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

#Twitter and MMOs share common ground in the fact that everyone gets clumped in with everyone else. Koster’s articles invite juxtaposition to Elon Musk’s laissez-faire approach to moderation on Twitter. His idea of free speech is being able to non-consensually thrust shitty opinions into the faces of folks who *didn’t fucking ask;* regular users are deprived of power, because “that’s the admin’s job,” and, well, the admin *didn’t fucking care.*

> 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.

Pokémon #EmeraldRogue is a ROM hack that offers a modern Pokémon experience in a modified version of the Gen 3 engine. Here’s the twist: it’s not just a modern #pokemon experience, it’s a roguelite – you go through areas with randomly generated Pokémon and trainers, fight gym leaders, an elite four, and then become the Champion. If your Pokémon faint, they are out of play for the rest of the run:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roguelike#Rogue-lites_and_procedural_death_labyrinths