Grindr’s Plan to Squeeze Its Users
Grindr plans to boost revenue by monetizing the app more aggressively, putting previously free features behind a paywall, and rolling out new in-app purchases, employees say. The company is currently working on an AI chatbot that can engage in sexually explicit conversations with users, Platformer has learned. According to employees with knowledge of the project, the bot may train in part on private chats with other human users, pending their consent.
I remember the very early days of Grindr. I had one of the only smartphones in my part of the state, and the nearest fellow user was nearly 250 miles away. Chatting with other gay men was fun and refreshing.
Much has changed in the intervening 15 years. Dating (or hookup) apps have become vast wastelands of algorithmic sameness. People on these apps look, act, talk, and behave in eerily similar ways, not unlike how every young person now dresses like an "influencer." (I refuse to use that word without quotation marks.)
These apps gave us corrosion sold as connection. I'm reminded of David Foster Wallace's thoughts on entertainment, about always wondering what's on the other channel, wondering if there's something better to be watching. Shopping around (because that's precisely what these apps are: shopping) is so damn easy.
Contentment is hard when you think there's always something better just around the corner.
I Feel Loneliest When I’m With My Family
What kind of memories could I have shared with my loved ones if I had known the difference between what I thought I wanted and what I didn’t want anymore?
I largely don’t feel lonely around my family anymore. In my twenties? Absolutely. In my early thirties? Yes. But now, I’ve come to appreciate my time spent with them, even if I know myself enough to want it in fits and starts.
Reading this piece, I’m struck by the plight of any writer in a relationship. Writing is an attempt to get at some truth, whether I arrive there or not. But how does one maintain relationships with people when doing so?
There are so many things I want to write, but don’t for fear of disrupting my relationships.
I once thought that all truths must be laid bare, the cards left to fall where they may. But now I’m not as sure. ‘Telling it like it is’ can feel both indulgent and crass. It can feel a little too good.
I still feel an insatiable need to write or say what’s real, but it’s tempered with, well, call it what you want: age, experience, cynicism, common sense, defeatism.
On Christmas, It’s OK to Argue
But a deep loneliness can reside at the heart of forced civility. What good is it if only our joys are worthy of sharing and not our struggles? Underlying that courteousness is the fear that acceptance remains conditional. We worry that if we reveal who we really are, what we really think and the difficulties we endure, then we might be rejected. No more pumpkin pie from Grandma. But what if something essential is lost when we stop telling the truth?
Let me repeat that back to you
Treat it like a checkpoint, rather than a continuation of the discussion. Before you continue the discussion by introducing a new idea, or presenting an opinion, stop, repeat, and confirm. Then you can be sure you’re moving forward on the same page.
Effective and useful, but I’m learning that people who don’t communicate like this do not often appreciate this communication style. Usually, they hate it. They find it pedantic (which it is — by design) and infantilizing. In our culture, we’re taught from a young age to believe that if we don’t know or understand something, we are dumb. People don’t react well when they feel dumb.
Finding people that are open to new communication styles is rare. Finding people willing to critically analyze their communication styles are even rarer.
Cherish the people willing to learn new things about themselves.
Israel and Palestinians Blame Each Other for Blast at Gaza Hospital That Killed Hundreds
The ambiguity of this situation is precisely why moral clarity and consistency is so valuable.
Do I think Hamas would launch a rocket to intentionally bomb a Palestinian hospital so they could blame the Israelis? I do.
Do I think if Hamas unintentionally blew up a hospital with a misfired rocket, they’d blame Israel? I do.
Do I think Israel would intentionally bomb a hospital? I do not.
Do I think Israel might blame Hamas if one of their airstrikes — which have been so aggressive and killed hundreds of civilians just this week, to say nothing of the last decade — had unintentionally hit a hospital? I do.
When you don’t know who to believe, who to trust, the world becomes a very scary place…and fast.
Stop Being Shocked—Once and for All
Many of us at Tablet believed strongly, and still believe, in the possibility of creating a better world. But something bothered us from the very beginning about these ideas, and the people pushing them. Every time we pressed on one of the newly mass-embraced policy proposals or narratives—intersectionality, decolonization studies, the Iran nuclear deal, Russiagate, Black Lives Matter, the Women’s March, critical race theory, COVID lockdowns—a weird thing would happen: The idea itself fell apart at the seams within seconds of contact with reality, and yet its defenders got more sure of themselves, more performatively boastful, more passionate and gleeful about smearing anyone who dared to question them.
