The entire discussion around Facebook’s disclosures of what happened in 2016 is very frustrating. No exec stopped any investigations, but there were a lot of heated discussions about what to publish and when.

Butt plugs were originally sold as a miracle cure for headaches, acne, and insanity

Thread, article here and h/t: @qikipedia :
https://t.co/Ts84xnmWKJ

For a long time, medicine was pre-occupied with the question "can this be solved by putting something in the butt?"

Take, for example, tobacco smoke enemas, in which 18th Century physicians saw drowning victims and attempted to de-deadify them by blowing tobacco smoke up their rectums with a pipe.

Despite having no medical benefit whatsoever, the practice was popular, and enema kits lined the Thames like lifebelts, ready to be used as one final humiliation for somebody who was crap at swimming.

This practice ended sometime after 1800 when it became apparent that it didn't really work, given how the anus famously isn't really connected to the lungs, but doctors weren't quite finished with having a poke around in the old anus to see what happens just yet.

Hey, who wants to read a story about @Upwork fucking over freelancers in order to upsell their clients on unnecessary services the clients don't want and can't afford? Strap in!

So after my marketing agency closed I started freelancing again. A marketing company that wanted to work with me only hires freelance writers through @Upwork. So I signed up. I wasn't thrilled about it, but that's who they contract with and it's their marketing company.

I've been receiving regular assignments from this company, thru @Upwork, for over a month now. I've written dozens of articles for them. My work has been exemplary. I've been handling repeated rush jobs and delivering. The client was and is very happy. That's coming from them.

While I was wrapping up several assignments this week I was contacted by the marketing company. They asked if I had taken a new full-time job and wasn't available anymore. It seems @Upwork's talent group told them I was no longer available to take assignments.

I was very surprised. Nothing had changed on my end. I still needed the freelance work very much. I told them so. So the marketing company pressed @Upwork and were told there were "compliance" issues that were preventing the marketing company from giving me any more work.

Two years ago on a weekend, I built a tool to make it easier to evaluate Twitter accounts. Since then 36590 people used it to analyze 55390 different Twitter accounts.

Over the last months @mmkaradeniz and I made a new version. We launched it last night:

@accountanalysis doesn't use machine learning or AI „magic“. Instead of telling users if an account is authentic or not, it helps them to evaluate the accounts themselves.

It visualizes the different features (date, time, type, app, etc.) of Tweets to make them interpretable. /1

@accountanalysis The core concept is still the same, but it looks much better and is easier to operate. Not only for the users, but us developers as well. Enabling us to continuously roll out new features in the future.

Side-by-side screenshots of the old and new version. /2

@accountanalysis Some people had questions what different charts displayed and how they could be interpreted. There are now explanations for all charts, that can be toggled on and off at any time. /3

@accountanalysis The selected/retrieved Tweet count moved to the top to make it clear that not all Tweets of an account are analyzed. 3200 is the API limit by Twitter. It's possible to get more through the Premium API, but I don't think people would pay $100+ for the analysis of one account. /4

Elastic didn't really relicense ElasticSearch. It forked it.

🧵 A thread.

1/18

There's a lot of talk in the open source community about the cost of forking.

2/18

- "Forking is best avoided."

- "Forking is a last resort option."

- "Forking is like a nuclear weapons. It's a defensive threat."

3/18

Forking is seen as impractical and extremely expensive.

And that's a Really Good Thing(tm).

It's a forcing function for figuring out solutions that are broadly acceptable across the community.

4/18

The thing is, the cost of forking is mostly a function of three things:

1⃣ the size of the community that you can bring along with you,
2⃣ whether you need to rename your fork (who owns the trademark), and
3⃣ how much infrastructure you need to rebuild.

5/18