I think Twitter thinks we like using it 😕

Read to the end for my first dad-dispatch from Miami

Apr 6, 2022

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Before we jump into today’s newsletter, I have some exciting news of my own to share. Garbage Day was nominated for not one, but two different Webby award categories. I am incredibly honored and still totally unsure how to process this. This newsletter has grown in ways I could have never imagined, so thank you to everyone who reads and supports this crazy little project. And if you're so inclined, I’d love for you to vote for me! To even be nominated feels like a victory already, but it would also be pretty cool to win one.

Also, I’m in Miami this week for Bitcoin 2022. I brought my dad along and will have a few exclusive dispatches for paying subscribers, starting with today’s newsletter. I think it’ll be real fun. Hit the subscribe button to check that.

Twitter Seems To Mistakenly Think That People Enjoy Using It

Twitter Comms @TwitterComms

now that everyone is asking… yes, we’ve been working on an edit feature since last year! no, we didn’t get the idea from a poll 😉 we're kicking off testing within @TwitterBlue Labs in the coming months to learn what works, what doesn’t, and what’s possible.

Twitter, yesterday, announced that it was rolling out an edit feature. This is a terrible, terrible, terrible idea and any quality of life improvements it might provide to users are tremendously outweighed by the amount of abuse and misinformation it will bring to the platform. I have a lot of questions about how this would work practically. For instance, will tweets that are edited change inside of quote tweets? If not, will that just create different instances of the same tweet? Will tweet editing be available forever? Or only for a few minutes?

Before I move on to the main point of why I’m writing about this, as someone who makes A LOT of Twitter typos, I actually just think the entire need for a Twitter edit button would be fixed if you could thread tweets independently of when they were published. A typo or an error in a tweet really only matters in threads and it’s kind of weird you can only link together tweets with a reply.

Anyways, like I said, I have a lot of questions about how this would work and Twitter’s communications team has not provided really anything of substance about it, which is kind of wild seeing as how an edit button would fundamentally change the nature of the platform possibly more than anything else they’ve done since the jump from 140 characters to 280.

Ed Zitron, who writes a real good newsletter, felt similarly, tweeting, “I feel like there are ways they could’ve announced this that included significantly more detail. Twitter’s comms strategy remains completely confusing to me.”

I think the reason Twitter’s communication is so bad about this kind of stuff is because everything Twitter does comes from a wildly misinformed place of perceived user enthusiasm. And they’re actually one of the few major platforms that still operates this way. Facebook is basically a nation state now that treats its users with the same level of affection The Matrix treats its meat tubes. The only thing their communications team emphasizes in updates are abstractions — connection, local networks, value, etc. And Instagram is basically a mall, with most of their announcements and features focused on the financial impact for the platforms’ many business and influencers. But Twitter, the company, still seems to think that their website is a website used by people who enjoy it. Which is bizarre! It’s 2022. People don’t enjoy websites anymore because there’s only 5 left and they all realized that it’s more profitable to piss people off. And this is especially true for Twitter!

Twitter has ruined more lives than any other website that has maybe ever existed, including 4chan. It’s nickname among its most fervent users is “hell site” and the majority of its most popular accounts spend most of their time either sharing stories about how traumatized they are from constant harassment or openly admitting they’re only using it because they have to for their jobs. In fact, the only real social value that Twitter adds to our lives is that it kind of works well as an inadvertent archive of our reactions to current events. And researchers over the years have realized it’s a pretty good tool for capturing immediate historical data. But, hilariously, unless there’s some version of an edit button my tiny brain can’t conceive of, this feature will completely screw that up! Thus, robbing the site of the last useful thing about it.

Anyways, here’s Dril’s take.

wint @dril

great news for me- a fucking dumb ASS! who FUCKS EVERY THING UP!!!

Twitter Comms @TwitterComms

NFT Traders Seem To Still Be Mostly Trading With Themselves

I’ll be honest, I’m very surprised that NFTs are still a thing. I have to imagine that most of the people who made their money made their money and I just have a really hard time putting myself in the shoes of a person buying an NFT in April 2022. And I’m literally, as I write this, in a convention center surrounded by the exact kind of people who would buy an NFT! And still it’s inconceivable to me.

