1,144 Matching Annotations
  1. Jan 2024
    1. The Evaporative Cooling Effect describes the phenomenon that high value contributors leave a community because they cannot gain something from it, which leads to the decrease of the quality of the community. Since the people most likely to join a community are those whose quality is below the average quality of the community, these newcomers are very likely to harm the quality of the community. With the expansion of community, it is very hard to maintain the quality of the community.

      via ref to Xianhang Zhang in Social Software Sundays #2 – The Evaporative Cooling Effect « Bumblebee Labs Blog [archived] who saw it

      via [[Eliezer Yudkowsky]] in Evaporative Cooling of Group Beliefs

    1. By its very nature, moderation is a form of censorship. You, as a community, space, or platform are deciding who and what is unacceptable. In Substack’s case, for example, they don’t allow pornography but they do allow Nazis. That’s not “free speech” but rather a business decision. If you’re making moderation based on financials, fine, but say so. Then platform users can make choices appropriately.
  2. Dec 2023
    1. One could easily replace World War I and idea of war here with social media/media and the essay broadly reads well today.

    1. I dislike isolated events anddisconnected details. I really hate state-ments, views, prejudices, and beliefsthat jump at you suddenly out of mid-air.

      Wells would really hate social media, which he seems to have perfectly defined with this statement.

    1. Untangling Threads by Erin Kissane on 2023-12-21

      This immediately brings up the questions of how the following - founder effects and being overwhelmed by the scale of an eternal September - communism of community interactions being subverted bent for the purposes of (surveillance) capitalism (see @Graeber2011, Debt)

    1. In my book Technology’s Child: Digital Media’s Role in the Ages and Stages of Growing Up, I explore how the design of platforms and the way people engage with those designs helps to shape the cultures that emerge on different social media platforms. I propose three layers for understanding this process.
    1. While social media emphasizes the show-off stuff — the vacation in Puerto Vallarta, the full kitchen remodel, the night out on the town — on blogs it still seems that people are sharing more than signalling.

      Yes!

  3. Nov 2023
    1. In contrast, media ecologists focus on understanding media as environments and how those environments affect society.

      The World Wide Web takes on an ecological identity in that it is defined by the ecology of relationships exercised within, determining the "environmental" aspects of the online world. What of media ecology and its impact on earth's ecology? There are climate change ramifications simply in the use of social media itself, yet alone the influences or behaviors associated with it: here is a carbon emissions calculator for seemingly "innocent" internet use:

  4. Oct 2023
    1. Everyone is super ambitious and that creates a little bit of a toxic environment where people feel like it's a very comparative space

      Competitive in what way? Grades? Jobs? Finances? Material things? Relationships?

    2. "And I think social media turbocharged us all of this.

      wow...tell me more.

    1. In both cases, it's up to us now to discipline ourselves to avoid the fats in junk food, and the breaking news and dopamine thrill-ride of social media.

      A nice encapsulation of evolutionary challenges that humans are facing.

    1. Television, radio, and all the sources of amusement andinformation that surround us in our daily lives are also artificialprops. They can give us the impression that our minds are active, because we are required to react to stimuli from outside.But the power of those external stimuli to keep us going islimited. They are like drugs. We grow used to them, and wecontinuously need more and more of them. Eventually, theyhave little or no effect. Then, if we lack resources within ourselves, we cease to grow intellectually, morally, and spiritually.And when we cease to grow, we begin to die.

      One could argue that Adler and Van Doren would lump social media into the sources of amusement category.

  5. Sep 2023
      • for: doppleganger, conflict resolution, deep humanity, common denominators, CHD, Douglas Rushkoff, Naomi Klein, Into the Mirror World, conspiracy theory, conspiracy theories, conspiracy culture, nonduality, self-other, human interbeing, polycrisis, othering, storytelling, myth-making, social media amplifier -summary
        • This conversation was insightful on so many dimensions salient to the polycrisis humanity is moving through.
        • It makes me think of the old cliches:
          • "The more things change, the more they remain the same"
          • "What's old is new" ' "History repeats"
        • the conversation explores Naomi's latest book (as of this podcast), Into the Mirror World, in which Naomi adopts a different style of writing to explicate, articulate and give voice to
          • implicit and tacit discomforting ideas and feelings she experienced during covid and earlier, and
          • became a focal point through a personal comparative analysis with another female author and thought leader, Naomi Wolf,
            • a feminist writer who ended up being rejected by mainstream media and turned to right wing media.
        • The conversation explores the process of:
          • othering,
          • coopting and
          • abandoning
        • of ideas important for personal and social wellbeing.
        • and speaks to the need to identify what is going on and to reclaim those ideas for the sake of humanity
        • In this context, the doppleganger is the people who are mirror-like imiages of ourselves, but on the other side of polarized issues.
        • Charismatic leaders who are bad actors often are good at identifying the suffering of the masses, and coopt the ideas of good actors to serve their own ends of self-enrichment.
        • There are real world conspiracies that have caused significant societal harm, and still do,
        • however, when there ithere are phenomena which we have no direct sense experience of, the mixture of
          • a sense of helplessness,
          • anger emerging from injustice
        • a charismatic leader proposing a concrete, possible but explanatory theory
        • is a powerful story whose mythology can be reified by many people believing it
        • Another cliche springs to mind
          • A lie told a hundred times becomes a truth
          • hence the amplifying role of social media
        • When we think about where this phenomena manifests, we find it everywhere:
  6. Aug 2023
    1. I do expect new social platforms to emerge that focus on privacy and ‘fake-free’ information, or at least they will claim to be so. Proving that to a jaded public will be a challenge. Resisting the temptation to exploit all that data will be extremely hard. And how to pay for it all? If it is subscriber-paid, then only the wealthy will be able to afford it.
      • for: quote, quote - Sam Adams, quote - social media
      • quote, indyweb - support, people-centered
        • I do expect new social platforms to emerge that focus on privacy and ‘fake-free’ information, or at least they will claim to be so.
        • Proving that to a jaded public will be a challenge.
        • Resisting the temptation to exploit all that data will be extremely hard.
        • And how to pay for it all?
        • If it is subscriber-paid, then only the wealthy will be able to afford it.
      • author: Sam Adams
        • 24 year IBM veteran -senior research scientist in AI at RTI International working on national scale knowledge graphs for global good
      • comment
        • his comment about exploiting all that data is based on an assumption
          • a centralized, server data model
      • this doesn't hold true with a people-centered, person-owned data network such as Inyweb
    2. Will members-only, perhaps subscription-based ‘online communities’ reemerge instead of ‘post and we’ll sell your data’ forms of social media? I hope so, but at this point a giant investment would be needed to counter the mega-billions of companies like Facebook!
      • for: quote, quote - Janet Salmons, quote - online communities, quote - social media, indyweb - support
      • paraphrase
        • Will members-only, perhaps subscription-based ‘online communities’ reemerge instead of
        • ‘post and we’ll sell your data’ forms of social media?
        • I hope so, but at this point a giant investment would be needed to counter the mega-billions of companies like Facebook!
    1. The big tech companies, left to their own devices (so to speak), have already had a net negative effect on societies worldwide. At the moment, the three big threats these companies pose – aggressive surveillance, arbitrary suppression of content (the censorship problem), and the subtle manipulation of thoughts, behaviors, votes, purchases, attitudes and beliefs – are unchecked worldwide
      • for: quote, quote - Robert Epstein, quote - search engine bias,quote - future of democracy, quote - tilting elections, quote - progress trap, progress trap, cultural evolution, technology - futures, futures - technology, progress trap, indyweb - support, future - education
      • quote
        • The big tech companies, left to their own devices , have already had a net negative effect on societies worldwide.
        • At the moment, the three big threats these companies pose
          • aggressive surveillance,
          • arbitrary suppression of content,
            • the censorship problem, and
          • the subtle manipulation of
            • thoughts,
            • behaviors,
            • votes,
            • purchases,
            • attitudes and
            • beliefs
          • are unchecked worldwide
      • author: Robert Epstein
        • senior research psychologist at American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology
      • paraphrase
        • Epstein's organization is building two technologies that assist in combating these problems:
          • passively monitor what big tech companies are showing people online,
          • smart algorithms that will ultimately be able to identify online manipulations in realtime:
            • biased search results,
            • biased search suggestions,
            • biased newsfeeds,
            • platform-generated targeted messages,
            • platform-engineered virality,
            • shadow-banning,
            • email suppression, etc.
        • Tech evolves too quickly to be managed by laws and regulations,
          • but monitoring systems are tech, and they can and will be used to curtail the destructive and dangerous powers of companies like Google and Facebook on an ongoing basis.
      • reference
      • for: titling elections, voting - social media, voting - search engine bias, SEME, search engine manipulation effect, Robert Epstein
      • summary
        • research that shows how search engines can actually bias towards a political candidate in an election and tilt the election in favor of a particular party.
    1. In our early experiments, reported by The Washington Post in March 2013, we discovered that Google’s search engine had the power to shift the percentage of undecided voters supporting a political candidate by a substantial margin without anyone knowing.
      • for: search engine manipulation effect, SEME, voting, voting - bias, voting - manipulation, voting - search engine bias, democracy - search engine bias, quote, quote - Robert Epstein, quote - search engine bias, stats, stats - tilting elections
      • paraphrase
      • quote
        • In our early experiments, reported by The Washington Post in March 2013,
        • we discovered that Google’s search engine had the power to shift the percentage of undecided voters supporting a political candidate by a substantial margin without anyone knowing.
        • 2015 PNAS research on SEME
          • http://www.pnas.org/content/112/33/E4512.full.pdf?with-ds=yes&ref=hackernoon.com
          • stats begin
          • search results favoring one candidate
          • could easily shift the opinions and voting preferences of real voters in real elections by up to 80 percent in some demographic groups
          • with virtually no one knowing they had been manipulated.
          • stats end
          • Worse still, the few people who had noticed that we were showing them biased search results
          • generally shifted even farther in the direction of the bias,
          • so being able to spot favoritism in search results is no protection against it.
          • stats begin
          • Google’s search engine 
            • with or without any deliberate planning by Google employees 
          • was currently determining the outcomes of upwards of 25 percent of the world’s national elections.
          • This is because Google’s search engine lacks an equal-time rule,
            • so it virtually always favors one candidate over another, and that in turn shifts the preferences of undecided voters.
          • Because many elections are very close, shifting the preferences of undecided voters can easily tip the outcome.
          • stats end
    2. What if, early in the morning on Election Day in 2016, Mark Zuckerberg had used Facebook to broadcast “go-out-and-vote” reminders just to supporters of Hillary Clinton? Extrapolating from Facebook’s own published data, that might have given Mrs. Clinton a boost of 450,000 votes or more, with no one but Mr. Zuckerberg and a few cronies knowing about the manipulation.
      • for: Hiliary Clinton could have won, voting, democracy, voting - social media, democracy - social media, election - social media, facebook - election, 2016 US elections, 2016 Trump election, 2016 US election, 2016 US election - different results, 2016 election - social media
      • interesting fact
        • If Facebook had sent a "Go out and vote" message on election day of 2016 election, Clinton may have had a boost of 450,000 additional votes
          • and the outcome of the election might have been different
  7. Jul 2023
    1. As Threads "soars", Bluesky and Mastodon are adopting algorithmic feeds. (Tech Crunch) You will eat the bugs. You will live in the pod. You will read what we tell you. You will own nothing and we don't much care if you are happy.

