1,806 Matching Annotations
  1. May 2021
    1. “For one of the most heavily guarded individuals in the world, a publicly available Venmo account and friend list is a massive security hole. Even a small friend list is still enough to paint a pretty reliable picture of someone's habits, routines, and social circles,” Gebhart said.

      Massive how? He's such a public figure that most of these connections are already widely reported in the media or easily guessable by an private invistigator. The bigger issue is the related data of transactions which might open them up for other abuses or potential leverage as in the other examples.

    1. Social media platforms work on a sort of flywheel of engagement. View->Engage->Comment->Create->View. Paywalls inhibit that flywheel, and so I think any hope for a return to the glory days of the blogosphere will result in disappointment.

      The analogy of social media being a flywheel of engagement is an apt one and it also plays into the idea of "flow" because if you're bored with one post, the next might be better.

    1. Yet apart from a few megastar “influencers”, most creators receive no reward beyond the thrill of notching up “likes”.

      But what are these people really making? Besides one or two of the highest paid, what is a fair-to-middling influencer really making?

    1. Schmitt, H.-J., Booy, R., Aston, R., Van Damme, P., Schumacher, R. F., Campins, M., Rodrigo, C., Heikkinen, T., Weil-Olivier, C., Finn, A., Olcén, P., Fedson, D., & Peltola, H. (2007). How to optimise the coverage rate of infant and adult immunisations in Europe. BMC Medicine, 5, 11. https://doi.org/10.1186/1741-7015-5-11

    1. A strong and cogent argument for why we should not be listening to the overly loud cries from Tristan Harris and the Center for Human Technology. The boundary of criticism they're setting is not extreme enough to make the situation significantly better.

      It's also a strong argument for who to allow at the table or not when making decisions and evaluating criticism.

    2. These companies do not mean well, and we should stop pretending that they do.
    3. But “humane technology” is precisely the sort of pleasant sounding but ultimately meaningless idea that we must be watchful for at all times. To be clear, Harris is hardly the first critic to argue for some alternative type of technology, past critics have argued for: “democratic technics,” “appropriate technology,” “convivial tools,” “liberatory technology,” “holistic technology,” and the list could go on.

      A reasonable summary list of alternatives. Note how dreadful and unmemorable most of these names are. Most noticeable in this list is that I don't think that anyone actually built any actual tools that accomplish any of these theoretical things.

      It also makes more noticeable that the Center for Humane Technology seems to be theoretically arguing against something instead of "for" something.

    4. Big tech can patiently sit through some zingers about their business model, as long as the person delivering those one-liners comes around to repeating big tech’s latest Sinophobic talking point while repeating the “they meant well” myth.
    5. Thus, these companies have launched a new strategy to reinvigorate their all American status: engage in some heavy-handed techno-nationalism by attacking China. And this Sinophobic, and often flagrantly racist, shift serves to distract from the misdeeds of the tech companies by creating the looming menace of a big foreign other. This is a move that has been made by many of the tech companies, it is one that has been happily parroted by many elected officials, and it is a move which Harris makes as well.

      Perhaps the better move is to frame these companies as behemoths on the scale of foreign countries, but ones which have far more power and should be scrutinized more heavily than even China itself. What if the enemy is already within and it's name is Facebook or Google?

    1. Darren Dahly. (2021, February 24). @SciBeh One thought is that we generally don’t ‘press’ strangers or even colleagues in face to face conversations, and when we do, it’s usually perceived as pretty aggressive. Not sure why anyone would expect it to work better on twitter. Https://t.co/r94i22mP9Q [Tweet]. @statsepi. https://twitter.com/statsepi/status/1364482411803906048

    1. Ira, still wearing a mask, Hyman. (2020, November 26). @SciBeh @Quayle @STWorg @jayvanbavel @UlliEcker @philipplenz6 @AnaSKozyreva @johnfocook Some might argue the moral dilemma is between choosing what is seen as good for society (limiting spread of disinformation that harms people) and allowing people freedom of choice to say and see what they want. I’m on the side of making good for society decisions. [Tweet]. @ira_hyman. https://twitter.com/ira_hyman/status/1331992594130235393

    1. This media query only targets WebKit-supported email clients—which have incredible support for HTML5 and CSS3. This media query allows you to use of modern techniques like HTML5 video, CSS3 animation, web fonts, and more.
    1. build and maintain a sense of professional community. Educator and TikTok user Jeremy Winkle outlines four ways teachers can do this: provide encouragement, share resources, provide quick professional development, and ask a question of the day (Winkler).

