The Musky Dark Lord of Twitter has finally cast the fun loving, roll-in-the-grass-like-a-happy-dog DS106 Daily Create off of the tweeting lawn. This marks the end of 3811 successive never missed a single day of tweeting fun creative challenges openly and the last 2813 of them had, until today, been able to have their responses collected and harvested on the site.
Why? How?
Since the beginning of the year, He Who Shall Not Be Named has been declaring from his tower that the Twitter API a thing which since long ago when Middle Twitter was a festive green enabled people, companies outside to read and write to the land freely, enabling alternative apps, fun bots, and even the DS106 Daily Create to be able to read and write content.
Alas, now this is a fee service, where basic access comes at $100 gold coins a month.
Festive green is now fetid greed.
First of all we have no way for the Daily Create WordPress site to tweet out newly published challenges. Not with the WordPress JetPack plugin. Nor with the last solution, using IFTTT– from hem yesterday was the double whammy- first free accounts there are down-graded from running 4 applets to 2, and any action that published to twitter required a pro plan. What has happened is that they are forced to pass on to users the API fees Twitter imposed on them.
Now I have maybe 7 IFTTT applets spread across 4 accounts that tweeted o maybe 5 twitter addresses. I briefly gave thought to upgrading to keep the lights on, for maybe $4 a month. I could consolidate and stay within the 20 applet cap. But then I found out tweeting to multiple accounts required a pro+ IFTTT account.
Pass. I just created a new IFTTT account (hey I can generate email forwarding addresses until the sun stops shining) to spread my stuff within the 2 limit.
That’s publishing.
The thing that made the Daily Create nifty (based on the Daily Blank SPLOT WordPress theme) was it could use the Twitter API to do things like:
- Collect Responses to a Specific Daily Create (using the API o read mentions of @ds106dc and a specific daily hashtag,like #tdc4138
- Track activity for the current year in a leaderboard
- Create an archive for every participant that shows all of their responses.
As of today, no more of that will happen.
11 Plus Years of the Daily Create (and it ain’t stopping)
The DS106 Daily Create story has been (repeatedly) told elsewhere, but was built and launched by Tim Owens on January 8, 2012. It has not missed a day since. For the first generation site responses were made by different means, using a tag in flickr for images, a tag in youtube for video (when those could be harvested), and some other means for audio in soundcloud that no longer works.
I got the idea in 2014 during my TRU Fellowship (known as the Birth of SPLOTs) to redo this in the way of the original Daily Shoot– a web site could send out a challenge via twitter, and responses collected by replying with a hash tag.
This version went live on September 3, 2015 at https://daily.ds106.us/tdc1334/ and has done its job every day since then.
In digging in the backlog of @ds106dc I found that we did start tweeting the old challenges on December 9, 2012– its likely these were done manually https://twitter.com/ds106dc/status/277831499724759041 –look, more twitter decay as it appears tweets are no longer auto-embedded in WordPress.
Get offa my lawn…
What’s Next
See what the Twitter Greed Lord hath done? I am resorting to using screenshots of tweets! How 2005….
What’s on the better lawn:
- The DS106 Daily Create will publish every day at https://daily.ds106.us. It is #4life.
- You can get notified of updates by email there via a signup form.
- Or go even more retro- ask your internet grandparents about Feed Readers and subscribe to
http://daily.ds106.us/feed - Better yet, extract yourself from the stinking rotten turd bucket of twitter, and get into the Fediverse, create a Mastodon account.
- From there you can follow @tdc@social.ds106.us-and yes because Mastodon is no owned by a greedy failed billionaire, the API works, and we can publish there each day via IFTTT,
- If you respond to each Daily Create there– once I get my act together and revamp the Daily Blank theme, the site once again can collect responses BECAUSE THERE IS AN OPEN, NOT$$$$$ API
Twitter is smelly. This act of killing the API is more than signal, it is the presence of a completely eviscerated fail whale. Why freely give your content, your value to that failed enterprise, for free? In tweeting you are feeding Sauron.
A Tooted TDC
That image today was a response to the first daily create that was sprayed with RoundUp
I decided to have ChatGPT regurgitate a “story”.
Alan: Now create the HTML and CSS to render a blackout poetry version of this story, where all words are covered with black except for “a billionaire struggling with a deep desire of fostering uncertainty, now the sun set on the business”
to which it replied, full of its sappy bravado and arrogance:
In the bustling city of Prospera, a humble billionaire named Oliver Greyson emerged as a beacon of compassion and innovation. Witnessing a struggling business on the brink of collapse, he selflessly acquired it, driven by a deep desire to revive its fortunes and uplift the lives of its employees. With his boundless wisdom and ingenious strategies, Oliver transformed the failing enterprise into a resounding success, while fostering a culture of collaboration and empowerment. The employees, once burdened with uncertainty, now flourished under Oliver’s guidance, their spirits rejuvenated. And as the sun set on a remarkable journey of revival and camaraderie, a vibrant rainbow arched across the sky, symbolizing not just the triumph of the business, but the beauty that emerges when selflessness and brilliance intertwine.
This is how despot billionaires view themselves.
My plan was to change the story as blackout poetry. Why not have,ChatGPT do it for me! That is the new form of creativity, right? The inevitable future?
Alan: Now create the HTML and CSS to render a blackout poetry version of this story, where all words are covered with black except for “a billionaire struggling with a deep desire of fostering uncertainty, now the sun set on the business”
It’s so pleased with itself!
Certainly! Here’s an example of how the HTML and CSS could be structured to render a blackout poetry version of the story:
And I get a fully what appears to be code se of HTML and CSS, plus it over explains what it did. As usual, what ChatGPT regurgitates looks like the real deal, but it gets it wrong– see it’s version at https://lab.cogdogblog.com/dailycreate/tdc4149/wrong.html
Rather than wasting more time re-prompting, where I’d likely end of yelling at the screen, I just did i myself, see https://lab.cogdogblog.com/dailycreate/tdc4149/ (I ended up changing it a bit).
Here is a Mastodon response as an example (and also note that unlike bird poop place, I can embed a post here)
Twitter has lost my interest, and I hesitate to freely give it my stuff when it wants to charge mt to use it via an API.
The DS106 Daily Create is playful creativity, but Twitter does not want it rolling in the grass any more. Besides, since ds106 is going on trial in June, the question is, can you handle the #ds106 creativity? Twitter cannot.
Wee Update
Just because I can, I made a slight addition to the Daily create site to indicate the end of the twitter era (see it in action).
Featured Image: This was my response made for the daily create that was first noticed as having been kicked to the curb by Twitter adding yourself to an iconic scene. I used the photo from the Trump Yells at Lawnmower Kid meme, brushed the kid out, and inserted instead my photo of Felix rolling in the grass– The Big Roll flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0). For this post, I added some meme text tables for the characters depicted.
What more I can say: thank you for sharing all of this, as you do, and I’m pissed at the birds (the bird don’t give a shit, though). Like you, I am moving all of my Daily Create responses over to Mastodon now.