The more we listened to freshly minted universal experts, the more we were struck by the increasing lunacy of their pronouncements on every topic under the sun, always backed by “studies” and “science”—where COVID–19 came from, how many genders there are, which skin tones and personal experiences qualify a person for protection status and which do not, whether it was OK for a Syrian dictator to bomb and gas 500,000 of his people, whether the U.S. should ally itself with a Holocaust-denying medieval theocracy, whether the president of the United States was secretly a Russian agent, whether large American cities should let drug addicts and violent schizophrenics get high on the streets and steal stuff—and more. Indeed, over time, we were struck by how little the ideas themselves seemed to matter; what so many people seemed most attached to was power.
Saying Hello Linked to Higher Wellbeing, but With Limits
Adults in the U.S. who regularly say hello to multiple people in their neighborhood have higher wellbeing than those who greet fewer or no neighbors. Americans’ wellbeing score increases steadily by the number of neighbors greeted, from 51.5 among those saying hello to zero neighbors to 64.1 for those greeting six neighbors.
I can attest to this. I was in a dark place the winter of 2022 when I decided to make a conscious effort to say hello to my neighbors. Changed my mindset completely.
Archive Your Reddit Data While You Still Can
I’ve been a fairly active Redditor for more than 11 years. Until now, it’s been the website with the best mix of community, popularity, developer ecosystem, and web-search-ability. The non-monetary value Reddit as a knowledge store is literally priceless; it’s a modern-day Library of Alexandria.
By now, you probably know my thoughts on social media. (Fuck social media.) But Reddit was always the exception. When I hear “social media,” I think “toxic stew of projection and posturing designed to make you feel bad about yourself in the service of serving you advertisements,” and by that definition, Reddit isn’t social media.
I’ve made friends on Reddit. Real-life friends. Pen pals. Some people I’ve met in person, others I haven’t. Fellow writers and amateur programmers, fellow HomeKit-ers and hikers and GaiaGPS power users and Stoics and people who live in old homes and lovers of the American West. For many years, on a night when I couldn’t sleep, I’d hop on r/depression and talk to people on the edge of suicide, hoping my past experiences might help them in some way. I’d come to Reddit for good vibes or a little schadenfreude. For help with dinner or a laugh. I met other people with my very, very specific interests. Antinatalists. Techno-grumps. Privacy nerds. Plant daddies. Nature lovers. Righteous tenants and geologists and people just as fascinated by the world in which we live.
Reddit was the promise of the internet in one place. A group of people, each passionate about something, talking and supporting and, yes, sometimes fighting with each other. It’s been a good place. The best of human nature.
Everything changes and nothing is free. Not in this culture, anyway. I know this. But it’s still painful when the pursuit of profit comes for a community you love so dearly. We’ll see how these API changes play out, but I’m not hopeful.
Enshittification comes for us all.
(Update: my blogging idol with a very good point over on Daring Fireball.)
Headed Into the Abyss by Brian T. Watson 📚
I just finished, laying here in my bed, the dogs and cat asleep beside me. Crickets chirp out my window. In the distance a train’s whistle breaks and rolls over the valley.
More than anything, I prize seeing things clearly. Nothing fills me with that particular and precious joie de vivre — that electric sizzle — quite like close proximity to the truth. But most people don’t like the truth. We’ll do anything to avoid it, if we know it at all. So it’s a rare thrill to read something so transgressive in its honesty, so clear-eyed.
Credit to Brian T. Watson for his courage to accept the inevitable, and then to write it. May his acceptance be an inspiration.
What If Friendship, Not Marriage, Was at the Center of Life? via Kottke
“We’re the cake.”
It’s no secret that I’ve long struggled with relationships, romantic and otherwise. Though I have two older half-brothers, I grew up an ostensible only child without anyone but my parents in the home. If you had asked me at the time, I would have said the predominant feeling of my childhood was loneliness. Geographically, socio-economically, socially, intellectually… I was isolated. I had the tremendous fortune to be born to two loving, kind, thoughtful people, and as I age I’ve learned that this alone set me apart from most everyone else. To say nothing of our economic status: well-off in a town that, well, wasn’t.
