Bielefeld conspiracy. The city of Bielefeld in Germany does not exist. Everyone claiming to live there is a paid actor. Anyone who says they’ve visited is either in on it or has been decieved.

Agent Mode can click around as if it were a human user, with full access to that user’s authentication and browsing history

Yeah, that should be fine.

Network effect. In a lot of places it’s kind of the default messaging platform for any kind of social interaction.

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I had no idea gPodder could do that. I’d never tried it, just assumed it was mostly for playing and syncing with the web service.

Thanks!

Actually that’s something I hadn’t considered. I do have a Jellyfin / *arr setup, there might be something in that ecosystem that does at least part of what I want.

Social skills are like any other skill; they can be learned. I’d suggest volunteering. It’s usually okay if you’re a bit weird and awkward so long as you’re contributing. I’ve done a fair bit of volunteer work and been on both sides of that. Plus it gives you a common goal and instant common ground with people; there’s at least one thing you all care enough about to do it for free.

I guarantee you they’ll still collect marketing data, they just won’t show the resulting targeted ads until you let your subscription lapse.

No, the point of the entire site is to generate revenue. They’ve been pushing subscription based AI to “help” with profile writing for a while. GenAI content is also supposed to be good for juicing engagement numbers to show to advertisers.

I agree with you that it probably won’t work and the whole thing will degenerate into shrimp Jesus and bots replying to bots, but that’s the line of thinking. They don’t give a fuck about the quality of the service.

I miss 2000’s era Nokia. They had their flagship phones that turned a profit but also just did some truly weird shit purely to see if it caught on.

Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.

There’s a couple of Wip3Out games on PSP that I find as timeless and rewarding as the rest of the series.