Linked List: July 20, 2019

Saturday, 20 July 2019

Morning Brew 

My thanks to Morning Brew for sponsoring this week at Daring Fireball. There’s a reason over 1 million people (including me) start their day with Morning Brew — the daily email that delivers the latest news from Wall Street to Silicon Valley. Business news doesn’t have to be dry and dense. Morning Brew is to the point and funny.

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Instagram ‘Tag Cleaners’ Are Fighting Against Digital Vandalism 

Megan Farokhmanesh, writing for The Verge:

Tag cleaners, as they call themselves, drown out gore, harassment, and more by flooding a user’s tagged photos with pleasant images. It’s benevolent spam. The most prolific accounts are usually reposting the same images ad nauseam in quick bursts. Randomfloweracc, run by a 17-year-old named Lori, uses cartoons like Rilakkuma or Hello Kitty. Naomi, owner of cute.cleanup, is also partial to Sanrio characters and rainbows. […]

Instagram appears to have removed all of the tagged photos of Devins’ death, but there’s little to stop abusers from creating new accounts and restarting the cycle again. In the days following her death, The Verge noticed waves of these photos, both originating from the same accounts constantly reposting, as well as multiple new accounts cropping up. Reports filed by The Verge usually resulted in photos being taken down in minutes; but in some cases, that’s all it takes for any user to see them to begin with.

What these “tag cleaners” are doing is clearly good. It’s heartwarming that they spend so much time on this. But it’s heartbreaking that they have to do this in the first place. If Facebook truly cared, they could stop this hateful trolling in its tracks.

Today’s Proceeds From the Apollo Reddit App Are Going to the SPCA 

Christian Selig:

So yeah, to try to help some today 100% of Apollo’s proceeds (every penny I make) will be donated to the local SPCA animal shelter. Apollo’s free to download with a Pro version that adds some extra features, as well as an Ultra version that adds a few more, so if you unlock those today it’ll be completely going to the animals and you get a little treat as a thank you for being awesome!

You might remember we did the same thing a year ago and raised $5,000 for the SPCA. I really want to try to hit $10,000 this time, I really think we can do it!

Fantastic app, great cause. Apollo isn’t just a truly nice native iOS app; it simply makes Reddit readable for me.