Beyond just the overall lack of value for an average investor, there’s also the ongoing problem of people anonymously buying their own NFTs which, once you learn it’s a thing, is hard not to see everywhere. Like the very curious transaction process surrounding Justin Bieber “buying” NFTs. And it doesn’t seem like the problem has gotten any better. Bloomberg has a great story this week about how the buzzy NFT platform LooksRare has a system that is actually optimized to facilitate sketchy NFT laundering, or as it’s commonly known, wash trades. In the simplest terms possible, LooksRare rewards tokens for NFT sales and takes a cut via transaction fees. So users are basically buying and selling their own NFTs to earn LooksRare tokens, which then inflates the value of the token, which can then be bought and sold. It’s like a real fucked up Chuck E. Cheese.

But at least it’s better than what’s waiting for owners of Ubisoft’s Ghost Recon NFTs. Three months after Ubisoft started selling NFTs for the game, it will cease getting updates. The game’s Twitter account thanked NFT holders for being a part of “history” lmao. What’s weird though is I found more than a few positive replies from gamers who felt like they had supported the game from a wildly buggy alpha to a barely functional fully-developed game that was then sunsetted almost immediately. idk man.

Have You Experienced The Horrors Of The Jello Steak Yet?

kelbin @pissboymcgee

i am going to fucking vomit

This video may be one of the grossest things I’ve watched in a real long time. Which is impressive considering it’s pretty SFW. But the entire process here is just really heinous. Just an absolutely haunted energy coming from the entire thing. I really hate it! So of course I had to share it with all of you.

But wait! There’s more bad news. This video is actually part of a series that TikTok user Savannah Mortenson is doing to raise money for a gaming PC by eating horribly disgusting food. There are 15 of these videos so far and they’re all just awful.

A Good Tweet

donald boat @laserboat999

there is an earth shattering moment in every white boys life when he discovers UNIQLO

Let’s Talk About The Clown Posts

Look, we gotta do this. It’s too big of a story to ignore. It’s extremely NSFW, but it’s also kind of sweet and wonderful in a weird way. It does involve having sex with a clown though. So if you don’t feel like you’re in the right mental state to balance the tonally complexities of an ultimately heartwarming and life-affirming story about a redditor living out his fetish of having sex with a woman dressed like a clown, well, just keep on scrolling!

Alright, let’s dive in.

Twenty days ago, a Reddit user aptly named u/FemClownLover posted in r/confessions that his dream in life was to have sex with a woman dressed like a clown. You can read the whole post here, but I think this quote pretty much sums up the whole thing: “More than anything I just want a beautiful woman with a clown costume, make up and a big red nose to have sweaty passionate sex with.”

Right, OK, so as you can imagine, most of the comments were a mix of jokes and visible incomprehension. “Man's down to clown 🤡🤡🤡,” one user wrote. But then last week, u/FemClownLover came back with an update titled, “I fulfilled my dream. I had sex with a woman in a clown costume and it was everything I wanted and more.”

Once again, the post is wildly graphic, but here’s a good quote I feel comfortable sharing: “I cried as she held me because I was so happy. She began to cry too and we are definitely going to be together now and are both so happy with each other. I feel like a hole in my soul has been healed and that my life is finally on its way up.”

If you can stomach the insanely graphic descriptions of clown sex, the two posts are actually a beautiful story of self-discovery and I’m really happy for u/FemClownLover! We all need a clown in our lives who will accept us for the disgusting little freak that we truly are. My favorite take on the whole story was from Ayesha A. Siddiqi, who tweeted, “They manifested what they wanted because they knew exactly what they wanted, that’s the level of insight I wish for all of us. It’s the wanting that requires courage. To even allow yourself to dream of clussy… how many of us would even know what to do if given what we’ve always wanted.” I assume I don’t need to define “clussy”.

One More Good Tweet

Homie @Proud_Shooter

if the hardcore bands guitarist looks like this you are about to die in that pit

Some Stray Links

BONUS: My Dad Is Very Excited About A VR Yacht

It’s day 0 of the Bitcoin 2022 convention here in Miami, Florida. The conference kicks off properly tomorrow, but today, as hundreds of Web3 startups gather for industry day, the city is thoroughly awash in crypto. Around the corner from where my dad and I are staying is a “Bitcoin Bodega” offering convention-goers a free breakfast in exchange for tips in Bitcoin.

The reason I brought my dad to Miami the week of the world’s largest crypto convention is because he’s the reason I’m here. In the winter of 2020, I discovered he was buying and selling cryptocurrencies on Coinbase and Robinhood and decided it was probably time for me to start learning as much about that world as I could. The timing turned out to be pretty good! So now, we’re down here together. Here’s my dad’s first impressions from the heart of Web3.

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