Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Which Web sites get the most traffic? According to the ranking service Alexa, the top three sites in the United States, as of this writing, are Google, YouTube, and Facebook. (Porn, somewhat hearteningly, doesn’t crack the top ten.) The rankings don’t reflect everything—the dark Web, the nouveau-riche recluses harvesting bitcoin—but, for the most part, people…
On Tuesday evening, the dark recesses of the Internet lit up with talk of politics. “Tampa rally, live coverage,” wrote “Dan,” posting a link to President Trump’s Tampa speech in a thread on 8chan, an anonymous image board also known as Infinitechan or Infinitychan, which might be best described as the unglued twin of better-known…
When 16-year-old Harshita Arora posted on Reddit about the crypto price tracking app she created the most she hoped for was a few downloads and perhaps some useful user feedback. Instead, she was met with rape threats, days of online abuse, a deluge of hateful emails, tweets, and messages claiming that she had “plagiarized” the…
react-text: 248 On Saturday, at /react-text react-text: 249 a Charlottesville rally populated by alt-right activists and white supremacists, a car plowed into a crowd of counter-protestors, injuring 19 and /react-text react-text: 251 killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer /react-text react-text: 252 . The man arrested in connection with the murder, James Alex Fields, Jr., had previously /react-text…
On July 2, President Donald Trump tweeted out a video showing himself, as he had appeared in a 2007 WrestleMania event, attacking a person whose head had been replaced with the CNN logo. Two days later, CNN reporter Andrew Kaczynski wrote an article about the origins of the video and the anonymous Reddit user who…
Criminals this morning massively attacked Dyn, a company that provides core Internet services for Twitter, SoundCloud, Spotify, Reddit and a host of other sites, causing outages and slowness for many of Dyn’s customers. Twitter is experiencing problems, as seen through the social media platform Hootsuite. In a statement, Dyn said that this morning, October 21, Dyn…
Steven Universe is a beloved animated children’s show known for its smart and progressive depictions of its diverse and lovable cast of characters. But these positive qualities in the show itself have led to a very ugly turn of events in the Steven Universe fandom, after a beleaguered fanartist said she attempted suicide after being…
Reddit is a total fucking mess, but the new boss is laying down the law. The site’s CEO Steve Huffman opened a traditional Ask Me Anything session this afternoon with a fairly non-traditional type of announcement. Or at least it’s non-traditional for Reddit because CEO Steve is banning specific types of content. It all makes…
Reddit’s chief engineer Bethanye Blount quit just days after interim CEO Ellen Pao left the high-profile online community. In an interview, Blount confirmed her departure after only two months at Reddit, having come there from Facebook. She said her move was not directly linked to Pao’s exit, but noted that she had lost confidence in…
AYYYYYY LMAO How’s everyone doing? This is AWESOME! There’s something I neglected to tell you all this time (“executive privilege”, but hey I’m declassifying a lot of things these days). Back around the time of the /r/creepshots debacle, I wrote to /u/spez for advice. I had met him shortly after I had taken the job,…