Hacker News: AlexAplin

New comment by AlexAplin in "EFF is leaving X"

AlexAplin — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 18:13:22 +0000

The advertisers that evaporated and left behind a lot of no label dropshipping scams seem to think so. Did a lot of them eventually come back because there is some audience to squeeze numbers from? Sure, but I also wouldn't negate that many didn't and aren't coming back because it is Elon's playground now.

New comment by AlexAplin in "EFF is leaving X"

AlexAplin — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 18:00:20 +0000

We have probably crested over some peak, but you would not look at the broad numbers and say 3% of a peak is organic to that trend. That is a dying/dead website, at least from the position of someone running socials for EFF.

https://flowingdata.com/2025/10/03/passed-peak-social-media-...

New comment by AlexAplin in "Goodbye to Sora"

AlexAplin — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 23:00:04 +0000

Notably, this primer on Sora safeguards was published only yesterday: https://openai.com/index/creating-with-sora-safely/

Not a great look that either the teams responsible for Sora didn't know this was coming or the decision was so brash that things changed overnight.

New comment by AlexAplin in "Show HN: I saw this cool navigation reveal, so I made a simple HTML+CSS version"

AlexAplin — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 02:49:31 +0000

I'm pretty forgiving about accessibility (I'm able to say this at all because I don't have to rely rigidly on accessibility tools) but nav menus feel like a baseline we shouldn't muck with. Tabbing doesn't seem to respond very well in the live example, and at least in the limited demo you can't expand the listing without using a mouse (I thought it would respond to a space with the :checked pseudo, but seems not).

New comment by AlexAplin in "AI Slop Report: The Global Rise of Low-Quality AI Videos"

AlexAplin — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 08:55:11 +0000

The current utilization of generative video is almost universally horrible, which this article does suggest, so I'm not too surprised there are players trying to differentiate themselves. Slop for thee, not for me.

New comment by AlexAplin in "TikTok Deal Is the Shittiest Possible Outcome, Making Everything Worse"

AlexAplin — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 17:28:53 +0000

Comparing views cross-platform is not a very useful study and YouTube routinely adjusts what a view means. Shorts changed earlier this year to count all playbacks and loops without a minimum watch time requirement. https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/333869549/a-change...

New comment by AlexAplin in "Former Twitter Attorney Files for 'Twitter' Trademark"

AlexAplin — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 22:55:01 +0000

For what it is worth, they have communicated that they do eventually plan to retire the domain themselves [1]:

>Re-enrolling your security key will associate them with x[.]com, allowing us to retire the Twitter domain.

[1] https://xcancel.com/Safety/status/1982278858457174522

New comment by AlexAplin in "Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?"

AlexAplin — Sat, 22 Nov 2025 04:09:21 +0000

Cloudhiker is pretty healthy as a StumbleUpon revival. I've found lots of great personal blogs and sites across a lot of categories through it. https://cloudhiker.net/

New comment by AlexAplin in "Internet Archive's legal fights are over, but its founder mourns what was lost"

AlexAplin — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 22:22:01 +0000

Google had a tailored fair use argument because they never made more than snippets public and searchable. It was also prior to Hachette that controlled lending with one-to-one digital copies for every physical copy was a status quo that publishers largely accepted, which IA deliberately tried to upset with the National "Emergency" Library.

I think it's worth fighting back on copyright as a broken institution, and it should be part of the IA's mission, but you have to be responsible on your approach if you're also going to posture as an archival library with stability of information and access. I understand Kahle might lament losing some of the hacker ethos, but the IA is too important to run up against extremes like this without an existential threat.

New comment by AlexAplin in "When stick figures fought"

AlexAplin — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 11:16:31 +0000

Stick figures run through a lot of amateur digital animation, for probably obvious reasons. Pivot reigned on a lot of early YouTube and the stubby stick figure style ran through a lot of Flipnote Hatena. I'm not sure if it's simply that standards for amateur digital content have evolved, or if we have lost the character of small platforms like SFDT and Flipnote, but I do find stick figures absent today on the large platforms we've all herded towards. A lot of what I see is definitely buoyed by Flipnote diehards.

New comment by AlexAplin in "DoorDash and Waymo launch autonomous delivery service in Phoenix"

AlexAplin — Thu, 16 Oct 2025 19:00:50 +0000

This exact arbitrage, performed by Doordash, was exploited.

https://www.readmargins.com/p/doordash-and-pizza-arbitrage

New comment by AlexAplin in "Blog Feeds"

AlexAplin — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 02:37:43 +0000

Some of the major hosted feed readers (Inoreader, Feedly, Feedbin) include subscriber count in their user agent. I usually run a filter on requests to the feed links in my access logs to get an idea of how they're changing. Anecdotally, my subcriber count reaches into triple digits with only those counts, but I've never gotten email from readers and generally only get feedback promoting new posts on socials. The counts are about as nebulous as follower counts, which is to say most people probably subscribe/follow and forget.

New comment by AlexAplin in "TikTok has turned culture into a feedback loop of impulse and machine learning"

AlexAplin — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 18:00:55 +0000

Quibi launched in April 2020. TikTok by this point would have 2 billion downloads [1]. It's difficult to assess they were trailblazers here. I might even say a component of their failure is free mobile video was widely accessible by this point.

[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/29/21241788/tiktok-app-downl...

New comment by AlexAplin in "Bluesky Is Not Decentralized"

AlexAplin — Sat, 26 Oct 2024 08:26:08 +0000

Watching the firehose events they're probably clearing Mastodon for now. We'll see how that looks after it stabilizes again, the surges tend to have pretty steep dropoffs so far.

https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats https://bskycharts.edavis.dev/edavis.dev/bskycharts.edavis.d...

New comment by AlexAplin in "Almost three quarters of the golden age of Hollywood has been lost"

AlexAplin — Wed, 19 Apr 2023 20:19:52 +0000

Neil Cicierega's Ariel Needs Legs somewhat infamously had the audio corrupted on its YouTube upload over time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nH6ya5g2-s

It actually seems better from when I last looked at it, but you can you still hear skipping and audio jitter around spots like at 0:18. I've seen similar behavior on Twitter video uploads over the last few years.

New comment by AlexAplin in "Lost something? Search through 91.7M files from the 80s, 90s, and 2000s"

AlexAplin — Wed, 19 Oct 2022 08:32:28 +0000

IA received and posted a dump of MP3.com dated just prior to their takeover by CNET a few months back: https://archive.org/details/mp3-com-rescue-barge