John Cox

Blogs · @wyome

Tagged social media · everything

Texas Football Coach's Ex-Stripper Wife Threatens To Sue Viral Instagram Account For Posting Their Photo

Dani Banks, the wife of Texas special teams coordinator Jeff Banks and former exotic dancer known as "The Pole Assassin," is threatening to sue the Instagram account @collegefootball for reposting a photo of her from the field without permission. The image, which originated from a Twitter burner account, was shared among college football meme pages and reignited attention on Banks, who became a notable figure in college football lore after an incident involving her emotional support monkey in 2021. Banks, who has over 70,000 Instagram followers and has largely retired from dancing, is leveraging the threat of legal action to protect her image rights as her likeness continues to circulate on social media.

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11 new social media platforms in 2026

This article surveys 11 emerging social networks launched between 2017 and 2024, ranging from niche platforms like Noplace (a Gen Z-focused Twitter/MySpace hybrid) and BeReal (daily unfiltered photo-sharing) to better-established alternatives like Bluesky and Threads. Each entry includes basic data on the platform's release date, headquarters, user count, and core functionality, positioning them as responses to dissatisfaction with existing social media giants. The list captures a diverse ecosystem focused on specific demographics and use cases—from anonymous college networks (Fizz, Yik Yak) to voice messaging (Ten Ten) to disposable camera aesthetics (Lapse).

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Is Reddit still for humans? — Vox

As the broader internet becomes increasingly commercialized and search results degrade under the weight of spam and AI-generated content, Reddit has emerged as a trusted alternative where seemingly authentic people freely share opinions and recommendations. However, the platform is now being systematically infiltrated by brands and marketing firms using fake accounts to pose as real users recommending products with controlled messaging, exploiting Reddit's reputation for genuine human conversation. The danger isn't necessarily that Reddit will become completely overrun, but that users will lose faith in the platform's authenticity, and AI systems trained on Reddit data will amplify this deceptive marketing by citing spam posts without being able to distinguish between genuine recommendations and paid promotion.

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Social web - Wikipedia

This Wikipedia-style overview traces the "social web" from its origins in early tools like email, BBS, and Usenet through Rheingold's 1996 coining of the term, arguing that the web's underlying purpose was always social despite not being designed explicitly for that goal. It charts a three-stage evolution from static "one-way" pages to interactive, egocentric platforms like Facebook and Twitter, and surveys how social features (reviews, crowdsourcing, blogs/wikis, mobile apps) have spread even into non-social sites like Amazon and eBay, ultimately blurring lines between online interaction and real-world relationships, commerce, and dating. Worth keeping as a broad reference piece with citations for the history and mechanics of social interaction online, rather than a focused argument or single case study.

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Resist and Unsubscribe

This document outlines a "Resist and Unsubscribe" campaign targeting major tech and service companies alleged to have ties to ICE or political figures, providing specific boycott actions for each (such as canceling AT&T service, avoiding Dell computers, or unsubscribing from Amazon Prime). The campaign emphasizes simplicity and measurability, offering tools like QuitGPT for easy one-action boycotts and an Impact Calculator that quantifies how individual consumer actions translate into specific revenue losses and market cap effects for targeted companies. The organizers highlight their methodology for estimating campaign impact, calculating that each converted participant canceling an average of two subscriptions results in approximately $30 monthly revenue loss per company, scaled across estimated audience reach.

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The Way You’re Making Fresh Pasta Is Needlessly Fussy

The article argues that the traditional "well method" for making fresh pasta—creating a flour mound with an egg-filled center—persists largely because it looks photogenic and romantic rather than because it's actually the best technique for home cooks. While pasta authorities like Marcella Hazan defend the method for its ability to control flour absorption, the author points out that many professional chefs now acknowledge bowl-mixing works just as well, especially for smaller home batches, and that the well method's association with Italian tradition has been partly invented to serve nationalist identity-building rather than culinary necessity. The piece suggests a practical compromise: mixing eggs and some flour in a bowl first, then transferring to a floured counter to knead, which gives you control without the yolk-explosion disasters most home cooks experience.

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The 2010s Have Broken Our Sense Of Time

The 2010s marked the shift from the internet as a discrete destination to an omnipresent algorithmic feed woven into daily life, with platforms like Instagram and Twitter replacing chronological timelines with engagement-based algorithms that fundamentally altered how information, politics, and culture reach us. This transformation—enabled by smartphones, streaming services, and social media's evolution—created a disorienting temporal experience where past and present collapse, making figures like Trump the ideal vessel for such a system while spawning cultural backlash (vintage watches, vinyl records, digital detox rhetoric) that ultimately fails because the internet has become inseparable from physical reality. The essay argues that what defines the decade isn't any single technology but the complete merger of our online and offline identities, creating a perpetual state of algorithmic fragmentation that keeps us perpetually scrolling, reacting, and unable to escape.

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christianv/jquery-lifestream · GitHub

jQuery Lifestream is a plugin that aggregates your activity from over 40 social media and content platforms—including Twitter, GitHub, Flickr, Last.fm, and many others—into a single chronological feed on your website. The plugin is configurable via JSON, supports custom templates for how each activity appears, and allows developers to contribute new feed sources through pull requests to the project repository.

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Feedspot - Social Feed Reader

I can't summarize this document because it's not a saved article—it's marketing copy from FeedSpot promoting their creator lists to brands and advertisers. There's no actual reporting or argument to extract; it's promotional material describing FeedSpot's service and featuring headlines of their curated lists (vegan chefs, Bible teachers, side hustle creators, sports nutrition experts) without substantive content in any of those categories.

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CSS Social Buttons

This resource provides a reusable CSS framework for creating social media icon buttons using background images and combinable CSS classes. It offers multiple customization options including 14 color choices, 7 style variations (flat, circle, glossy, embossed, etc.), and 3 size options that can be mixed and matched, along with instructions for adding custom icons, gradients, and overriding default styles. The solution is cross-browser compatible with CSS3 effects supported in modern browsers and includes a downloadable stylesheet and demo files.

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Favs App

I can't provide a useful summary of this content. The text appears to be a promotional description for a Mac application called "Favs" mixed with unrelated material (Birkenstock sandals, casino advertising), making it unclear what the actual article being saved was about or what argument it makes. If you have a coherent article or piece you'd like summarized, I'd be happy to help with that instead.

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9 Advanced Twitter Tips | Mobile and Social Media

This post offers nine practical tips for experienced Twitter users seeking to optimize their engagement and information management on the platform. The advice covers technical issues (avoiding ampersands in profiles, leaving character room for retweets), discovery strategies (searching for yourself instead of using reply columns, using Friendfeed to find old tweets), and social practices (starting replies with periods to broadcast conversations, using groups to organize large follow lists). The underlying philosophy emphasizes that Twitter's value lies in dialogue and interaction rather than status updates, and that thoughtful sharing and reciprocity—through retweets and direct mentions—strengthen the network for all users.

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Gay teen bullying victim who recorded an “It Gets Better” video commits suicide – Boing Boing

Jamey Rodemeyer, a 14-year-old from Buffalo, died by suicide just four months after creating an "It Gets Better" video in which he spoke about finding hope through Lady Gaga and self-acceptance. Despite his public message of optimism, he privately documented ongoing severe bullying that left him feeling unheard, writing in his final Tumblr post that no one listened to his pleas for help despite his constant talk of being bullied.

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