The Neopets Renaissance [Content Made Simple]
Issue #319: AI revolt, Threads success, and more.
TOP OF THE WEEK
Neopets is promising a ‘new era’ with an improved website and fixed Flash games
Quote:
Neopets, the beloved virtual pet website that launched in 1999, announced a “new era” on Monday. The Neopets Team (TNT) said that it will be launching a new “unified website” this week and fixing some of the old Flash games shortly after, per an extensive blog post on Medium.
The new website, which will launch on July 20th, will “serve as a one stop shop for all brand announcements, links to our different games and products, a repository of Neopets articles and related links, and anything else Neopian you can think of!” TNT says in the post. Neopets.com “isn’t going anywhere,” TNT says, but the team will be giving the site some “extra care” to fix up some issues with the site, “including the Flash games.”
Commentary:
This probably doesn’t mean anything to a healthy portion of you, but hopefully some of you will enjoy a jolt of nostalgia knowing that Neopets is experiencing a bit of a renaissance.
THE TRIVIA QUESTION
The #1 most populous and #10 most populous cities in the world are in the same country: which is it?
Answer at the bottom.
HITTING THE LINKS
Link #1: ‘Not for Machines to Harvest’: Data Revolts Break Out Against A.I.
I’m glad this is happening, at least for individual creators. Important movement here.
Writers and artists are locking their files to protect their work or are boycotting certain websites that publish A.I.-generated content, while companies like Reddit want to charge for access to their data. At least 10 lawsuits have been filed this year against A.I. companies, accusing them of training their systems on artists’ creative work without consent. This past week, Ms. Silverman and the authors Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey sued OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, and others over A.I.’s use of their work.
Link #2: Five reasons Threads could still go the distance
Good reflection from Casey on Threads.
Twitter’s deterioration continues to accelerate. Ad revenue is down by 50 percent, according to Musk, and — despite the company choosing not to pay many of its bills — the company is losing money. Rate limits continue to make the site unusable to many free users, and even some paid ones. Spam is overwhelming users’ direct messages so much that the company disabled open DMs to free users. The company has lately been reduced to issuing bribe-like payouts to a handful of hand-picked creators, many of whom are aligned with right-wing politics.
Link #3: YouTube is testing a new way to let you easily watch videos at 2x speed
So much content, so little time to consume it.
YouTube is experimenting with a way to help sickos like me watch videos as fast as humanly possible. The test, which YouTube Premium subscribers can opt in to, lets you long-press on the video player to set the playback speed to 2x, according to YouTube’s experiments page (via 9to5Google).
THE FUNNY PART
You can subscribe to The Funnies here. (It is a weekly email of funny internet content, and it will always be free.)
Trivia Answer: Japan. (#1 is Tokyo at 37.2mil and #10 is Osaka at 19mil.)