      I love all of these ideas. It's all-around edifying!

  2. Apr 2021
    1. Documents should offer the same granularity.

      That neither content creators nor browser vendors are particularly concerned with the production and consumption of documents, as such, is precisely the issue. This is evident in the banner that the majority of the work has occurred under over the last 10+ years: they're the Web Hypertext Applications Technology Working Group.

      No one, not even the most well-intentioned (such as the folks at Automattic who are responsible for the blogging software that made Christina's post here possible), see documents when they think of the Web. No, everything is an app—take this page, for example; even the "pages" that WordPress produces are facets of an application. Granted, it's an application meant for reading the written word (and meant for occasionally writing it), but make no mistake, it's an application first, and a "document" only by happenstance (i.e. the absence of any realistic alternative to HTML & co for application delivery).

    1. You can do less with media that’s merely digitized than with the real thing
    2. Though its format can be copied and manipulated, HTML doesn’t make that easy.

      In fact, HTML makes it very easy (true for the reasons that lead Mark to write that it can be copied and manipulated). It's contemporary authoring systems and the typical author-as-publisher and the choices they make that are what makes this difficult.

      The future of rich media lies in striving to be more like dead media (or at least mining it for insights by better understanding it through thoughtful study), rather than the misguided attempts we've been living inside.

      (This is something that I've done a 180 on in the last year or so.)

    1. Others are asking questions about the politics of weblogs – if it’s a democratic medium, they ask, why are there so many inequalities in traffic and linkage?

      This still exists in the social media space, but has gotten even worse with the rise of algorithmic feeds.

    1. I managed to do half the work. But that’s exactly it: It’s work. It’s designed that way. It requires a thankless amount of mental and emotional energy, just like some relationships.

      This is a great example of how services like Facebook can be like the abusive significant other you can never leave.

    2. I realized it was foolish of me to think the internet would ever pause just because I had. The internet is clever, but it’s not always smart. It’s personalized, but not personal. It lures you in with a timeline, then fucks with your concept of time. It doesn’t know or care whether you actually had a miscarriage, got married, moved out, or bought the sneakers. It takes those sneakers and runs with whatever signals you’ve given it, and good luck catching up.
    3. Pinterest doesn’t know when the wedding never happens, or when the baby isn’t born. It doesn’t know you no longer need the nursery. Pinterest doesn’t even know if the vacation you created a collage for has ended. It’s not interested in your temporal experience.This problem was one of the top five complaints of Pinterest users.
    4. So on a blindingly sunny day in October 2019, I met with Omar Seyal, who runs Pinterest’s core product. I said, in a polite way, that Pinterest had become the bane of my online existence.“We call this the miscarriage problem,” Seyal said, almost as soon as I sat down and cracked open my laptop. I may have flinched. Seyal’s role at Pinterest doesn’t encompass ads, but he attempted to explain why the internet kept showing me wedding content. “I view this as a version of the bias-of-the-majority problem. Most people who start wedding planning are buying expensive things, so there are a lot of expensive ad bids coming in for them. And most people who start wedding planning finish it,” he said. Similarly, most Pinterest users who use the app to search for nursery decor end up using the nursery. When you have a negative experience, you’re part of the minority, Seyal said.

      What a gruesome name for an all-too-frequent internet problem: miscarriage problem

    5. To hear technologists describe it, digital memories are all about surfacing those archival smiles. But they’re also designed to increase engagement, the holy grail for ad-based business models.

      It would be far better to have apps focus on better reasons for on this day features. I'd love to have something focused on spaced repetition for building up my memory for other things. Reminders at a week, a month, three months, and six months would be a useful thing for some posts.

