Update (9/11/23): A TikTok spokesperson told Media Matters that “WGA has been inadvertently blocked as part of the platforms’ protections against QAnon conspiracy theories.” Searches for “WGA” and related terms now appear to function normally.

take a cold shower

Well umm, that’s kinda the trick. In Phoenix in summertime, “cold” water is cold in name only. It’s more tepid than anything. That’s just another part of what makes it so oppressive living there in summer.

They’re paying Joe Rogan $200M to be the exclusive home of his conspiracy disinformation bullshit, and they’re more concerned about forest_stream_with_gentle_rain_3.mp3?

Yeah, uhh we had that in the 1990s and it sucked:

Why do one thing poorly when you can do a whole bunch of different things even worse.

I’ve been very happy with Tidal. I prefer the UX to the Spotify app but it is lacking some functionality like Spotify Connect. It’s also nice that they pay artists more, and that none of my subscription fees are feeding into a $200 million contract for Joe Rogan.

If you use Google Home/Assistant, Tidal doesn’t integrate well. It does integrate with Alexa.

As far as audio quality, I’m reasonably certain that I’d be unable to discern between the top tiers of any of the current services in a blind A/B test.

I wonder how much of that are Reddit-specific problems vs just plain old humans online in a pseudo-anonymous setting problem.