      Applying the WEF meme about pods and bugs to Threads inspiring Bluesky and one Mastodon app to push algorithmic feeds.

    1. specific uses of the technology help develop what we call “relational confidence,” or the confidence that one has a close enough relationship to a colleague to ask and get needed knowledge. With greater relational confidence, knowledge sharing is more successful.
    1. Not that an E2E rule precludes algorithmic feeds: remember, E2E is the idea that you see what you ask to see. If a user opts into a feed that promotes content that they haven't subscribed to at the expense of the things they explicitly asked to see, that's their choice. But it's not a choice that social media services reliably offer, which is how they are able to extract ransom payments from publishers.

      I don't understand how you could audit this, unless you had to force a default of chronological presentation of posts etc.

    1. the folly of endless bla, bla bla, people viewing the mind as a big boy, while in reality, it is a little boy who is undisciplined and goes on random rants and tangents, liking and disliking everything it sees on social-media

    1. "After years of research, our engineers have created a revolution in social media technology: a Twitter clone on Instagram that offers the absolute worst of both worlds," said a VR headset-wearing Zuckerberg in an address to dozens of friends in the Metaverse. "At long last, you can read caustic hot takes written by talentless idiots, while still enjoying oppressive censorship and sepia-toned thirst traps from yoga pants models with obnoxious lip injections. You're welcome!"

      Babylon Bee article with made up Mark Zuckerberg quote touting the virtues of Threads. This is some of the Bee's finest writing and not at all inaccurate.

  8. Jun 2023
    1. (14:20-19:00) Dopamine Prediction Error is explained by Andrew Huberman in the following way: When we anticipate something exciting dopamine levels rise and rise, but when we fail it drops below baseline, decreasing motivation and drive immensely, sometimes even causing us to get sad. However, when we succeed, dopamine rises even higher, increasing our drive and motivation significantly... This is the idea that successes build upon each other, and why celebrating the "marginal gains" is a very powerful tool to build momentum and actually make progress. Surprise increases this effect even more: big dopamine hit, when you don't anticipate it.

      Social Media algorithms make heavy use of this principle, therefore enslaving its user, in particular infinite scrolling platforms such as TikTok... Your dopamine levels rise as you're looking for that one thing you like, but it drops because you don't always have that one golden nugget. Then it rises once in a while when you find it. This contrast creates an illusion of enjoyment and traps the user in an infinite search of great content, especially when it's shortform. It makes you waste time so effectively. This is related to getting the success mindset of preferring delayed gratification over instant gratification.


      It would be useful to reflect and introspect on your dopaminic baseline, and see what actually increases and decreases your dopamine, in addition to whether or not these things help to achieve your ambitions. As a high dopaminic baseline (which means your dopamine circuit is getting used to high hits from things as playing games, watching shortform content, watching porn) decreases your ability to focus for long amounts of time (attention span), and by extent your ability to learn and eventually reach success. Studying and learning can actually be fun, if your dopamine levels are managed properly, meaning you don't often engage in very high-dopamine emitting activities. You want your brain to be used to the low amounts of dopamine that studying gives. A framework to help with this reflection would be Kolb's.

      A short-term dopamine reset is to not use the tool or device for about half an hour to an hour (or do NSDR). However, this is not a long-term solution.

  9. May 2023
    1. Trakt DataRecoveryIMPORTANTOn December 11 at 7:30 pm PST our main database crashed and corrupted some of the data. We're deeply sorry for the extended downtime and we'll do better moving forward. Updates to our automated backups are already in place and they will be tested on an ongoing basis.Data prior to November 7 is fully restored.Watched history between November 7 and Decmber 11 has been recovered. There is a separate message on your dashboard allowing you to review and import any recovered data.All other data (besides watched history) after November 7 has already been restored and imported.Some data might be permanently lost due to data corruption.Trakt API is back online as of December 20.Active VIP members will get 2 free months added to their expiration date
  10. Apr 2023
    1. Benefits of sharing permanent notes .t3_12gadut._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; }

      reply to u/bestlunchtoday at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/12gadut/benefits_of_sharing_permanent_notes/

      I love the diversity of ideas here! So many different ways to do it all and perspectives on the pros/cons. It's all incredibly idiosyncratic, just like our notes.

      I probably default to a far extreme of sharing the vast majority of my notes openly to the public (at least the ones taken digitally which account for probably 95%). You can find them here: https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich.

      Not many people notice or care, but I do know that a small handful follow and occasionally reply to them or email me questions. One or two people actually subscribe to them via RSS, and at least one has said that they know more about me, what I'm reading, what I'm interested in, and who I am by reading these over time. (I also personally follow a handful of people and tags there myself.) Some have remarked at how they appreciate watching my notes over time and then seeing the longer writing pieces they were integrated into. Some novice note takers have mentioned how much they appreciate being able to watch such a process of note taking turned into composition as examples which they might follow. Some just like a particular niche topic and follow it as a tag (so if you were interested in zettelkasten perhaps?) Why should I hide my conversation with the authors I read, or with my own zettelkasten unless it really needed to be private? Couldn't/shouldn't it all be part of "The Great Conversation"? The tougher part may be having means of appropriately focusing on and sharing this conversation without some of the ills and attention economy practices which plague the social space presently.

      There are a few notes here on this post that talk about social media and how this plays a role in making them public or not. I suppose that if I were putting it all on a popular platform like Twitter or Instagram then the use of the notes would be or could be considered more performative. Since mine are on what I would call a very quiet pseudo-social network, but one specifically intended for note taking, they tend to be far less performative in nature and the majority of the focus is solely on what I want to make and use them for. I have the opportunity and ability to make some private and occasionally do so. Perhaps if the traffic and notice of them became more prominent I would change my habits, but generally it has been a net positive to have put my sensemaking out into the public, though I will admit that I have a lot of privilege to be able to do so.

      Of course for those who just want my longer form stuff, there's a website/blog for that, though personally I think all the fun ideas at the bleeding edge are in my notes.