    6. Our smartphones pulse with memories now. In normal times, we may strain to remember things for practical reasons—where we parked the car—or we may stumble into surprise associations between the present and the past, like when a whiff of something reminds me of Sunday family dinners. Now that our memories are digital, though, they are incessant, haphazard, intrusive.
    7. I still have a photograph of the breakfast I made the morning I ended an eight-year relationship and canceled a wedding. It was an unremarkable breakfast—a fried egg—but it is now digitally fossilized in a floral dish we moved with us when we left New York and headed west. I don’t know why I took the photo, except, well, I do: I had fallen into the reflexive habit of taking photos of everything. Not long ago, the egg popped up as a “memory” in a photo app. The time stamp jolted my actual memory.

      Example of unwanted spaced repetition via social media.

    1. This year’s Slow Art Day — April 10 — comes at a time when museums find themselves in vastly different circumstances.

      Idea: Implement a slow web week for the IndieWeb, perhaps to coincide with the summit at the end of the week.

      People eschew reading material from social media and only consume from websites and personal blogs for a week. The tough part is how to implement actually doing this. Many people would have a tough time finding interesting reading material in a short time. What are good discovery endpoints for that? WordPress.com's reader? Perhaps support from feed reader community?

  3. Mar 2021
    1. On the internet, the lines between the sender and receiver are increasingly blurred.

      This is certainly a defining characteristic that differentiates the internet from previous mediums of mass communication. Consider the process by which a reader or viewer would share their opinion about a story or a show in the pre-internet era?

    1. There's a reasonably good overview of some ideas about fixing the harms social media is doing to democracy here and it's well framed by history.

      Much of it appears to be a synopsis from the perspective of one who's only managed to attend Pariser and Stround's recent Civic Signals/New_Public Festival.

      There could have been some touches of other research in the social space including those in the Activity Streams and IndieWeb spaces to provide some alternate viewpoints.

    2. Tang has sponsored the use of software called Polis, invented in Seattle. This is a platform that lets people make tweet-like, 140-character statements, and lets others vote on them. There is no “reply” function, and thus no trolling or personal attacks. As statements are made, the system identifies those that generate the most agreement among different groups. Instead of favoring outrageous or shocking views, the Polis algorithm highlights consensus. Polis is often used to produce recommendations for government action.

      An example of social media for proactive government action.

    3. Matias has his own lab, the Citizens and Technology Lab at Cornell, dedicated to making digital technologies that serve the public and not just private companies.

      [[J. Nathan Matias]] Citizens and Technology Lab

      I recall having looked at some of this research and not thinking it was as strong as is indicated here. I also seem to recall he had a connection with Tristan Harris?

    4. What Fukuyama and a team of thinkers at Stanford have proposed instead is a means of introducing competition into the system through “middleware,” software that allows people to choose an algorithm that, say, prioritizes content from news sites with high editorial standards.

      This is the second reference I've seen recently (Jack Dorsey mentioning a version was the first) of there being a marketplace for algorithms.

      Does this help introduce enough noise into the system to confound the drive to the extremes for the average person? What should we suppose from the perspective of probability theory?

    5. One person writing a tweet would still qualify for free-speech protections—but a million bot accounts pretending to be real people and distorting debate in the public square would not.

      Do bots have or deserve the right to not only free speech, but free reach?

    6. The scholars Nick Couldry and Ulises Mejias have called it “data colonialism,” a term that reflects our inability to stop our data from being unwittingly extracted.

      I've not run across data colonialism before.

    1. What I’d like more of is a social web that sits between these two extremes, something with a small town feel. So you can see people are around, and you can give directions and a friendly nod, but there’s no need to stop and chat, and it’s not in your face. It’s what I’ve talked about before as social peripheral vision (that post is about why it should be build into the OS).

      I love the idea of social peripheral vision online.

    2. If I’m in a meeting, I should be able to share a link in the chat to a particular post on my blog, then select the paragraph I’m talking about and have it highlighted for everyone. Well, now I can.

      And you could go a few feet farther if you added fragment support to the site, then the browser would also autoscroll to that part. Then you could add a confetti cannon to the system and have the page rain down confetti when more than three people have highlighted the same section!

    3. A status emoji will appear in the top right corner of your browser. If it’s smiling, there are other people on the site right now too.

