Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 6 October 2025
Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
App developers think that’s a bogus argument. Mr. Bier told me that data he had seen from start-ups he advised suggested that contact sharing had dropped significantly since the iOS 18 changes went into effect, and that for some apps, the number of users sharing 10 or fewer contacts had increased as much as 25 percent.
aww, does the widdle app's business model collapse completely once it can't harvest data? how sad
this reinforces a suspicion that I've had for a while: the only reason most people put up with any of this shit is because it's an all or nothing choice and they don't know the full impact (because it's intentionally obscured). the moment you give them an overt choice that makes them think about it, turns out most are actually not fine with the state of affairs
There are so many features of modern applications and platforms that I have to wonder why anybody would have thought it was a good idea, this is just one of them. Sharing your contacts shouldn't even be an option. As somebody else in this thread put it, it's not your data.
@froztbyte@jwz Not the biggest Apple fan, but you got to give them credit: with privacy changes in their OSs, they regularly expose all the predatory practices lots of social media companies are running on.