      Since some (u/deafpolygon, u/Magnifico99, and u/thiefspy; cc: u/FastSascha, u/A_Dull_Significance) have mentioned social media, Instagram, and journalists, I'll share a relevant old note with an example, which is also simultaneously an example of the benefit of having public notes to be able to point at, which u/PantsMcFail2 also does here with one of Andy Matuschak's public notes:

      [Prominent] Journalist John Dickerson indicates that he uses Instagram as a commonplace: https://www.instagram.com/jfdlibrary/ here he keeps a collection of photo "cards" with quotes from famous people rather than photos. He also keeps collections there of photos of notes from scraps of paper as well as photos of annotations he makes in books.

      It's reasonably well known that Ronald Reagan shared some of his personal notes and collected quotations with his speechwriting staff while he was President. I would say that this and other similar examples of collaborative zettelkasten or collaborative note taking and their uses would blunt u/deafpolygon's argument that shared notes (online or otherwise) are either just (or only) a wiki. The forms are somewhat similar, but not all exactly the same. I suspect others could add to these examples.

      And of course if you've been following along with all of my links, you'll have found yourself reading not only these words here, but also reading some of a directed conversation with entry points into my own personal zettelkasten, which you can also query as you like. I hope it has helped to increase the depth and level of the conversation, should you choose to enter into it. It's an open enough one that folks can pick and choose their own path through it as their interests dictate.

    1. Introducing Substack Notes<br /> by Hamish McKenzie, Chris Best, Jairaj Sethi

    2. In Notes, writers will be able to post short-form content and share ideas with each other and their readers. Like our Recommendations feature, Notes is designed to drive discovery across Substack. But while Recommendations lets writers promote publications, Notes will give them the ability to recommend almost anything—including posts, quotes, comments, images, and links.

      Substack slowly adding features and functionality to make them a full stack blogging/social platform... first long form, then short note features...

      Also pushing in on Twitter's lunch as Twitter is having issues.

  11. Mar 2023
    1. Die schiere Menge sprengt die Möglichkeiten der Buchpublikation, die komplexe, vieldimensionale Struktur einer vernetzten Informationsbasis ist im Druck nicht nachzubilden, und schließlich fügt sich die Dynamik eines stetig wachsenden und auch stetig zu korrigierenden Materials nicht in den starren Rhythmus der Buchproduktion, in der jede erweiterte und korrigierte Neuauflage mit unübersehbarem Aufwand verbunden ist. Eine Buchpublikation könnte stets nur die Momentaufnahme einer solchen Datenbank, reduziert auf eine bestimmte Perspektive, bieten. Auch das kann hin und wieder sehr nützlich sein, aber dadurch wird das Problem der Publikation des Gesamtmaterials nicht gelöst.

      link to https://hypothes.is/a/U95jEs0eEe20EUesAtKcuA

      Is this phenomenon of "complex narratives" related to misinformation spread within the larger and more complex social network/online network? At small, local scales, people know how to handle data and information which is locally contextualized for them. On larger internet-scale communication social platforms this sort of contextualization breaks down.

      For a lack of a better word for this, let's temporarily refer to it as "complex narratives" to get a handle on it.

  12. Feb 2023
    1. Related here is the horcrux problem of note taking or even social media. The mental friction of where did I put that thing? As a result, it's best to put it all in one place.

      How can you build on a single foundation if you're in multiple locations? The primary (only?) benefit of multiple locations is redundancy in case of loss.

      Ryan Holiday and Robert Greene are counter examples, though Greene's books are distinct projects generally while Holiday's work has a lot of overlap.

    1. If Seneca or Martial were around today, they would probably write sarcastic epigrams about the very public exhibition of reading text messages and in-your-face displays of texting. Digital reading, like the perusing of ancient scrolls, constitutes an important statement about who we are. Like the public readers of Martial’s Rome, the avid readers of text messages and other forms of social media appear to be everywhere. Though in both cases the performers of reading are tirelessly constructing their self-image, the identity they aspire to establish is very different. Young people sitting in a bar checking their phones for texts are not making a statement about their refined literary status. They are signalling that they are connected and – most importantly – that their attention is in constant demand.
    1. Internet ‘algospeak’ is changing our language in real time, from ‘nip nops’ to ‘le dollar bean’ by [[Taylor Lorenz]]

      shifts in language and meaning of words and symbols as the result of algorithmic content moderation

      instead of slow semantic shifts, content moderation is actively pushing shifts of words and their meanings


      article suggested by this week's Dan Allosso Book club on Pirate Enlightenment

    2. Could it be the sift from person to person (known in both directions) to massive broadcast that is driving issues with content moderation. When it's person to person, one can simply choose not to interact and put the person beyond their individual pale. This sort of shunning is much harder to do with larger mass publics at scale in broadcast mode.

      How can bringing content moderation back down to the neighborhood scale help in the broadcast model?

    3. In January, Kendra Calhoun, a postdoctoral researcher in linguistic anthropology at UCLA, and Alexia Fawcett, a doctoral student in linguistics at UC Santa Barbara, gave a presentation about language on TikTok. They outlined how, by self-censoring words in the captions of TikToks, new algospeak code words emerged.

      follow up on this for the relevant forthcoming paper....

    4. “It makes me feel like I need a disclaimer because I feel like it makes you seem unprofessional to have these weirdly spelled words in your captions,” she said, “especially for content that's supposed to be serious and medically inclined.”

      Where's the balance for professionalism with respect to dodging the algorithmic filters for serious health-related conversations online?

      link to: https://hypothes.is/a/uBq9HKqWEe22Jp_rjJ5tjQ

    5. But algorithmic content moderation systems are more pervasive on the modern Internet, and often end up silencing marginalized communities and important discussions.

      What about non-marginalized toxic communities like Neo-Nazis?

    6. Unlike other mainstream social platforms, the primary way content is distributed on TikTok is through an algorithmically curated “For You” page; having followers doesn’t guarantee people will see your content. This shift has led average users to tailor their videos primarily toward the algorithm, rather than a following, which means abiding by content moderation rules is more crucial than ever.

      Social media has slowly moved away from communication between people who know each other to people who are farther apart in social spaces. Increasingly in 2021 onward, some platforms like TikTok have acted as a distribution platform and ignored explicit social connections like follower/followee in lieu of algorithmic-only feeds to distribute content to people based on a variety of criteria including popularity of content and the readers' interests.

    1. Man kann die ganze Situation nämlich auch einmal zum Anlass nehmen, darüber nachzudenken, ob man das Ganze wirklich braucht. Ist der Nutzen der sozialen Medien so hoch, dass er den Preis rechtfertigt? Das ist eine Frage, die ich mir stelle, seit ich meinen persönlichen Twitter-Account stillgelegt habe, aber so verkehrt fühlt es sich zumindest für mich nicht an, nicht mehr auf Twitter, Mastodon & Co. vertreten zu sein. Vielleicht hatte ein solcher Dienst auch einfach seine Zeit, und vielleicht überschätzen wir die Relevanz von sozialen Medien, und vielleicht wäre es gut, davon mehr Abstand zu nehmen.
    1. One can find utility in asking questions of their own note box, but why not also leverage the utility of a broader audience asking questions of it as well?!

      One of the values of social media is that it can allow you to practice or rehearse the potential value of ideas and potentially getting useful feedback on individual ideas which you may be aggregating into larger works.

  13. Jan 2023
    1. social media platform

      This technical jargon, in the context of Cohost.org, means "a website".

    1. is zettelkasten gamification of note-taking? .t3_zkguan._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; }

      reply to u/theinvertedform at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/zkguan/is_zettelkasten_gamification_of_notetaking/

      Social media and "influencers" have certainly grabbed onto the idea and squeezed with both hands. Broadly while talking about their own versions of rules, tips, tricks, and tools, they've missed a massive history of the broader techniques which pervade the humanities for over 500 years. When one looks more deeply at the broader cross section of writers, educators, philosophers, and academics who have used variations on the idea of maintaining notebooks or commonplace books, it becomes a relative no-brainer that it is a useful tool. I touch on some of the history as well as some of the recent commercialization here: https://boffosocko.com/2022/10/22/the-two-definitions-of-zettelkasten/.

  14. Dec 2022
    1. "Queer people built the Fediverse," she said, adding that four of the five authors of the ActivityPub standard identify as queer. As a result, protections against undesired interaction are built into ActivityPub and the various front ends. Systems for blocking entire instances with a culture of trolling can save users the exhausting process of blocking one troll at a time. If a post includes a “summary” field, Mastodon uses that summary as a content warning.
    1. Investigating social structures through the use of network or graphs Networked structures Usually called nodes ((individual actors, people, or things within the network) Connections between nodes: Edges or Links Focus on relationships between actors in addition to the attributes of actors Extensively used in mapping out social networks (Twitter, Facebook) Examples: Palantir, Analyst Notebook, MISP and Maltego
    1. Drawing from negativity bias theory, CFM, ICM, and arousal theory, this study characterizes the emotional responses of social media users and verifies how emotional factors affect the number of reposts of social media content after two natural disasters (predictable and unpredictable disasters). In addition, results from defining the influential users as those with many followers and high activity users and then characterizing how they affect the number of reposts after natural disasters
    1. Using actual fake-news headlines presented as they were seen on Facebook, we show that even a single exposure increases subsequent perceptions of accuracy, both within the same session and after a week. Moreover, this “illusory truth effect” for fake-news headlines occurs despite a low level of overall believability and even when the stories are labeled as contested by fact checkers or are inconsistent with the reader’s political ideology. These results suggest that social media platforms help to incubate belief in blatantly false news stories and that tagging such stories as disputed is not an effective solution to this problem.
    1. . Furthermore, our results add to the growing body of literature documenting—at least at this historical moment—the link between extreme right-wing ideology and misinformation8,14,24 (although, of course, factors other than ideology are also associated with misinformation sharing, such as polarization25 and inattention17,37).