      This is pretty cool looking. I'll have to add it as an example to my list: Social Reading User Interface for Discovery.

      We definitely need more things like this on the web.

      It makes me wish the Reading.am indicator were there without needing to click on it.

      I wonder how this sort of activity might be built into social readers as well?

    4. If somebody else selects some text, it’ll be highlighted for you.

      Suddenly social annotation has taken an interesting twist. @Hypothes_is better watch out! ;)

    1. Sociologist Michael Warner built on this some ten years later, saying:Counterpublics are spaces of circulation in which it is hoped that the poiesis of scenemaking will be transformative, not replicative merely.Poiesis is a fancy way of talking about the art and the act of creating, inventing — and it’s closely related to technique. Consciously making a scene that others can join in with.Economist Kim Crayton’s antiracism programme, Cause a Scene speaks directly to this: she is bringing a clear set of principles to life through leadership training and sharing content to achieve “strategic disruption of the status quo in technical organizations”.Making a scene is galvanising and welcoming, dynamic and inclusive by default.

      I like this idea of creating a space and causing a scene to pull people in.

      Not too dissimilar to the aculturation Hollywood does to help normalize certain activities just by showing them increasingly.

      Definitely want to circle back to this with additional examples and expand on it.

    1. ReconfigBehSci. (2020, December 5). As everyone’s focus turns to vaccine hesitancy, we will need to take a close look not just at social media but at Amazon- the “top” recommendations I get when typing in ‘vaccine’ are all anti-vaxx https://t.co/ug5QAcKT9Q [Tweet]. @SciBeh. https://twitter.com/SciBeh/status/1335181088818388992

    1. So Substack has an editorial policy, but no accountability. And they have terms of service, but no enforcement.

      This is also the case for many other toxic online social media platforms. A fantastic framing.

    1. Q: So, this means you don’t value hearing from readers?A: Not at all. We engage with readers every day, and we are constantly looking for ways to hear and share the diversity of voices across New Jersey. We have built strong communities on social platforms, and readers inform our journalism daily through letters to the editor. We encourage readers to reach out to us, and our contact information is available on this How To Reach Us page.

      We have built strong communities on social platforms

      They have? Really?! I think it's more likely the social platforms have built strong communities which happen to be talking about and sharing the papers content. The paper doesn't have any content moderation or control capabilities on any of these platforms.

      Now it may be the case that there are a broader diversity of voices on those platforms over their own comments sections. This means that a small proportion of potential trolls won't drown out the signal over the noise as may happen in their comments sections online.

      If the paper is really listening on the other platforms, how are they doing it? Isn't reading some or all of it a large portion of content moderation? How do they get notifications of people mentioning them (is it only direct @mentions)?

      Couldn't/wouldn't an IndieWeb version of this help them or work better.

    1. A question on CSS or accessibility or even content management is a rare thing indeed. This isn't a community centred on helping people build their own websites, as I had first imagined[5]. Instead, it's a community attempting to shift the power in online socialising away from Big Tech and back towards people[6].

      There is more of the latter than the former to be certain, but I don't think it's by design.

      Many of the people there are already experts in some of these sub-areas, so there aren't as many questions on those fronts. Often there are other resources that are also better for these issues and links to them can be found within the wiki.

      The social portions are far more difficult, so this is where folks are a bit more focused.

      I think when the community grows, we'll see more of these questions about CSS, HTML, and accessibility. (In fact I wish more people were concerned about accessibility and why it was important.)

    1. In this respect, we join Fitzpatrick (2011) in exploring “the extent to which the means of media production and distribution are undergoing a process of radical democratization in the Web 2.0 era, and a desire to test the limits of that democratization”

      Something about this is reminiscent of WordPress' mission to democratize publishing. We can also compare it to Facebook whose (stated) mission is to connect people, while it's actual mission is to make money by seemingly radicalizing people to the extremes of our political spectrum.

      This highlights the fact that while many may look at content moderation on platforms like Facebook as removing their voices or deplatforming them in the case of people like Donald J. Trump or Alex Jones as an anti-democratic move. In fact it is not. Because of Facebooks active move to accelerate extreme ideas by pushing them algorithmically, they are actively be un-democratic. Democratic behavior on Facebook would look like one voice, one account and reach only commensurate with that person's standing in real life. Instead, the algorithmic timeline gives far outsized influence and reach to some of the most extreme voices on the platform. This is patently un-democratic.