And I was gay. In a conservative town. That fucking sucked. I wasn’t able to be myself throughout most of my childhood, always learning to avert my eyes or change my voice, always afraid that someone would uncover my secret and beat the shit out of me. (As it turned out, this eventually happened long after I came out and if I’m honest, it wasn’t as bad as I had imagined it might be. They didn’t kill me, after all, but no child should have to internalize a fear of death at such a young age.) Cruelly, my sexual orientation in that place-and-time pushed me to self-isolate, never sure of who I could trust, compounding my loneliness.
In my isolation, I honed my sense of observation. I spent much of my time attempting to understand people, which is why I’ve come to feel at home in nature. Though I concede that humans are themselves part of nature, the latter makes sense to me. Humans still don’t.
Though I suppose that’s not quite right. What continues to confound is trauma. How much trauma exists in the world, how much suffering people endure (and therefore inflict). People aren’t complicated, really. We merely internalize our insecurities, then project them onto the people and world around us. They animate our actions the way a puppet master pulls the strings of her puppet. Only in giving them name — only by speaking them aloud — do our insecurities lose their power.
But the sheer magnitude of this very simple, very obvious thing is stunning. Look around. Capitalism. Religion. Marriage. Parenthood. Childhood. All are social constructions upon which most people foist their insecurities, rather than do the work of acknowledging their pain, their hurt, the ache they feel, their fear.
Yet it remains the only way: to go through the fear, not avoid it.
I’ve long said that “I prefer the company of animals to humans.” It’s one of those utterances I tend to liberally throw out in conversation, particularly when making small talk. But each time I say it, I wince. I don’t really mean it, or more specifically, I don’t want to. I don’t want to prefer the company of animals to humans, if only because it means that I’ve given up on humanity in a profound way.
I’m already tending in this direction. I spend much of my time in the woods with my dogs. (Just as I did as a kid, funnily enough.) Just last night, my dog and I were up in the foothills at sunset when a female elk came within 100 feet of us. She stood there, barking and coughing, curious about these two new animals in her clearing. My dog and I sat there for 20 minutes, just watching, neither of us moving a muscle. Eventually, I stood up to pee. The elk stood straight up, stomped her front hooves twice, and disappeared into the canyon below. Those moments of communion with animals are some of my most precious, as I remember I am part of a larger world, one far more interesting and mysterious than I can imagine.
But my love of nature need not come at the expense of my love of humans.
Or does it? Humans, after all, seem to be destroying much of nature. We clear cut, we mine, we burn, we raze, we graze, we build, we pave, we reap and sow.
I am not immune to this. I am complicit.
How do I circle this square? To love is to accept as-is. To love humanity is to accept us as-is, to look around at the world and accept that we are destroying so much of our own home.
Why?
Because we’re insecure. We’re afraid. We want to be loved. And we’re afraid we won’t be.
This is all to say that relationships have never been easy. I struggle to accept people as they are, both individually and collectively. The ghosts of Kant and the first formulation of his categorical imperative haunt me, and becomes harder with age to not attempt to universalize every decision made by myself and, most cruelly, others.
I know where I need to go, though I doubt I’ll ever arrive: acceptance. Only then will I be forgiving and tolerant and accepting and loving in a way I myself want to be loved. But I first must accept that humans are the engines of our own destruction, that we would rather destroy our own home than deal with our pain. Hurt people hurt people, and perhaps we’ve reached a critical mass of hurt people.
I have to accept that we as humans have not learned our lessons, and very likely won’t. Only then can I honestly love others.
How the fuck do I do that?
Scar tissues
Some people are just too nice, and they wreck the relationships. They think, “Oh, it’s not a big deal, it’s just one little thing, not worth having a big argument about it. I’ll just give in.” Well, that seems generous, but it’s a really bad idea. You have to ask yourself, “Are you really, completely, 100% over this? You’re giving in? No animosity? You’re not secretly hoping that maybe they’ll do something for you in return or a little behavior change here or there?”
No one would ever accuse me of being “too nice,” but I am guilty of this, mainly out of fear of being considered petty.