      Misinformation exposure and extreme right-wing ideology appear associated in this report. Others find that it is partisanship that predicts susceptibility.

    2. . We also find evidence of “falsehood echo chambers”, where users that are more often exposed to misinformation are more likely to follow a similar set of accounts and share from a similar set of domains. These results are interesting in the context of evidence that political echo chambers are not prevalent, as typically imagined
    3. And finally, at the individual level, we found that estimated ideological extremity was more strongly associated with following elites who made more false or inaccurate statements among users estimated to be conservatives compared to users estimated to be liberals. These results on political asymmetries are aligned with prior work on news-based misinformation sharing

      This suggests the misinformation sharing elites may influence whether followers become more extreme. There is little incentive not to stoke outrage as it improves engagement.

    4. Estimated ideological extremity is associated with higher elite misinformation-exposure scores for estimated conservatives more so than estimated liberals.

      Political ideology is estimated using accounts followed10. b Political ideology is estimated using domains shared30 (Red: conservative, blue: liberal). Source data are provided as a Source Data file.

      Estimated ideological extremity is associated with higher language toxicity and moral outrage scores for estimated conservatives more so than estimated liberals.

      The relationship between estimated political ideology and (a) language toxicity and (b) expressions of moral outrage. Extreme values are winsorized by 95% quantile for visualization purposes. Source data are provided as a Source Data file.

    5. In the co-share network, a cluster of websites shared more by conservatives is also shared more by users with higher misinformation exposure scores.

      Nodes represent website domains shared by at least 20 users in our dataset and edges are weighted based on common users who shared them. a Separate colors represent different clusters of websites determined using community-detection algorithms29. b The intensity of the color of each node shows the average misinformation-exposure score of users who shared the website domain (darker = higher PolitiFact score). c Nodes’ color represents the average estimated ideology of the users who shared the website domain (red: conservative, blue: liberal). d The intensity of the color of each node shows the average use of language toxicity by users who shared the website domain (darker = higher use of toxic language). e The intensity of the color of each node shows the average expression of moral outrage by users who shared the website domain (darker = higher expression of moral outrage). Nodes are positioned using directed-force layout on the weighted network.

    6. Exposure to elite misinformation is associated with the use of toxic language and moral outrage.

      Shown is the relationship between users’ misinformation-exposure scores and (a) the toxicity of the language used in their tweets, measured using the Google Jigsaw Perspective API27, and (b) the extent to which their tweets involved expressions of moral outrage, measured using the algorithm from ref. 28. Extreme values are winsorized by 95% quantile for visualization purposes. Small dots in the background show individual observations; large dots show the average value across bins of size 0.1, with size of dots proportional to the number of observations in each bin. Source data are provided as a Source Data file.

    1. Exposure to elite misinformation is associated with sharing news from lower-quality outlets and with conservative estimated ideology.

      Shown is the relationship between users’ misinformation-exposure scores and (a) the quality of the news outlets they shared content from, as rated by professional fact-checkers21, (b) the quality of the news outlets they shared content from, as rated by layperson crowds21, and (c) estimated political ideology, based on the ideology of the accounts they follow10. Small dots in the background show individual observations; large dots show the average value across bins of size 0.1, with size of dots proportional to the number of observations in each bin.

    1. Notice that Twitter’s account purge significantly impacted misinformation spread worldwide: the proportion of low-credible domains in URLs retweeted from U.S. dropped from 14% to 7%. Finally, despite not having a list of low-credible domains in Russian, Russia is central in exporting potential misinformation in the vax rollout period, especially to Latin American countries. In these countries, the proportion of low-credible URLs coming from Russia increased from 1% in vax development to 18% in vax rollout periods (see Figure 8 (b), Appendix).

    2. Interestingly, the fraction of low-credible URLs coming from U.S. dropped from 74% in the vax devel-opment period to 55% in the vax rollout. This large decrease can be directly ascribed to Twitter’s moderationpolicy: 46% of cross-border retweets of U.S. users linking to low-credible websites in the vax developmentperiod came from accounts that have been suspended following the U.S. Capitol attack (see Figure 8 (a), Ap-pendix).
    3. Considering the behavior of users in no-vax communities,we find that they are more likely to retweet (Figure 3(a)), share URLs (Figure 3(b)), and especially URLs toYouTube (Figure 3(c)) than other users. Furthermore, the URLs they post are much more likely to be fromlow-credible domains (Figure 3(d)), compared to those posted in the rest of the networks. The differenceis remarkable: 26.0% of domains shared in no-vax communities come from lists of known low-credibledomains, versus only 2.4% of those cited by other users (p < 0.001). The most common low-crediblewebsites among the no-vax communities are zerohedge.com, lifesitenews.com, dailymail.co.uk (consideredright-biased and questionably sourced) and childrenshealthdefense.com (conspiracy/pseudoscience)
    1. We applied two scenarios to compare how these regular agents behave in the Twitter network, with and without malicious agents, to study how much influence malicious agents have on the general susceptibility of the regular users. To achieve this, we implemented a belief value system to measure how impressionable an agent is when encountering misinformation and how its behavior gets affected. The results indicated similar outcomes in the two scenarios as the affected belief value changed for these regular agents, exhibiting belief in the misinformation. Although the change in belief value occurred slowly, it had a profound effect when the malicious agents were present, as many more regular agents started believing in misinformation.

    1. Therefore, although the social bot individual is “small”, it has become a “super spreader” with strategic significance. As an intelligent communication subject in the social platform, it conspired with the discourse framework in the mainstream media to form a hybrid strategy of public opinion manipulation.
    2. There were 120,118 epidemy-related tweets in this study, and 34,935 Twitter accounts were detected as bot accounts by Botometer, accounting for 29%. In all, 82,688 Twitter accounts were human, accounting for 69%; 2495 accounts had no bot score detected.In social network analysis, degree centrality is an index to judge the importance of nodes in the network. The nodes in the social network graph represent users, and the edges between nodes represent the connections between users. Based on the network structure graph, we may determine which members of a group are more influential than others. In 1979, American professor Linton C. Freeman published an article titled “Centrality in social networks conceptual clarification“, on Social Networks, formally proposing the concept of degree centrality [69]. Degree centrality denotes the number of times a central node is retweeted by other nodes (or other indicators, only retweeted are involved in this study). Specifically, the higher the degree centrality is, the more influence a node has in its network. The measure of degree centrality includes in-degree and out-degree. Betweenness centrality is an index that describes the importance of a node by the number of shortest paths through it. Nodes with high betweenness centrality are in the “structural hole” position in the network [69]. This kind of account connects the group network lacking communication and can expand the dialogue space of different people. American sociologist Ronald S. Bert put forward the theory of a “structural hole” and said that if there is no direct connection between the other actors connected by an actor in the network, then the actor occupies the “structural hole” position and can obtain social capital through “intermediary opportunities”, thus having more advantages.
    3. We analyzed and visualized Twitter data during the prevalence of the Wuhan lab leak theory and discovered that 29% of the accounts participating in the discussion were social bots. We found evidence that social bots play an essential mediating role in communication networks. Although human accounts have a more direct influence on the information diffusion network, social bots have a more indirect influence. Unverified social bot accounts retweet more, and through multiple levels of diffusion, humans are vulnerable to messages manipulated by bots, driving the spread of unverified messages across social media. These findings show that limiting the use of social bots might be an effective method to minimize the spread of conspiracy theories and hate speech online.
    1. I want to insist on an amateur internet; a garage internet; a public library internet; a kitchen table internet.

      Social media should be comprised of people from end to end. Corporate interests inserted into the process can only serve to dehumanize the system.


      Robin Sloan is in the same camp as Greg McVerry and I.