    1. ReconfigBehSci. (2020, December 8). I’ve been pondering failed predictions today. A spectacular error of mine: In the early media rush to listen to scientists and doctors, I actually thought Western societies might be seeing the end of the “influencer” and a renewed interest in people who did stuff 1/2 [Tweet]. @SciBeh. https://twitter.com/SciBeh/status/1336383952232308736

    1. "So capitalism created social media. Literally social life, but mediated by ad sellers." https://briefs.video/videos/why-the-indieweb/

      Definition of social media: social life, but mediated by capitalistic ad sellers online.

  4. Feb 2021
    1. Dispo is an invite-only social photo app with a twist: you can’t see any photos you take with the app until 24 hours after you take them. (The app sends you a push notification to open them every day at 9AM local time: among other things, a nice hack to boost daily usage.) Founded by David Dobrik, one of the world’s most popular YouTubers, Dispo has been around as a basic utility for a year.

      This is the first reference to Dispo I've come across.

    1. Small world of annotation enthusiasts, but hopefully getting bigger!

      I've always wished that Hypothes.is had some additional social features built in for discovering and following others, but they do have just enough for those who are diligent.

      I've written a bit about how to follow folks and tags using a feed reader.

      And if you want some quick links or even an OPML feed of people and material I'm following on Hypothesis: https://boffosocko.com/about/following/#Hypothesis%20Feeds

    1. The Quest for Truth

      The quest for Truth is everywhere and not limited to the economic topics linked here. This is just a topic that started a thought process where I had access to a convenient tool (Hypothesis) to bookmark my thoughts and research.

      Primary thought is: The Quest for Truth. Subcategories would provide a structured topic for the thought. In this case the subcategory would be: US Economy, Inflation

      The TRUTH is a concept comprised of inconsistencies and targets that frequently move.

      Targets (data, methods, people, time, semantics, agenda, demographic, motive, means, media, money, status) hold a position in time long enough to fulfill a purpose or agenda. Sometimes they don't consciously change, but history over time shines light and opens cracks in original narrative that leads to new truth's, real or imagined.

      Verifying and validating certain Truth is very difficult. Why is That?
    1. There is no standard format or open API to discover, create, augment, and persist media metadata across platforms, so broken image sharing habits persist.

      preservation of [[metadata]] -- assuming there are similar concepts in [[healthcare]], although maybe opposite problem is true where you actually do want to obfuscate [[PII]]; insurance companies have financial incentive to do so

    1. Sharpe claims that Englishmen “were able to…constitute themselves as political agents” by reading, whether or not they read about state affairs; for politics was “a type of consciousness” and the psyche “a text of politics.” “The Civil War itself became a contested text.” So reading was everything: “We are what we read.”

      The argument here is that much of the English Civil War was waged in reading and writing. Compare this with today's similar political civil war between the right and the left, but it is being waged in social media instead in sound bites, video clips, tweets, which encourage visceral gut reactions instead of longer and better thought out arguments and well tempered reactions.

      Instead of moving forward on the axis of thought and rationality, we're descending instead into the primordial and visceral reactions of our "reptilian brains."

    1. A view into communities, identity, and how smaller communities might be built in new ways and with new business models that aren't as centralized or ad driven as Facebook, Twitter, et al.

    2. But the inverse trajectory, from which this essay takes its name, is now equally viable: “come for the network, pay for the tool.” Just as built-in social networks are a moat for information products, customized tooling is a moat for social networks.1 This entrenchment effect provides a realistic business case for bespoke social networks. Running a bespoke social network means you’re basically in the same business as Slack, but for a focused community and with tailored features. This is a great business to be in for the same reasons Slack is: low customer acquisition costs and long lifetime value. The more tools, content, and social space are tied together, the more they take on the qualities of being infrastructure for one’s life.

      An interesting value proposition and way of looking at the space that isn't advertising specific.

