Sarah Perez writing for TechCrunch: A report from market intelligence firm Similarweb suggests that Meta’s Threads is now seeing more daily usage than Elon Musk’s X on mobile devices. While X still dominates Threads on the web, the Threads mobile app for iOS and Android has continued to see an increase in daily...

Manuel Moreale writing about People and Blogs, where he features regular interviews with bloggers: It sucks because, since day one, I tried to find a good balance between keeping the series running smoothly and not letting guests wait for months and months to get their interview published. But I’m at the point where...

Clare Armstrong writing for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC): More than 4.7 million accounts on platforms like Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat were deactivated in the first two days of the ban that started on December 10, according to new data released by the federal government. The social media ban,...

The first version of digg, something many people called the front page of the internet, arrived in 2004, and was a little like what Hacker News is today. A social bookmarking news aggregator, if you want to be technical. People could submit items of interest, and those favoured by the community would win a place on...

Eleanor Dickinson, writing for Mumbrella: South by Southwest (SXSW) has cancelled its Sydney event — which has been held just three times — citing a “changing global environment that is impacting major events, festivals and cultural programs worldwide”. Purely anecdotal, but one or two of the tech people on my...

Hannah Story, writing for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC): Authors including Miles Franklin winners Michelle de Kretser and Melissa Lucashenko will boycott Adelaide Writers’ Week (AWW) to protest the cancellation of an event featuring Palestinian Australian author, lawyer and activist Randa...

Anil Dash: The trillion-dollar AI industry’s system for controlling their most advanced platforms is a plain text format one guy made up for his blog and then bounced off of a 17-year-old kid before sharing it with the world for free. You’re welcome, Time Magazine’s people of the year, The Architects of AI. Their...

Most Australia states, with the reported exception of Queensland, are in the grip of a heatwave. Temperatures in our part of the world, the NSW Central Coast, are expected to reach the high thirties, Celsius, on Saturday. That’ll be a little too warm at our place here, which doesn’t have AC. We’ll go into Sydney,...

A website to destroy all websites, by Henry Desroches. Hand-coded, syndicated, and above all personal websites are exemplary: They let users of the internet to be autonomous, experiment, have ownership, learn, share, find god, find love, find purpose. Bespoke, endlessly tweaked, eternally redesigned,...

Simon Willison’s third annual review of the AI space, for last year. I read someone saying somewhere that Willison has become expert in AI and LLM since ChatGPT arrived in late 2022. He’s not the only one (obviously), but in late 2022 and early 2023 I was having conversations with people about ChatGPT and AI. At the...

But that’s what Instagram’s (IG) owner wanted of course. Put another way, this means anyone using IG is expected to behave like an influencer, even if they only have a handful of followers. The comment was made by Mosseri, Head of Meta owned IG, in a year-end presentation (Instagram link), a few days ago. That...

Fernando Borretti: I will often find a blog post on Hacker News that really resonates. And when I go to check the rest of the site there’s three other posts. And I think: I wish you’d write more! When I find someone whose writing I really connect with, I like to read everything they have written, or at least a...