    1. Alas, lawmakers are way behind the curve on this, demanding new "online safety" rules that require firms to break E2E and block third-party de-enshittification tools: https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/online-safety-made-dangerous/ The online free speech debate is stupid because it has all the wrong focuses: Focusing on improving algorithms, not whether you can even get a feed of things you asked to see; Focusing on whether unsolicited messages are delivered, not whether solicited messages reach their readers; Focusing on algorithmic transparency, not whether you can opt out of the behavioral tracking that produces training data for algorithms; Focusing on whether platforms are policing their users well enough, not whether we can leave a platform without losing our important social, professional and personal ties; Focusing on whether the limits on our speech violate the First Amendment, rather than whether they are unfair: https://doctorow.medium.com/yes-its-censorship-2026c9edc0fd

      This list is particularly good.


      Proper regulation of end to end services would encourage the creation of filtering and other tools which would tend to benefit users rather than benefit the rent seeking of the corporations which own the pipes.

    1. I'd love it to be normal and everyday to not assume that when you post a message on your social network, every person is reading it in a similar UI, either to the one you posted from, or to the one everyone else is reading it in.

      🤗

    1. [https://a.gup.pe/ Guppe Groups] a group of bot accounts that can be used to aggregate social groups within the [[fediverse]] around a variety of topics like [[crafts]], books, history, philosophy, etc.

    1. A lot has changed about our news media ecosystem since 2007. In the United States, it’s hard to overstate how the media is entangled with contemporary partisan politics and ideology. This means that information tends not to flow across partisan divides in coherent ways that enable debate.

      Our media and social media systems have been structured along with the people who use them such that debate is stifled because information doesn't flow coherently across the political partisan divide.

    1. “The damage commercial social media has done to politics, relationships and the fabric of society needs undoing.
    2. As users begin migrating to the noncommercial fediverse, they need to reconsider their expectations for social media — and bring them in line with what we expect from other arenas of social life. We need to learn how to become more like engaged democratic citizens in the life of our networks.
    1. I have about fourteen or sixteen weeks to do this, so I'm breaking the course into an "intro" section that covers some basic stuff like affordances, and other insights into how tech functions. There's a section on AI which is nothing but critical appraisals on AI from a variety of areas. And there's a section on Social Media, which is the most well formed section in terms of readings.

      https://zirk.us/@shengokai/109440759945863989

      If the individuals in an environment don't understand or perceive the affordances available to them, can the interactions between them and the environment make it seem as if the environment possesses agency?

      cross reference: James J. Gibson book The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (1966)


      People often indicate that social media "causes" outcomes among groups of people who use it. Eg: Social media (via algorithmic suggestions of fringe content) causes people to become radicalized.

  15. Nov 2022
    1. The TTRG (time to reply guy) was getting so fast, that I can’t actually remember the last time I tweeted something helpful like a design or development tip. I just couldn’t be arsed, knowing some dickhead would be around to waste my time with whataboutisms and “will it scale”?
    1. 11/30 Youth Collaborative

      I went through some of the pieces in the collection. It is important to give a platform to the voices that are missing from the conversation usually.

      Just a few similar initiatives that you might want to check out:

      Storycorps - people can record their stories via an app

      Project Voice - spoken word poetry

      Living Library - sharing one's story

      Freedom Writers - book and curriculum based on real-life stories

    1. The notable exception: social media companies. Gen Zers are more likely to trust social media companies to handle their data properly than older consumers, including millennials, are.

      Gen-Z is more trusting of data handling by social media companies

      For most categories of businesses, Gen Z adults are less likely to trust a business to protect the privacy of their data as compared to other generations. Social media is the one exception.

    1. https://zettelkasten.social/about

      Someone has registered the domain and it is hosted by masto.host, but not yet active as of 2022-11-13

    1. Any migration is likely to face many of the challenges previous platform migrations have faced: content loss, fragmented communities, broken social networks and shifted community norms.
    2. By asking participants about their experiences moving across these platforms – why they left, why they joined and the challenges they faced in doing so – we gained insights into factors that might drive the success and failure of platforms, as well as what negative consequences are likely to occur for a community when it relocates.
    1. DHS’s mission to fight disinformation, stemming from concerns around Russian influence in the 2016 presidential election, began taking shape during the 2020 election and over efforts to shape discussions around vaccine policy during the coronavirus pandemic. Documents collected by The Intercept from a variety of sources, including current officials and publicly available reports, reveal the evolution of more active measures by DHS. According to a draft copy of DHS’s Quadrennial Homeland Security Review, DHS’s capstone report outlining the department’s strategy and priorities in the coming years, the department plans to target “inaccurate information” on a wide range of topics, including “the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine.”

      DHS pivots as "war on terror" winds down

      The U.S. Department of Homeland Security pivots from externally-focused terrorism to domestic social media monitoring.

  16. Oct 2022
    1. A recent writer has called attention to apassage in Paxson's presidential address before the American Historical Associationin 1938, in which he remarked that historians "needed Cheyney's warning . . . not towrite in 1917 or 1918 what might be regretted in 1927 and 1928."

      There are lessons in Frederic L. Paxson's 1938 address to the American Historical Association for todays social media culture and the growing realm of cancel culture when he remarked that historians "needed Cheyney's warning... not to write in 1917 or 1918 what might be regretted in 1927 and 1928.

    1. https://glasp.co/home

      Glasp is a startup competitor in the annotations space that appears to be a subsidiary web-based tool and response to a large portion of the recent spate of note taking applications.

      Some of the first users and suggested users are names I recognize from this tools for thought space.

      On first blush it looks like it's got a lot of the same features and functionality as Hypothes.is, but it also appears to have some slicker surfaces and user interface as well as a much larger emphasis on the social aspects (followers/following) and gamification (graphs for how many annotations you make, how often you annotate, streaks, etc.).

      It could be an interesting experiment to watch the space and see how quickly it both scales as well as potentially reverts to the mean in terms of content and conversation given these differences. Does it become a toxic space via curation of the social features or does it become a toxic intellectual wasteland when it reaches larger scales?

      What will happen to one's data (it does appear to be a silo) when the company eventually closes/shuts down/acquihired/other?

      The team behind it is obviously aware of Hypothes.is as one of the first annotations presented to me is an annotation by Kei, a cofounder and PM at the company, on the Hypothes.is blog at: https://web.hypothes.is/blog/a-letter-to-marc-andreessen-and-rap-genius/

      But this is true for Glasp. Science researchers/writers use it a lot on our service, too.—Kei

      cc: @dwhly @jeremydean @remikalir

    1. Edgerly noted that disinformation spreads through two ways: The use of technology and human nature.Click-based advertising, news aggregation, the process of viral spreading and the ease of creating and altering websites are factors considered under technology.“Facebook and Google prioritize giving people what they ‘want’ to see; advertising revenue (are) based on clicks, not quality,” Edgerly said.She noted that people have the tendency to share news and website links without even reading its content, only its headline. According to her, this perpetuates a phenomenon of viral spreading or easy sharing.There is also the case of human nature involved, where people are “most likely to believe” information that supports their identities and viewpoints, Edgerly cited.“Vivid, emotional information grabs attention (and) leads to more responses (such as) likes, comments, shares. Negative information grabs more attention than (the) positive and is better remembered,” she said.Edgerly added that people tend to believe in information that they see on a regular basis and those shared by their immediate families and friends.

      Spreading misinformation and disinformation is really easy in this day and age because of how accessible information is and how much of it there is on the web. This is explained precisely by Edgerly. Noted in this part of the article, there is a business for the spread of disinformation, particularly in our country. There are people who pay what we call online trolls, to spread disinformation and capitalize on how “chronically online” Filipinos are, among many other factors (i.e., most Filipinos’ information illiteracy due to poverty and lack of educational attainment, how easy it is to interact with content we see online, regardless of its authenticity, etc.). Disinformation also leads to misinformation through word-of-mouth. As stated by Edgerly in this article, “people tend to believe in information… shared by their immediate families and friends”; because of people’s human nature to trust the information shared by their loved ones, if one is not information literate, they will not question their newly received information. Lastly, it most certainly does not help that social media algorithms nowadays rely on what users interact with; the more that a user interacts with a certain information, the more that social media platforms will feed them that information. It does not help because not all social media websites have fact checkers and users can freely spread disinformation if they chose to.

    1. Trolls, in this context, are humans who hold accounts on social media platforms, more or less for one purpose: To generate comments that argue with people, insult and name-call other users and public figures, try to undermine the credibility of ideas they don’t like, and to intimidate individuals who post those ideas. And they support and advocate for fake news stories that they’re ideologically aligned with. They’re often pretty nasty in their comments. And that gets other, normal users, to be nasty, too.

      Not only programmed accounts are created but also troll accounts that propagate disinformation and spread fake news with the intent to cause havoc on every people. In short, once they start with a malicious comment some people will engage with the said comment which leads to more rage comments and disagreements towards each other. That is what they do, they trigger people to engage in their comments so that they can be spread more and produce more fake news. These troll accounts usually are prominent during elections, like in the Philippines some speculates that some of the candidates have made troll farms just to spread fake news all over social media in which some people engage on.

