Newsletter 8/12/2022: Terrorist Booty Models
From the Desk of Dennis:
Five great noise rock albums to drown out the static this summer:
Teeny Shiny - Melt Banana \\ circuit board fun
Wonderful Rainbow - Lightning Bolt \\ a banjo behemoth
Planet of the Wolves - Guitar Wolf \\ coined the term “jet rock and roll”
Goo - Sonic Youth \\ if you haven’t yet, today’s a great day to start
FACE TAT - Zach Hill \\ the drummer from Death Grips, pre-noiding
TGIF,
Dennis A. Wilson
This Week in Marketing and Technology:
SearchEngineLand, “Google Search outage causing major issues with search quality and indexing”
“If you notice ranking changes, both positive or negative, or big swings in traffic from Google Search, this might be why. Things should return to normal as this issue gets resolved but it is unclear how long it will take for everything to come back to the state it was prior to this fire.“
It seems that there was an electrical fire at a data center this week that resulted in injuries to three Google employees - although the significance for SEL was evidently just fretting about rankings, in a chilling example of how “if it bleeds it leads” does not always apply to the cold world of tech journalism. SEL also missed that Google is now claiming that this is unconnected to the outages this week, but still sad news for those employees who were injured. Best wishes to them and uh, I guess also to any SEOs who were also stressed out about ranking fluctuations.
CNBC, “Clothing subscriptions like Stitch Fix were once hot – but now might be the victims of ‘box fatigue’
“At the beginning, they were trying to tell me to buy sweatpants and joggers,” he said.
But Hill, 41, no longer needed new clothes since he was working from home and barely going out, and he canceled his subscription.”
In addition to the softening demand from the pandemic among the WFH set, the product itself seems to have inherent issues - too many returns of clothes people don’t like, and all of the sudden you’ve got uneven amounts of inventory and a logistical headache to figure out. All of this is distracts the “stylists”, or more likely, merchandise buyers on your payroll from being able to consistently source styles that people are going to want to keep next season. Personally, I think a subscription box woul dhave been one too many indulgences sent to my doorstep during the Prime-ordering bacchanalia that was lockdown.
ArsTechnica, “Lawsuits: OnlyFans bribed Instagram to put creators on “terrorist blacklist” [Updated]”
“As adult entertainers outside of OnlyFans’ content stream looked for answers to their declining revenue, they realized that Meta had not only allegedly targeted their accounts to be banned for posting supposedly inappropriate content but seemingly also for suspected terrorist activity.”
This is a real-world case of one of the longstanding free-speech concerns in social media - that platform owners can take moderation action against users who go against the owners’ own financial interest. In this case, the allegations are a little spicier - that Meta actually took cash from OnlyFans to shut down the accounts of non-OnlyFans adult content creators who were promoting themselves on Instagram. Putting them on a terrorist watchlist feels especially Orwellian, and, as the article points out, makes it much tougher for these content creators to find recourse. It’s important to stick up for the booty models in a case like this as an advertiser - if I can’t trust a platform like Meta to have transparent content moderation, I’m going to be adverse to spend money on it only to find my content pulled.
