beatpanda

The multi-billion dollar question is whether someone with serious technical acumen is prepared to step up and fight for a law that meaningfully restrains surveillance capitalism while allowing startups to compete. Or build a compliance-as-a-service business and give it away to startups for free.

Automattic was founded 15 years ago, and despite being a profitable and growing company for most of that time, has only raised $617.3 million, mostly to fund specific expansion projects. At no time have they sought 10x returns or some kind of spectacular exit for the benefits of its shareholders. It’s not even close to the disaster that is most of VC world.

People love to trash talk WordPress, but by being consistently correct and committed to its principles, it got this single line in this article:

"WordPress has managed to keep chugging and even bought Tumblr off Verizon."

It's because Matt Mullenweg and co have held the line on open source and the open internet for more than a decade now, and we should all be grateful.

Everything cool I've gotten to do in my life I owe to learning to code via building WordPress websites. I hope in the next decade WordPress and companies like Automattic become the example to aspire to instead of people throwing more fuel on the never-ending VC trash fire.

You can’t, this is why we used to design services based on open protocols with data portability. No service lives forever.

I was hoping this article was going to be more like “who makes enough money to eat working on Open Source Software?”

> If you really believe the media, any media, is reporting things accurately in 2019 you are not thinking critically or actively searching for the truth.

Please tell me which media source you consume that's telling you the other media sources are lying to you.

> I quit reading media, and eliminated all social media from my life, and I've never been happier.

Staggering numbers of people are dying from opioid overdoses, many of them from opiates that doctors were incentivized to push onto their patients by drug companies, or that were illegally distributed from pharmacies who looked the other way when there were enough pills going out the door to kill the entire population of the town they were in. It's bad enough that someone might even finally be held criminally liable for it.

It isn't the media's fault that any of that happened, and it's largely because of media attention that anyone is being held accountable for it. Blaming the media for accurately reporting on the state of the world is always the last refuge of the person who's run out of real arguments.

The argument from people who would rather not engage with the state of the world for a long time has been that anyone who complains about the state of the world is just watching the news too much, because "the data" always show that the world is getting inexorably better, all the time. That was always a specious argument, and now that life expectancy in America has been declining for three years in a row, that argument should finally be laid to rest entirely. But here you're reviving it, by blaming the decrease in life expectancy itself on the media. It's very innovative! But it's just as wrong.

If I put my number or email on my page, and I adjust the privacy settings to "only friends", I understand I am making that information available to my friends. They are free to copy that information by hand, or by copy-pasting, into their own address book. I have explicitly made it available to them. Facebook includes information about your friends, such as their birthdays, in your data export. Their decision to not include off-Facebook contact information is a business decision designed to make leaving Facebook harder. It has nothing to do with privacy.

Their argument doesn't hold up under the slightest amount of scrutiny. You can go to your friends' pages and manually extract their email or other contact information. If it's visible to you, its because your friend made a decision to make that information visible. They designed the data export tool that way knowing that the main thing someone trying to leave Facebook wants is contact information for their friends that they may only know how to reach on Facebook.

Haha, remember more than a decade ago when we all thought that interoperability was more profitable, and that everything would just naturally tend toward open standards? Wow. We were all just stupid?

> Those things aren't going to zero anytime soon.

Not with that attitude

Divestment also means asking banks and institutions to commit to not investing in new fossil fuel infrastructure, not just selling stock in existing oil and gas companies. Making it more difficult for new fossil fuel infrastructure projects to access capital absolutely has an impact.