    2. So, bots are computer algorithms (set of logic steps to complete a specific task) that work in online social network sites to execute tasks autonomously and repetitively. They simulate the behavior of human beings in a social network, interacting with other users, and sharing information and messages [1]–[3]. Because of the algorithms behind bots’ logic, bots can learn from reaction patterns how to respond to certain situations. That is, they possess artificial intelligence (AI). 

      In all honesty, since I don't usually dwell on technology, coding, and stuff. I thought when you say "Bot" it is controlled by another user like a legit person, never knew that it was programmed and created to learn the usual patterns of posting of some people may be it on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms. I think it is important to properly understand how "Bots" work to avoid misinformation and disinformation most importantly during this time of prominent social media use.

  17. Sep 2022
    1. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/information-overload-helps-fake-news-spread-and-social-media-knows-it/

      Good overview article of some of the psychology research behind misinformation in social media spaces including bots, AI, and the effects of cognitive bias.

      Probably worth mining the story for the journal articles and collecting/reading them.

    2. Bots can also accelerate the formation of echo chambers by suggesting other inauthentic accounts to be followed, a technique known as creating “follow trains.”
    3. We observed an overall increase in the amount of negative information as it passed along the chain—known as the social amplification of risk.

      Could this be linked to my FUD thesis about decisions based on possibilities rather than realities?

    4. We confuse popularity with quality and end up copying the behavior we observe.

      Popularity ≠ quality in social media.

    5. “Limited individual attention and online virality of low-quality information,” By Xiaoyan Qiu et al., in Nature Human Behaviour, Vol. 1, June 2017

      The upshot of this paper seems to be "information overload alone can explain why fake news can become viral."

    6. Running this simulation over many time steps, Lilian Weng of OSoMe found that as agents' attention became increasingly limited, the propagation of memes came to reflect the power-law distribution of actual social media: the probability that a meme would be shared a given number of times was roughly an inverse power of that number. For example, the likelihood of a meme being shared three times was approximately nine times less than that of its being shared once.
    7. One of the first consequences of the so-called attention economy is the loss of high-quality information.

      In the attention economy, social media is the equivalent of fast food. Just like going out for fine dining or even healthier gourmet cooking at home, we need to make the time and effort to consume higher quality information sources. Books, journal articles, and longer forms of content with more editorial and review which take time and effort to produce are better choices.

    1. https://mleddy.blogspot.com/2005/05/tools-for-serious-readers.html

      Interesting (now discontinued) reading list product from Levenger that in previous generations may have been covered by a commonplace book but was quickly replaced by digital social products (bookmark applications or things like Goodreads.com or LibraryThing.com).

      Presently I keep a lot of this sort of data digitally myself using either/both: Calibre or Zotero.

  18. Aug 2022
    1. Indie sites can’t complete with that. And what good is hosting and controlling your own content if no one else looks at it? I’m driven by self-satisfaction and a lifelong archivist mindset, but others may not be similarly inclined. The payoffs here aren’t obvious in the short-term, and that’s part of the problem. It will only be when Big Social makes some extremely unpopular decision or some other mass exodus occurs that people lament about having no where else to go, no other place to exist. IndieWeb is an interesting movement, but it’s hard to find mentions of it outside of hippie tech circles. I think even just the way their “Getting Started” page is presented is an enormous barrier. A layperson’s eyes will 100% glaze over before they need to scroll. There is a lot of weird jargon and in-joking. I don’t know how to fix that either. Even as someone with a reasonably technical background, there are a lot of components of IndieWeb that intimidate me. No matter the barriers we tear down, it will always be easier to just install some app made by a centralised platform.
    1. We’re trapped in a Never-Ending Now — blind to history, engulfed in the present moment, overwhelmed by the slightest breeze of chaos. Here’s the bottom line: You should prioritize the accumulated wisdom of humanity over what’s trending on Twitter.

      Recency bias and social media will turn your daily inputs into useless, possibly rage-inducing, information.

    1. I wanted to read this article because I love Kon's movies and I'm curious what the link to social media is.

    1. Some 56% of Black teens and 55% of Hispanic teens say they are online almost constantly, compared with 37% of White teens.

      I would have expected this to go the other way. Interesting finding.

    2. Beyond just online platforms, the new survey finds that the vast majority of teens have access to digital devices, such as smartphones (95%), desktop or laptop computers (90%) and gaming consoles (80%). And the study shows there has been an uptick in daily teen internet users, from 92% in 2014-15 to 97% today. In addition, the share of teens who say they are online almost constantly has roughly doubled since 2014-15 (46% now and 24% then).

      All important stats.

      1. 95% or teens have a smartphone.
      2. 97% use internet daily.
      3. Almost half say they use it constantly.
    3. When reflecting on the amount of time they spend on social media generally, a majority of U.S. teens (55%) say they spend about the right amount of time on these apps and sites, while about a third of teens (36%) say they spend too much time on social media. Just 8% of teens think they spend too little time on these platforms.

      Self perceptions among teens about time spent.

      Most feel they spend the "right" amount of time. However, a solid third feel they are on them too much. That's a high number, especially among teenagers. On the whole, teenagers aren't known for self-critical discernment.

    4. Meanwhile, the share of teens who say they use Facebook, a dominant social media platform among teens in the Center’s 2014-15 survey, has plummeted from 71% then to 32% today.

      This is a tremendously important shift. I can remember 5-7 years ago when the Facebook is for old people talk was starting that data still bore out the reality that teens said they did not use it but were still on it constantly.

      That is no longer true.

    5. YouTube tops the 2022 teen online landscape among the platforms covered in the Center’s new survey, as it is used by 95% of teens.

      Again. Important. Almost every teen I'm America lives on YouTube.

    6. The landscape of social media is ever-changing, especially among teens who often are on the leading edge of this space. A new Pew Research Center survey of American teenagers ages 13 to 17 finds TikTok has rocketed in popularity since its North American debut several years ago and now is a top social media platform for teens among the platforms covered in this survey. Some 67% of teens say they ever use TikTok, with 16% of all teens saying they use it almost constantly. Meanwhile, the share of teens who say they use Facebook, a dominant social media platform among teens in the Center’s 2014-15 survey, has plummeted from 71% then to 32% today.

      Instagram up, Facebook down, TikTok and Snapchat are big

      This echos Meta’s concerns that Facebook was losing ground in this age demographic, and likely also the reasoning to make Instagram more TikTok-like. This may also dovetail with the recently announced change to the Facebook algorithm to be even more sticky and TikTok-like.

    1. But if you’re going to tweet that social media continues to lose credibility, I feel like you also need to recognize that social media is still a dominating force of discipleship and culture-making among the masses who don’t consider how the medium may affect the message. Something can “lose credibility” among thought leaders and still be seen as credible by the masses. Because the reality is that, while pastors and authors and academics and others are fleeing social media, dismissing it as a cesspool of negativity (understandably so), the people listening to their sermons, reading their books, and taking their classes are still being shaped by social media more than they are by the thought leaders who have fled the platforms.

      Crux. And I hate it. This gets back to what I now consider the age-old question, should a Pastor be on social media because his church members are? If we know what toxic place, do we still spend time there because we realize our people are on it, or do we set an example by getting off?

  19. Jul 2022
    1. Recommendation media is the new standard for content distribution. Here’s why friend graphs can‘t compete in an algorithmic world.
    1. Mark last week as the end of the social networking era, which began with the rise of Friendster in 2003, shaped two decades of internet growth, and now closes with Facebook's rollout of a sweeping TikTok-like redesign.
  20. www.peoplevsalgorithms.com www.peoplevsalgorithms.com
    1. Of course, the product itself is a small part of the equation. It’s the community of creators that really matters. People like the influencer family are the fuel that make these engines run. The next generation of social platforms could care less if your personal network is signed up and more about the vibrancy of a indentured creator class that that can be endlessly funneled into the video feed. Like media, social platforms are generational. Social is shifting from connections to entertainment. The next gen wants their MTV.
    2. Media is a game of intent and attention. The most valuable platforms dominate one or the other. Few win at both. On the internet, our intent is funneled into commercial action.

      people vs. algorithms

    1. Emmanuel has become a symbol: Of defiance. Of audacity. “Become ungovernable. Be the Emmanuel you wish to see in the world,” one book author tweeted.And Blake herself is relatable to many on social media — representing those just trying to get things done amid the chaos of life. Some parents compared her futile attempts at convincing a giant bird not to do something — and watching helplessly while Emmanuel, as Blake says, “chooses violence” anyway — with trying to raise a toddler. Some teachers said it reminded them of unruly classrooms.
    1. Moments, which takes the form of a new central tab on Android, iOS, and the web, is the result of more than 10 months of reimagining the way average people might want to use Twitter.

      how Moments came to pass...

    1. Unfortunately, many corporate software programsaim to level or standardise the differences betweenindividual workers. In supporting knowledgeworkers, we should be careful to provide tools whichenable diversification of individuals’ outputs.Word-processors satisfi this criterion; tools whichembed a model of a knowledge worker’s task in thesoftware do not.