    1. Transclusion would make this whole scenario quite different. Let's imagine this again...

      Many in the IndieWeb have already prototyped this using some open web standards. It's embodied in the idea of media fragments and fragmentions, a portmanteau of the words fragment and Webmention.

      A great example can be found at https://www.kartikprabhu.com/articles/marginalia

      This reminds me that I need to kick my own server to fix the functionality on my main site and potentially add it to a few others.

    1. I can even imagine a distant future where governments might sponsor e.g. social networking as a social service. I know many people don’t trust their governments, but when it comes down to it they’re more likely to be working in people’s interests than a group of unelected tech barons responsible only to their shareholders at best, or themselves in the cases where they have dual class stock with unequal voting rights, or even their families for 100s of years.

      Someone suggesting government run social media. There are potential problems, but I'm definitely in for public libraries doing this sort of work/hosting/maintenance.

    1. We’ve always used the term ‘social networking’ to refer to the process of finding and connecting with those people. And that process has always depended on a fabric of trust woven most easily in the context of local communities and face-to-face interaction.

      Too much of modern social networking suffers from this fabric of trust and rampant context collapse. How can we improve on these looking forward?

    1. Glad to have you back Ben!

      Interesting to hear the results of the experiment. Knowing that it only made you $10 on their platform is an interesting data point.

      I can't wait to see what you come up with on the community front. Healthier competitors to Facebook's pages/communities is a problem we need more work on.

    1. But while we can all agree that tech has a moderation problem, there's a lot less consensus on what to do about it. Broadly speaking, there are two broad approaches: the first is to fix the tech giants and the second is to fix the Internet.

      There is another approach (or two or more). The IndieWeb approach is another framing which isn't included in the two listed here, though it does have a few hints of "fixing the Internet" since they have created some new web recommendations through the W3C.

      Circling back to this, his definition of fix the Internet is talking about almost exactly IndieWeb.

    2. Economists call this a "network effect": the more people there are on Twitter, the more reason there is to be on Twitter and the harder it is to leave. But technologists have another name for this: "lock in." The more you pour into Twitter, the more it costs you to leave. Economists have a name for that cost: the "switching cost."
    1. Technologie kan ons helpen om de wereld op nieuwe manieren te bekijken. Het is daarom meer dan een hulpmiddel: het is de verbinding tussen de mens en de wereld om haar heen. “Technologie medieert tussen de mens en de wereld”, concludeert Verbeek.

      Technologie is een interface die, zoals McLuhan al aangaf, mogelijkheden biedt om de wereld anders te zien. Niet minder 'echt' of 'natuurgetrouw' overigens. We zijn al langer gewend om de werkelijkheid gemedieerd waar te nemen (zie Cooley) en kunnen al langer spreken van een symbolische samenleving (zie Elchardus).

  5. Jan 2021
    1. Recently, WhatsApp updated its privacy policy to allow sharing data with its parent, Facebook. Users who agreed to use WhatsApp under its previous privacy policy had two options: agree to the new policy or be unable to use WhatsApp again. The WhatsApp privacy policy update is a classic bait-and-switch: WhatsApp lured users in with a sleek interface and the impression of privacy, domesticated them to remove their autonomy to migrate, and then backtracked on its previous commitment to privacy with minimal consequence. Each step in this process enabled the next; had user domestication not taken place, it would be easy for most users to switch away with minimal friction.

      Definitely a dark pattern that has been replicated many times.

    1. History repeatedly documents the death knells that never came. Writing destroys the mind! Books destroy the mind! Radio destroys the mind! TV destroys the mind! The world wide web destroys the mind! Social media destroys the mind! Except they didn’t and probably don’t. What new mediums do destroy is the primacy of older ones.
    1. What will it take to break this circuit, where white supremacists see that violence is rewarded with amplification and infamy? While the answer is not straightforward, there are technical and ethical actions available.

      How can this be analogized to newspapers that didn't give oxygen to the KKK in the early 1900's as a means of preventing recruiting?

    1. something that the alternative online media has been unable to do is where mainstream media platforms are still unrivalled – being a one-stop repository for different sets of news consumers. MSM digital platforms, despite many flaws, thrive as catch-all baskets for round-the-clock information seekers, ranging from politics to cricket, from fashion to music and important news (which doesn’t only mean the unusual massacres) from a hamlet in Arwal district in Bihar to that from a Delhi suburb.

