Final Boss Form

The Next Twitter Is Just Thousands of Smaller Twitters

One of the biggest open-ended questions in the tech world is whether Twitter is truly dying—and if it is, what will replace it. Last Decembe

The Information

Take message boards, which evolved from simple online bulletin board systems and Usenet, the first real online social network for consumers. Usenet’s layout—different pages for different topics containing posts and replies—set the standard for message boards, the primary way internet users communicated publicly in the 1990s.

By the end of that decade, however, the message board format had started to feel old and brittle. Then 1998 brought the launch of Open Diary, which offered the first online comments section, slapping a message board on the bottom of what we would now call a blog post. Large message boards like Usenet were already creaking with age and burdened with a constant influx of new users, dissolving into millions of disparate boards. Comments sections channeled that momentum, effectively creating even smaller and more niche communities.

Over the next decade, this idea would revolutionize online communication and eventually pop culture. Open Diary gave birth to the blogosphere, an interconnected ad-hoc network of writers and commenters, linking to (and more often than not fighting with) each other. Comments were also a signature feature of Myspace, which prepared the ground for all the social media that followed.

Eventually comments sections broke apart the same way message boards did, to be replaced by the centralized feed architecture of the 2010s, which is now itself breaking apart. It’s not hard to imagine more Twitter-like services populating the web, customized to fit ever smaller and more specific niches.

The committee examined five areas of relative deficiency that are likely contributing to the U.S. health disadvantage: (1) unhealthy behaviors, such as our diets and use of firearms; (2) inadequate health care and public health systems; (3) poor socioeconomic conditions; (4) unhealthy and unsafe environments; and (5) deficient public policies. The last category especially exerts a powerful influence on the other domains — and helps explain why other advanced democracies are outperforming the United States on almost every measure of health and well-being.

In the years before the covid-19 pandemic, as life expectancy continued to increase in other countries, U.S. life expectancy plateaued and then decreased for three consecutive years. Researchers identified a key reason: U.S. mortality in midlife (ages 25 to 64) was increasing, a phenomenon not occurring in peer countries. This, too, became the subject of a landmark report, which cited drug overdoses, alcohol use, suicides and cardiometabolic diseases (e.g., obesity, diabetes, hypertensive heart disease) as leading causes. Enduring systemic racism and health inequities means that the U.S. health disadvantage is particularly acute among people of color, especially Native and Black Americans, whose life expectancy is far lower than that of White Americans.

With the arrival of the covid-19 pandemic in 2020, the long-standing U.S. health disadvantage only worsened. In 2020 and 2021, U.S. deaths were the highest of any country and among the highest per capita.

Migration between Search & Reality

A visual exploration of the gap between the reality of the world's migrants and search interest.

migrationinsearch.com|Mohamad Waked - Alhadaqa

Today, more people than ever live in a country other than the one in which they were born. One out of every 30 people in the world is a migrant.

I started to collect the data of these two parallel worlds (migration reality vs. search interest). I had to scrape Google search interest data of world countries for the common time period between the two data sources which is between 2005 and 2020. I used five different forms for common migration queries such as: migrate to (country) or move to (country), etc. Then, to ease the task a little, I only collected the data of the top 100 countries in terms of the number of immigrants to them as per 2020. In order to get more accurate results, I used 10 different translations of the queries according to the ten most spoken languages ​​in the world to have a better coverage on different regions.

Something Awful is racing to save the best and worst of web history

A long-running web community enlisted its goons to stop an Imgur extinction event.

www.theverge.com|Adi Robertson

Something Awful has a long and notorious past, and much of its nearly 25-year history is told through pictures. The site is one of the fountainheads of our modern visual internet, responsible, among other things, for latter-day cryptid Slender Man and the rise of cheezburger-loving Happy Cat. It’s a place defined by the constant remixing of strange and funny images, encouraged by traditions like Photoshop Phriday, a recurring showcase for creative digital manipulation. “There are many people who started posting on this site as children who are now raising children of their own,” says Jeffrey. (Jeffrey is not the site’s first owner; he purchased it in 2020 from founder Richard “Lowtax” Kyanka, who died in 2021.) Sharing their visual creations is what’s kept many of them coming back.

But the existence of these images has never been exactly stable. As with many forums, Something Awful has historically relied on external hosts like Imgur, which promise free uploads with just a few clicks. It’s a great deal until, almost invariably, the services start culling old photos and leaving behind thumbnail remnants: a broken Flickr link, ImageShack’s lonely yellow frog. Imgur isn’t the first time the site’s members have scrambled to back up a service. An earlier project saw them downloading and rehosting a smaller trove of files from wafflephotos — some holding onto images for a full decade, Jeffrey says, before the site could officially restore them.

The Imgur Download Caper was organized by Jeffrey and a pair of Something Awful administrators, and it involves, basically, three steps. The first step was to scrape Something Awful itself, parsing its decades’ worth of threads to identify and extract links to Imgur. Those targets were identified and compiled into gigantic text files, each one holding 100,000 Imgur link addresses. From there, the site’s members (known as goons) jumped into action on the second step: divvying up the chunks and mass downloading them, using scripts shared and tweaked by other posters.