditional journalism was not objective about the rise of blogging.  They were too dismissive to be objective.  He does not, however, challenge traditional journalism's self-proclaimed objectivity itself.  To be fair, this is probably beyond the scope of his book.  But he goes on to point out that traditional journalists often lack the time, interest, or expertise to properly report on given issues.  Note this problem existed long before the internet.  Bloggers just helped make it painfully obvious.

In addition to the economics of the internet, to truly understand the trouble traditional journalism faces today, one must consider the quality of the product.  I would argue this starts with traditional journalism's claim to be objective.  Journalism is not, and has never been, neutral.  The idea of neutral journalism is, at best, delusional, and at worst, deceptive.  Proclaiming neutrality and objective reporting does not make it so.  Rather, it simply engenders public distrust.

As a long-time blog reader, what is refreshing about the medium is the best bloggers, on all sides of any issue, don't pretend to be neutral.  Readers are invited to engage with the writers or free to seek alternative viewpoints.  Traditional journalism, condescending to the end, trembles at the thought of it.

Update:
July 27, 2009
Kyle Smith reviews Say Everything in today's Wall Street Journal (archive).
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Content Wants to be Free?

News last week that The New York Times is considering a five dollar monthly fee for access to its website.  I do not understand why newspapers constantly complain about the internet and yet continue to give their expensively-produced content away for free.  I would love to think that most people are like me and would never pay for such biased news coverage.  But they are not.  Many people and many opinion leaders love The Times.

One often reads that content should be free, wants to be free, on the internet.  A few years back Michael Kinsley pointed out that content was free long before the internet age.  And I have little doubt that this will ultimately prove true for opinion.

But hard news gathering, regardless of how well it's done, is not free.  To pretend otherwise is foolish.  While advertising paid the freight for print, apparently it is not, yet, capable of doing so online.
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