We are slowly turning ourselves into Krikkit.

The problem is all the other people voting the wrong way with their bigger wallets.

Viewing the images directly sounds to me like a different context. Browsing the images is more akin to end user activity, i.e. using the server for its intended purpose. Managing the server is more like making sure it’s running, that there is enough space allocated, security holes are plugged, software is up-to-date, etc. Administrative tasks. When wearing the admin hat, there wouldn’t usually be much of a need to actually look at the photos - you’d be more concerned with file names and metadata, not contents. In that context, the GUI becomes less important. And if you ever do need to see them, you can always fire up the GUI software for that occasional situation.

We have truly come full circle.

https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/04/23/le-twittre#

From reading the article, it sounds like Spotify itself doesn’t get directly affected. Instead, the record companies and advertisers are upset. The record companies, because the shared pool of royalties that gets paid out is now getting split with white noise creators, leaving them a smaller share of the pie. The advertisers, because most people listening to white noise are using it to fall asleep or just keeping it on in the background, and therefore nobody will be listening/paying attention when the ads come on.

Tough titties for them, you may say, but if they don’t like it, they may take their respective balls and go home. That would seriously impact Spotify, since without the music, most users will quickly lose interest, and the advertisers are a large part of their revenue stream. If they don’t do something, they could end being a streaming service predominantly for white noise, which would be far less profitable.

It should also be taken into account that a lot of the white noise hits were not organic, but the result of a problem with how Spotify set up their algorithm.

He didn’t want to buy the company. So, he’s turning it into a pet project.

That’s a good point, and one that had not occurred to me. For all we know, he’s already mentally written off the $44 billion as a loss and is just having fun with it, with no expectation of success.

That would explain a lot.

It wasn’t up the whole time. I went looking for it a few years ago after a new OS install, and found that, at the time, the site was in limbo with some message about coming back eventually, but no official way to download it. Glad it’s back, hope they didn’t turn it into enshittified bloatware.

I even got an error page the first time I tried to load this post. Just like old times! 🥲