      Tools which allow for flexibility and creativity are better for knowledge workers than those which attempt to crystalize their tasks into ruts. This may tend to force the outputs in a programmatic way and thereby dramatically decrease the potential for innovative outputs. If the tools force the automation of thought without a concurrent increase in creativity then one may as well rely on manual labor for their thinking.


      This may be one of the major flaws of tools for thought in the educational technology space. They often attempt to facilitate the delivery of education in an automated way which dramatically decreases the creativity of the students and the value of the overall outputs. While attempting to automate education may suit the needs of institutions which are delivering the education, particularly with respect to the overall cost of delivery, the automation itself is dramatically at odds with the desire to expand upon ideas and continue innovation for all participants involved. Students also require diverse modes of input (seen/heard) as well as internal processing followed by subsequent outputs (written/drawn/sculpted/painted, spoken/sung, movement/dance). Many teachers don't excel at providing all of these neurodiverse modes and most educational technology tools are even less flexible, thus requiring an even larger panoply of them (often not interoperable because of corporate siloing for competitive reasons) to provide reasonable replacements. Given their ultimate costs, providing a variety of these tools may only serve to increase the overall costs of delivering education or risk diminishing the overall quality. Educators and institutions not watching out for these traps will tend to serve only a small portion of their intended audiences, and even those may be served poorly as they only receive a limited variety of modalities of inputs and outputs. As an example Western cultures' overreliance on primary literacy modes is their Achilles' heel.


      Tools for thought should actively attempt to increase the potential solution spaces available to their users, while later still allowing for focusing of attention. How can we better allow for the divergence of ideas and later convergence? Better, how might we allow for regular and repeated cycles of divergence and convergence? Advanced zettelkasten note taking techniques (which also allow for drawing, visual, auditory and other modalities beyond just basic literacy) seem to allow for this sort of practice over long periods of time, particularly when coupled with outputs which are then published for public consumption and divergence/convergence cycles by others.

      This may also point out some of the stagnation allowed by social media whose primary modes is neither convergence nor divergence. While they allow for the transmission/communication portion, they primarily don't actively encourage their users to closely evaluate the transmitted ideas, internalize them, or ultimately expand upon them. Their primary mode is for maximizing on time of attention (including base emotions including excitement and fear) and the lowest levels of interaction and engagement (likes, retweets, short gut reaction commentary).

    1. Twitter (TWTR.N) removes more than 1 million spam accounts each day, executives told reporters in a briefing on Thursday

      inauthentic spam accounts removed from Twitter

      This is the number of accounts removed per day!

    1. reply to: https://ariadne.space/2022/07/01/a-silo-can-never-provide-digital-autonomy-to-its-users/

      Matt Ridley indicates in The Rational Optimist that markets for goods and services "work so well that it is hard to design them so they fail to deliver efficiency and innovation" while assets markets are nearly doomed to failure and require close and careful regulation.

      If we view the social media landscape from this perspective, an IndieWeb world in which people are purchasing services like easy import/export of their data; the ability to move their domain name and URL permalinks from one web host to another; and CMS (content management system) services/platforms/functionalities, represents the successful market mode for our personal data and online identities. Here competition for these sorts of services will not only improve the landscape, but generally increased competition will tend to drive the costs to consumers down. The internet landscape is developed and sophisticated enough and broadly based on shared standards that this mode of service market should easily be able to not only thrive, but innovate.

      At the other end of the spectrum, if our data are viewed as assets in an asset market between Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, et al., it is easy to see that the market has already failed so miserably that one cannot even easily move ones' assets from one silo to another. Social media services don't compete to export or import data because the goal is to trap you and your data and attention there, otherwise they lose. The market corporate social media is really operating in is one for eyeballs and attention to sell advertising, so one will notice a very health, thriving, and innovating market for advertisers. Social media users will easily notice that there is absolutely no regulation in the service portion of the space at all. This only allows the system to continue failing to provide improved or even innovative service to people on their "service". The only real competition in the corporate silo social media space is for eyeballs and participation because the people and their attention are the real product.

      As a result, new players whose goal is to improve the health of the social media space, like the recent entrant Cohost, are far better off creating a standards based service that allows users to register their own domain names and provide a content management service that has easy import and export of their data. This will play into the services market mode which improves outcomes for people. Aligning in any other competition mode that silos off these functions will force them into competition with the existing corporate social services and we already know where those roads lead.

      Those looking for ethical and healthy models of this sort of social media service might look at Manton Reece's micro.blog platform which provides a wide variety of these sorts of data services including data export and taking your domain name with you. If you're unhappy with his service, then it's relatively easy to export your data and move it to another host using WordPress or some other CMS. On the flip side, if you're unhappy with your host and CMS, then it's also easy to move over to micro.blog and continue along just as you had before. Best of all, micro.blog is offering lots of the newest and most innovative web standards including webmention notificatons which enable website-to-website conversations, micropub, and even portions of microsub not to mention some great customer service.

      I like to analogize the internet and social media to competition in the telecom/cellular phone space In America, you have a phone number (domain name) and can then have your choice of service provider (hosting), and a choice of telephone (CMS). Somehow instead of adopting a social media common carrier model, we have trapped ourselves inside of a model that doesn't provide the users any sort of real service or options. It's easy to imagine what it would be like to need your own AT&T account to talk to family on AT&T and a separate T-Mobile account to talk to your friends on T-Mobile because that's exactly what you're doing with social media despite the fact that you're all still using the same internet. Part of the draw was that services like Facebook appeared to be "free" and it's only years later that we're seeing the all too real costs emerge.

      This sort of competition and service provision also goes down to subsidiary layers of the ecosystem. Take for example the idea of writing interface and text editing. There are (paid) services like iA Writer, Ulysses, and Typora which people use to compose their writing. Many people use these specifically for writing blog posts. Companies can charge for these products because of their beauty, simplicity, and excellent user interfaces. Some of them either do or could support the micropub and IndieAuth web standards which allow their users the ability to log into their websites and directly post their saved content from the editor directly to their website. Sure there are also a dozen or so other free micropub clients that also allow this, but why not have and allow competition for beauty and ease of use? Let's say you like WordPress enough, but aren't a fan of the Gutenberg editor. Should you need to change to Drupal or some unfamiliar static site generator to exchange a better composing experience for a dramatically different and unfamiliar back end experience? No, you could simply change your editor client and continue on without missing a beat. Of course the opposite also applies—WordPress could split out Gutenberg as a standalone (possibly paid) micropub client and users could then easily use it to post to Drupal, micro.blog, or other CMSs that support the micropub spec, and many already do.

      Social media should be a service to and for people all the way down to its core. The more companies there are that provide these sorts of services means more competition which will also tend to lure people away from silos where they're trapped for lack of options. Further, if your friends are on services that interoperate and can cross communicate with standards like Webmention from site to site, you no longer need to be on Facebook because "that's where your friends and family all are."

      I have no doubt that we can all get to a healthier place online, but it's going to take companies and startups like Cohost to make better choices in how they frame their business models. Co-ops and non-profits can help here too. I can easily see a co-op adding webmention to their Mastodon site to allow users to see and moderate their own interactions instead of forcing local or global timelines on their constituencies. Perhaps Garon didn't think Webmention was a fit for Mastodon, but this doesn't mean that others couldn't support it. I personally think that Darius Kazemi's Hometown fork of Mastodon which allows "local only" posting a fabulous little innovation while still allowing interaction with a wider readership, including me who reads him in a microsub enabled social reader. Perhaps someone forks Mastodon to use as a social feed reader, but builds in micropub so that instead of posting the reply to a Mastodon account, it's posted to one's IndieWeb capable website which sends a webmention notification to the original post? Opening up competition this way makes lots of new avenues for every day social tools.

      Continuing the same old siloing of our data and online connections is not the way forward. We'll see who stands by their ethics and morals by serving people's interests and not the advertising industry.

    1. Stimulated by the creator economy and/or the new Web3 paradigm, and driven by overflowing creativity, these outsiders could well renew the social media model.
  21. Jun 2022
    1. send off your draft or beta orproposal for feedback. Share this Intermediate Packet with a friend,family member, colleague, or collaborator; tell them that it’s still awork-in-process and ask them to send you their thoughts on it. Thenext time you sit down to work on it again, you’ll have their input andsuggestions to add to the mix of material you’re working with.

      A major benefit of working in public is that it invites immediate feedback (hopefully positive, constructive criticism) from anyone who might be reading it including pre-built audiences, whether this is through social media or in a classroom setting utilizing discussion or social annotation methods.

      This feedback along the way may help to further find flaws in arguments, additional examples of patterns, or links to ideas one may not have considered by themselves.

