Best Of MetaFilter

My Velveteen Rabbit by Alyssa L. Miller (cc by)

"My 11 year old announced he wants to keep track of all his stuffed animals. On paper, he has maybe invented 2005 Facebook all over again, for his imagination. How can we do this?"

Giant Teddy Bear by focusc (cc by)

Great link on the enshittification of the internet and how platforms die by Cory Doctorow

My Social Graph from facebook by paul_irish (cc by)

I'm aware that my saying all of this is like when Ollivander referred to Voldemort as "Terrible, but great." But I think it's important, on some level, to understand that Facebook wasn't a fluke: Metafilter member Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted on witnessing the rise of Facebook, its early underestimation by most tech folk, and why it "was a radically different beast than Livejournal, MySpace, and anything else remotely adjacent to the scene"

The Whisper by Brian Smithson (Old Geordie) (cc by)

Are Siri, Alexa, et al, relaying your private conversations to advertisers? Kadin2048 on why this isn't the case, why the truth is actually more nefarious, and why the distinction matters.

Green IT by OiMax (cc by)

As an incredibly opinionated geek who has worked in the datacenter industry, let me rant about the delightful details between datacenter types.

MeFite Skrubly talks about datacenters and what people do and don't know about them.

and eriko talks about why the problem is so hard.

Facebook Disc by dannysullivan from this article (cc by)

I place Facebook ads on behalf of my workplace and looking at the ad console has been sort of fascinating to me as an end user in explaining why I see some of the ads I do and how I can stop some of the more obnoxious ones from appearing....

Most [facebook ad targeting] is based off user submitted data (if you don't tell Facebook how old your kids are, they can't serve you ads based on it) but some of it is stuff you wouldn't expect to be used that way. It brought me up short when I realised Facebook could use my submitted location and the submitted locations of my family members to target me as somebody who was isolated from my loved ones. I never saw any ads for the Scientologists or anything, just innocuous stuff, but it still creeped me out a little.

DSCN1753 by Perpetualtourist2000 (cc by)

In an Ask MetaFilter question about short term buying of Facebook stock around the IPO, member jeb lays out the crazy world of stock market IPOs, how they function, and why you'll probably pay more than the opening price.

The way the IPO business works is…sort of corrupt, to varying degrees. It's definitely not a good place for the individual investor. Basically what happens is this...