      This will be impossible for a small digital media startup to achieve.

      I rather see the independent digital news as a gateway to important, contentious, controversial or rather plain and non flashy news. News of the kind ignored by mainstream media due to their perverse incentive structures.

      I don't think the coverage on cricket for example or entertainment from newslaundry would be any drastically different from mainstream media. In that sense it would be wiser not to compete and squander resources on such kind of reporting just to be a one stop shop.

  6. Dec 2020
    1. Individuals and companies are discovering that direct contact with the reader via the mailbox is a lot easier and more interesting than the black holes of the social networks dictated by algorithms.
    1. SOC is added to E. coli cells to aid recovery after exposure to high salt concentrations and heat shock in many chemical-based DNA transformation protocols

      Elbing and Brent, 2002, Green and Sambrook, 2012

    1. At the end of the day, small businesses are owned by people like you and me—people who themselves will benefit from improved privacy rights.
    2. The practices of ad-targeting and engagement-tracking are precisely what make Facebook so tremendously powerful in the digital ecosystem.
    3. Small businesses owners are, at the end of the day, individual citizens and consumers, too. They care about privacy, just like anyone should—and any increase in data privacy, marginal or otherwise, is an economic win for consumers.
    4. This figure doesn’t necessarily indicate that small businesses benefit from advertising on Facebook, just that they have no other option.
    1. ReconfigBehSci {@SciBeh} (2020) sadly squares with my own impression of social media 'debate' - as someone who works on both argumentation and belief formation across social networks, this strikes me as every bit as big a problem as the spread of conspiracy. Twitter. Retrieved from: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1308341816333340672

    1. Andrew Bosworth, one of Facebook’s longtime executives, has compared Facebook to sugar—in that it is “delicious” but best enjoyed in moderation. In a memo originally posted to Facebook’s internal network last year, he argued for a philosophy of personal responsibility. “My grandfather took such a stance towards bacon and I admired him for it,” Bosworth wrote. “And social media is likely much less fatal than bacon.”

      Another example of comparing social media and food.

    2. If the age of reason was, in part, a reaction to the existence of the printing press, and 1960s futurism was a reaction to the atomic bomb, we need a new philosophical and moral framework for living with the social web—a new Enlightenment for the information age, and one that will carry us back to shared reality and empiricism.

      This is an interesting framing and makes sense to me.

    3. But so far, somewhat miraculously, we have figured out how to live with the bomb. Now we need to learn how to survive the social web.

      It's a sad thought that these two ideas can or need to be thought of in such close juxtaposition.

  7. Nov 2020
    1. The first Wired website, therefore, has a unique distinction of being an unofficial, amateur project led by two people from a different country uploading copyrighted content they didn’t own to a site that lacked any of the panache, glitz, or unconventional charm that had made Wired famous.

      Not sure how to feel about this...

      Now that I have read the story this way, I'm wondering...

      Might one say that Wired only went online as early as it did because of their ban from Singapore?

    1. these platforms aim to provide experiences “that people want to use that works as much as possible as they expect, but which is backed up by better values and technology.”

      This is an interesting statement of how this new social media should work.

    1. While there have always been server listings on joinmastodon.org, this is a break from our previous practice of listing servers. Before the Server Covenant we pulled a list of servers from a 3rd party provider called instances.social. However, instances.social was a 3rd party and automated service. The one thing that it could not do was any kind of quality control as it simply listed every instance submitted–regardless of stability or their code of conduct. As Mastodon has grown it has become increasingly clear that simply listing every possible server was not in our interest as a project, nor was it in the interest in the majority of the communities running Mastodon.

      To some level as an IndieWeb participant I'm doing this more manually by reading and individually adding people and their sites to my personal network one at a time. No one has yet moderated this process and to some extent it's sort of nice to have a more natural discovery process for protecting my own personal network.

    1. This is why social media services are free to use. The added signaling value is solely captured by the physical products that are being shared.

      Social media offers signalling distribution and amplification. But because they are not able to capture any of that value, it is free.

  8. Oct 2020