~95% of lizards I’ve spotted since joining iNaturalist have been Western Fence Lizards. (Occasionally they’ve even been on fences.)
Once I found one that was identified as a Great Basin Fence Lizard!
When I looked it up, it turned out to be a subspecies of Western Fence Lizards.
The flood control basin has been partly restored for stormwater infiltration and as habitat for native plants and migrating waterfowl, bounded by a city park on one side, baseball fields on the other, and hills all around. The city is currently expanding the basin while the water level is low.
Oddly quiet night here. Big change from last year when everyone seemed to be going all-out because they finally felt like they could.
Making the blue check mark mean “This person can afford $20/month” instead of “This person is who they say they are” is only the latest way Twitter has downgraded its signal/noise ratio over the years.
Word is that Twitter’s new owner is planning to charge $20/month for a blue check mark.
Which of course, means the blue checkmark will now be useless. Well, useless to the users of the site, anyway. It won’t tell you which of several accounts is really the person you’re looking for, just who has $20/month to spend on it. (Not that it was perfect, but at least it was a signal.)
It’s sort of like when SSL certificates went from being expensive and needing verification — so they were a sign that you were on the right website — to cheap and later free. Except an SSL/TLS cert still tells you something: your connection is protected from eavesdropping. The checkmark doesn’t tell you anything valuable.
But Twitter’s been messing with the signal/noise ratio for ages.
Ads themselves (or promoted tweets, or whatever you call them) are already adding noise. Then they started showing you other people’s “likes,” removing some meaning from the action and adding noise to the stream. These days they even show you tweets from people that people you follow are following.
On Mastodon I’ll sometimes get distracted from something I wanted to do or look for, but I can almost always get back to it. I’ll pop onto Twitter for 5 minutes to look for something and I’m there twice as long because I can’t find it in all the attention-grabbing “features.” The other day I decided to unfollow all the corporations and organizations and only keep the actual people on the list, and I still had trouble finding things.
I suppose from Twitter’s perspective it worked, because I was there for 10 minutes instead of 5…but it makes me less interested in coming back later.
Every bit of noise you add to a signal cuts down on how much value the listener gets out of it. Eventually the ratio is no longer worth it, and all that attention you managed to extract from them by ratcheting up the noise drops to zero.
