Re: Bye Bye Gravatar

40 pointsposted 3 days ago
by surprisetalk
(unattributed.cc)

21 Comments

behindsight

15 hours ago

The blog's visual design is quite pleasant to read.

However I am a bit confused by the author's remarks

> I do NOT EVER consent to ANYTHING being done in regard to AI in my name.

> With newer sites like Bio Link and FediProfile I don't see the usefulness of Gravatar. If anything, I think it now has ANTI-features.

It's conflicting to mention Bio Link with the author's ideology since it quite prominently has:

- AI assistant to answer visitor questions based off of your "links, descriptions, posts, and a short knowledge base"

- AI site builder

bruce511

14 hours ago

We live in a world with cognitive dissonance. We have to because if you don't you'd go insane.

This article is perhaps a good example of that. On the one hand live in public (post blogs, use the same avatar on multiple sites) but at the same time try and control how that publicness is consumed (humans only, no AI).

Right now, whatever you make public is in AI. Whether that is on HN, or your blog, or wherever. You may not like that, but public is ultimately public.

Ironically a blog post about leaving some service because they used the marketing phrase "AI", is immediately added to the AI training corpus.

AI is just the latest tech in a long history of ranting against change. I'm old enough to remember "old people" ranting against computers (paper and pencil is real!), then phones, then internet, then smart phones.

People like to rent. People don't like change. We want privacy but post all the time. We don't want to be tracked, but carry a tracker. We live in a dissonance world.

etiennebausson

11 hours ago

Is there a dissonance?

There is a difference with accepting a "feature" in a product you sign-on to, and having it added behind your back.

On one side, gravatar never talked about feeding your profile to AI when he signed up, and never amended TOS or announced change in that direction (that he received at least).

On the other, the new service he use are upfront about it; though I don't use either service, so no idea on the whole package.

I personally find value in that.

Gualdrapo

13 hours ago

> We live in a world with cognitive dissonance. We have to because if you don't you'd go insane.

Now I feel it's more that we are just way irrational and stupid than we'd like to admit. Accepting our cognitive dissonances would hurt so bad our anthropocentric ego.

uanttributed

10 hours ago

Hello, author here.

When I originally signed up for Bio Link they did not have any AI-anti features. I did not double-check the site before writing that sentence. I will update the article based on this information.

Thank you.

chrismorgan

15 hours ago

It’s funny, I’d genuinely say that Gravatar improved for quite some time. In the old days it was fine, then for quite some time under Automattic when they started fiddling with it it was ridiculously bad and for a while even literally unusable due to broken tie-in to WordPress.com accounts or something (I forget), then they finally got it together again so that it was arguably better than before they took it over, with the caveat that they had expanded its scope a little so there was foolish distraction, but at least the core flow was actually better… but then they’ve continued fiddling with it.

At a cursory glance, this “AI Context” thing is just frivolous AI-washing of the profiles feature they put in some years ago for humans to be able to read. I’m tired of that sort of thing, and products advertising features as being AI Ready™ for an Agentic Future™, when those features are just as meaningful for poor humans.

mvdtnz

15 hours ago

I feel like I'm missing a lot of context and I'm not willing to click on a (another) random link to get it.

s09dfhks

15 hours ago

I thought i was alone. I have no idea what this blog post is complaining about

echelon

13 hours ago

I don't get it either. I clicked their link to the other person's complaint, too - I still do not understand.

Almost every product I build pre-populates user avatars from Gravatar as the optional first personalization hook. It's a nice feature.

Also fuck this bit:

> I know a lot of people also think that Matt Mullenweg's recent statements about WordPress, open source, and other companies have been problematic.

Matt's company did 99% of the work on WordPress and newcomer WP Engine came in and took everything without contributing any code back. They also gobbled up 50% of the market share. The license means WP Engine can do that, but it doesn't make what WP Engine did ethical. Fuck WP Engine and people that do shit like that. Makes me hate OSI purism. It's not unlike what AWS and GCP do to starve Redis, Elastic, etc. of their revenue streams, meanwhile their entire platforms are closed source.

jemmyw

5 hours ago

They didn't take anything, they just sell it hosted. And surely they only got 50% of the market share by doing a better job of it? I also note they have some contributions, for example they seem to be the developers of faustjs.org so they can't be totally absent from contributing?

echelon

4 hours ago

This is why open source as outlined by the OSI is unsustainable. The dipshits calling from the sidelines remove economic reward from those who do all the work.

"Group A" does all the work, then "Group B" moves in and contributes nothing and just leeches.

It's not like the proprietary bits of WP Engine are open. They're not idealists. They're opportunists.

Google and Amazon do the same thing. They love to cheerlead OSI. They sit on the board. They invented this school of thought and advocate it, because it benefits them.

Now think of all the harms Google and Amazon have perpetuated off the back of "open source".

Are the moneymaking pieces of their platforms open? Fuck no they're not, because they're not idiots and they've got the lot of you blinded with religious fanaticism about a license that does not benefit you in the macro.

Screw all of this OSI purism. Fair Source, Open Code, Shareware, and "do not compete" are better.

We need healthy medium sized companies to claw back power from hyperscalers and provide employment to all the people the big giants are laying off and offshoring.

You guys are looking at the small picture. Zoom out.

colechristensen

14 hours ago

You have to read the image to figure out what they're talking about.

Subtitled "Add more info to your profile to help AI know you better"

Presumably llm scraping bots scrape gravatar, so they're adding a set of profile fields so bots will scrape and know more about you.

You could just call this a public profile and people wouldn't freak out, do it or don't, it's not like you're particularly paranoid if you're using gravatar.

But this one mentions AI instead of just calling it a profile and this person reacted ... like this.

efilife

15 hours ago

Beautiful typography on this site, a joy to read. Overall, it's just nicely designed

donatj

14 hours ago

Multiple people have made this comment... And I am perplexed ... Am I missing something?

I'm on my phone in bed so I can't inspect the page, but by all appearances it 16pt Arial...

Is the web in such a poor state that this is a revelation?

cwnyth

12 hours ago

I'm on a laptop and I don't get it either. I'd go so far to say it's quite plain and inoffensive and the dreary color of the background is ugly.

People have different tastes, and that's cool, but this page has the style of microwaved oatmeal.

phito

14 hours ago

Myeah, the first thing I saw when opening it on mobile is that the top logo is not centered and the menu is not displaying properly ("About" item single on a line with some random left margin).

Not that I care but then I was confused by the two comments here praising the design.

efilife

12 hours ago

The logo is the one thing I didn't like but I don't want to clarify every single thing to prevent people from nitpicking and dissecting my words.

I like the spacing between paragraphs, the line-height, and the font choice. The colors chosen are pleasing as well. And the design feels simple. I even like the centered text in the footer.