When you can fit all the leaders of industry around a table, what you have is a cartel that can move swiftly and with little friction. *That’s* #monopoly. But when your industry leaders are a hundred smaller companies, you’ve got a cacophony. They will be too busy disciplining each other with competition to agree on what they should be lobbying for.

In all, the debate’s premise was extremely important – we *should* be concerned with how a Google breakup could go wrong – but I just don’t buy the idea that an accountable ad-tech industry would make the web even more riddled with ads than it is right now. I just wish I could’ve said it like this at the time…

Next – most Pluralistic posts end with a trio of ‘hey look at this’ links. One recent link is a retrospective on griefing culture in MMO spaces:

https://www.raphkoster.com/2024/08/07/the-neverending-griefing-discussion/

These old games were some of the first online 3D games to try and address a fundamental content moderation dilemma – “How do we allow users to express themselves freely and disincentivise behaviour that sours the experience for other users?” We can learn from their post-mortems.

@raphkoster, a game designer known for his work on MMORPGs Ultima Online and EverQuest, makes a salient point about “player governance.” Although Reddit and Discord are centralised platforms, they do offer their users a lot more freedom over how communities are constructed. Everyone is not clumped in with everyone else on Discord – this lets users create their own private spaces, or “dark corners” as Doctorow describes them:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/15/normalize-dark-corners/

Content moderation has no silver bullets nor golden hammers, and where platforms claim it is a continuing process, we find that their idea of progress is glacial. The early days of UO saw players moderate each other using reputation systems. Think of the seeding/leeching numbers on magnet links, to wit: if you torrent something, and don’t continue after you’ve fully downloaded it, you’re a literal leech – you’ve slurped up your download, and gave nothing back*:

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/a-brief-history-of-murder-in-ultima-online

Ironically, if the rumours are true, Musk’s Twitter buyout has a sliver of provenance in his being kicked out of the Bay Area babyfur community. Yes, read that again: A group of furries who do a little ageplay (regardless of what you think of that) formed a cohesive enough commons to keep fuckwits like Elon Musk out of their community. Fur-curious!

https://social.coop/@katanova/112885524200418276

> Rather than driving him to introspect, and look inside himself to put together the broken parts to understand what drives his behavior, [he] concluded the way to have friends is basically to own the building where everyone hangs out, until only people who will talk to him are left.
- https://social.coop/@katanova/112885524200418276

While I’ve yet to follow more blogs on the English language, Nancy Friedman's @Fritinancy is one I cannot recommend enough. Recently, she explored the #etymology of the word ‘coconut,’ with particular attention paid to its usage in Kamala Harris’s campaign:

https://fritinancy.substack.com/p/word-of-the-week-coconut

Just a soundbite about the young people falling out of coconut trees. The ‘coco’ part being the Portugese word for ‘head’ in the 16th century makes me think of Exeggutor, a palm tree Pokémon with heads for nuts:

https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Exeggutor_(Pok%C3%A9mon)#Trivia

I don’t know about you, but depending on where you are in the English-speaking world you definitely hear the a that got left behind more than you do the ‘o.’ Which is a good enough segue into Jim Cummings’s audition for The Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog, one of many samples used by diskkunt nearly 13 years ago to produce this banger YTPMV:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVli0334lD0&t=195s

Now, go back and listen to it from the beginning.