I should have specified I meant the custom melodies. My understanding was that they're now all generic. https://sheets.works/the-bells-of-tokyo is a good reference for the transition.
JR East is already in the process of eliminating departure melodies as they transition to one-man station operations, so these will unfortunately be gone sooner than later. The Nambu and Joban lines got rid of them last year and it looks like the Yamanote is scheduled for them to be gone by 2030 [1].
I'm sure they can figure out a way to trigger custom melodies with RFID or similar eventually. Keikyu figured out how to recreate their departure boards [2]. JR might be less willing to come up with something immediately given the optics around automating someone out of a job.
Dead internet theory seems mostly proven by blog posts gesticulating about it. Digital creation is easier, more collaborative, and just as fun as it has ever been if you stop thinking in terms of mass audience and following the herd.
I'll grant you: Flash is a hole that never fully healed back. Search engines might not be especially great for discovery now either. They weren't especially great for Geocities shrines either, though.
The advertisers that evaporated and left behind a lot of no label dropshipping scams seem to think so. Did a lot of them eventually come back because there is some audience to squeeze numbers from? Sure, but I also wouldn't negate that many didn't and aren't coming back because it is Elon's playground now.
We have probably crested over some peak, but you would not look at the broad numbers and say 3% of a peak is organic to that trend. That is a dying/dead website, at least from the position of someone running socials for EFF.
I'm pretty forgiving about accessibility (I'm able to say this at all because I don't have to rely rigidly on accessibility tools) but nav menus feel like a baseline we shouldn't muck with. Tabbing doesn't seem to respond very well in the live example, and at least in the limited demo you can't expand the listing without using a mouse (I thought it would respond to a space with the :checked pseudo, but seems not).
The current utilization of generative video is almost universally horrible, which this article does suggest, so I'm not too surprised there are players trying to differentiate themselves. Slop for thee, not for me.
Comparing views cross-platform is not a very useful study and YouTube routinely adjusts what a view means. Shorts changed earlier this year to count all playbacks and loops without a minimum watch time requirement. https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/333869549/a-change...
Cloudhiker is pretty healthy as a StumbleUpon revival. I've found lots of great personal blogs and sites across a lot of categories through it. https://cloudhiker.net/
Google had a tailored fair use argument because they never made more than snippets public and searchable. It was also prior to Hachette that controlled lending with one-to-one digital copies for every physical copy was a status quo that publishers largely accepted, which IA deliberately tried to upset with the National "Emergency" Library.
I think it's worth fighting back on copyright as a broken institution, and it should be part of the IA's mission, but you have to be responsible on your approach if you're also going to posture as an archival library with stability of information and access. I understand Kahle might lament losing some of the hacker ethos, but the IA is too important to run up against extremes like this without an existential threat.
Stick figures run through a lot of amateur digital animation, for probably obvious reasons. Pivot reigned on a lot of early YouTube and the stubby stick figure style ran through a lot of Flipnote Hatena. I'm not sure if it's simply that standards for amateur digital content have evolved, or if we have lost the character of small platforms like SFDT and Flipnote, but I do find stick figures absent today on the large platforms we've all herded towards. A lot of what I see is definitely buoyed by Flipnote diehards.
Some of the major hosted feed readers (Inoreader, Feedly, Feedbin) include subscriber count in their user agent. I usually run a filter on requests to the feed links in my access logs to get an idea of how they're changing. Anecdotally, my subcriber count reaches into triple digits with only those counts, but I've never gotten email from readers and generally only get feedback promoting new posts on socials. The counts are about as nebulous as follower counts, which is to say most people probably subscribe/follow and forget.
Quibi launched in April 2020. TikTok by this point would have 2 billion downloads [1]. It's difficult to assess they were trailblazers here. I might even say a component of their failure is free mobile video was widely accessible by this point.