      Sadly, depending on your reader's context and understanding of your work, there are the attendant dangers of context collapse which may provide or elicit the wrong sorts of feedback, not to mention general abuse.

    2. Third, sharing our ideas with others introduces a major element ofserendipity

      There is lots of serendipity here, particularly when people are willing to either share their knowledge or feel compelled to share it as part of an imagined life "competition" or even low forms of mansplaining, though this last tends to be called this when the ultimate idea isn't serendipitous but potentially so commonly known that there is no insight in the information.

      This sort of "public serendipity" or "group serendipity" is nice because it means that much of the work of discovery and connecting ideas is done by others against your own work rather that you sorting/searching through your own more limited realm of work to potentially create it.

      Group focused combinatorial creativity can be dramatically more powerful than that done on one's own. This can be part of the major value behind public digital gardens, zettelkasten, etc.

    3. Favorites or bookmarks saved from the web or social media

      The majority of content one produces in social media is considered "throw away" material. One puts it in the stream of flotsam and jetsam and sets it free down the river never to be seen or used again. We treat too much of our material and knowledge this way.

    1. User participation in any online internet community generally follows the 90-9-1 rule:90% of community members are lurkers who read or observe, but don’t contribute9% of community members edit or respond to content but don’t create content of their own1% of community members create new content
    1. Social media might be more of an amplifier of other things going on rather than a major driver independently,” Gentzkow argued. “I think it takes some gymnastics to tell a story where it’s all primarily driven by social media, especially when you’re looking at different countries, and across different groups.”
    2. algorithmic radicalization is presumably a simpler problem to solve than the fact that there are people who deliberately seek out vile content. “These are the three stories—echo chambers, foreign influence campaigns, and radicalizing recommendation algorithms—but, when you look at the literature, they’ve all been overstated.”

      algorithmic radicalization

    3. the Google Doc—“Social Media and Political Dysfunction: A Collaborative Review”—was made available to the public.
    4. Haidt’s prevailing metaphor of thoroughgoing fragmentation is the story of the Tower of Babel: the rise of social media has “unwittingly dissolved the mortar of trust, belief in institutions, and shared stories that had held a large and diverse secular democracy together.”
    1. https://briansunter.com/graph/#/page/logseq-social

      Brian Sunter (twitter) using Logseq as a social network platform.

      What simple standards exist here? Could this more broadly and potentially be used to connect personal wikis, digital gardens, zettelkasten, etc?

      Note that in this thread Dave Winer asks about how it can be tied into other standardized pieces to interconnect?

      How can I hook my outlines into your net if I’m not running Logseq?

      — dave.rss (@davewiner) June 13, 2022
      <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
    1. Thanks to everyone who wrote to say they enjoyed the blogs. I had thought social media killed blogging, but a few of you seem to be here in the afterlife. Isn't it strange how a blog without comments is so much more intimate than social media? I think the key is that blogs are like letters, and letters are the most intimate human experience that doesn't involve touching someone's butt. Come to think of it, they may be more intimate now than in their heyday because only a few of you will even bother to read.

      For the folks who still like to blog or read blogs.

    1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G60o31ay_D0

      Maintaining multiple blogs or websites for each topic one is interested in can be exhausting.

      Example: Dan Allosso indicates that he's gotten overwhelmed at keeping things "everywhere" rather than in one place. (~4:40)

  22. May 2022
    1. In part in order to heighten his praise of Aldus as the ideal printer, Erasmus noted by contrast that most printers, given the absence of regulations, “fill the world with pamphlets and books [that are] . . . foolish, ignorant, malig-nant, libellous, mad, impious and subversive; and such is the flood that even

      things that might have done some good lose all their goodness.”198 The overabundance of bad books drowned out even any good bits that might be present among them.

      And we now say these same sorts of things about the internet and social media.

    1. For example, we know one of the ways to make people care about negative externalities is to make them pay for it; that’s why carbon pricing is one of the most efficient ways of reducing emissions. There’s no reason why we couldn’t enact a data tax of some kind. We can also take a cautionary tale from pricing externalities, because you have to have the will to enforce it. Western Canada is littered with tens of thousands of orphan wells that oil production companies said they would clean up and haven’t, and now the Canadian government is chipping in billions of dollars to do it for them. This means we must build in enforcement mechanisms at the same time that we’re designing principles for data governance, otherwise it’s little more than ethics-washing.

      Building in pre-payments or a tax on data leaks to prevent companies neglecting negative externalities could be an important stick in government regulation.

      While it should apply across the board, it should be particularly onerous for for-profit companies.

    1. The European Commission has prepared to legislate to require interoperability, and it calls being able to use your data wherever and whenever you like “multi-homing”. (Not many other people like this term, but it describes something important – the ability for people to move easily between platforms

      an interesting neologism to describe something that many want

    1. This came in the context of weighing what she stood to gain and lose in leaving a staff job at BuzzFeed. She knew the worth of what editors, fact-checkers, designers, and other colleagues brought to a piece of writing. At the same time, she was tired of working around the “imperatives of social media sharing.” Clarity and concision are not metrics imposed by the Facebook algorithm, of course — but perhaps such concerns lose some of their urgency when readers have already pledged their support.

      Continuing with the idea above about the shift of Sunday morning talk shows and the influence of Hard Copy, is social media exerting a negative influence on mainstream content and conversation as a result of their algorithmic gut reaction pressure? How can we fight this effect?

    1. One of its main features is “local only posting,” which gives users the option of not federating their posts.

      One of the main features of Darius Kazemi's Hometown, a fork of Mastodon from 2019, is that it allows "local only posting". This gives the users an option to post their content only with a small, limited group of people instead of spreading it widely outside of their social group. In addition to helping to tummel a smaller conversation this also prevents those who are more likely to suffer from context collapse of the groups social norms from engaging and potentially souring the conversation.

      This feature could also be well leveraged for small private classroom conversations between teachers and students without leaking their personal/private data or conversations that ought to be small as they learn.

      Could also be fun to limit the level of federation to the level of an academic department, academic discipline, or even a university. How might one define a group or groups of publics within Mastodon so that one could choose a level at which to share their content?

    2. “It was 2017, I would say, when Twitter started really cracking down on bots in a way that they hadn’t before — taking down a lot of bad bots, but also taking down a lot of good bots too. There was an appeals process [but] it was very laborious, and it just became very difficult to maintain stuff. And then they also changed all their API’s, which are the programmatic interface for how a bot talks to Twitter. So they changed those without really any warning, and everything broke.

      Just like chilling action by political actors, social media corporations can use changes in policy and APIs to stifle and chill speech online.

      This doesn't mean that there aren't bad actors building bots to actively cause harm, but there is a class of potentially helpful and useful bots (tools) that can make a social space better or more interesting.

      How does one regulate this sort of speech? Perhaps the answer is simply not to algorithmically amplify these bots and their speech over that of humans.

      More and more I think that the answer is to make online social interactions more like in person interactions. Too much social media is giving an even bigger bullhorn to the crazy preacher on the corner of Main Street who was shouting at the crowds that simply ignored them. Social media has made it easier for us to shout them back down, and in doing so, we're only making them heard by more. We need a negative feedback mechanism to dampen these effects the same way they would have happened online.

    3. He and his fellow bot creators had been asking themselves over the years, “what do we do when the platform [Twitter] becomes unfriendly for bots?”

      There's some odd irony in this quote. Kazemi indicates that Twitter was unfriendly for bots, but he should be specific that it's unfriendly for non-corporately owned bots. One could argue that much of the interaction on Twitter is spurred by the primary bot on the service: the algorithmic feed (bot) that spurs people to like, retweet, and interact with more content and thus keeping them on the platform for longer.

    1. 7.1.2 Forwarding from Inbox Note: Forwarding to avoid the ghost replies problem The following section is to mitigate the "ghost replies" problem which occasionally causes problems on federated networks. This problem is best demonstrated with an example. Alyssa makes a post about her having successfully presented a paper at a conference and sends it to her followers collection, which includes her friend Ben. Ben replies to Alyssa's message congratulating her and includes her followers collection on the recipients. However, Ben has no access to see the members of Alyssa's followers collection, so his server does not forward his messages to their inbox. Without the following mechanism, if Alyssa were then to reply to Ben, her followers would see Alyssa replying to Ben without having ever seen Ben interacting. This would be very confusing! When Activities are received in the inbox, the server needs to forward these to recipients that the origin was unable to deliver them to. To do this, the server MUST target and deliver to the values of to, cc, and/or audience if and only if all of the following are true: This is the first time the server has seen this Activity. The values of to, cc, and/or audience contain a Collection owned by the server. The values of inReplyTo, object, target and/or tag are objects owned by the server. The server SHOULD recurse through these values to look for linked objects owned by the server, and SHOULD set a maximum limit for recursion (ie. the point at which the thread is so deep the recipients followers may not mind if they are no longer getting updates that don't directly involve the recipient). The server MUST only target the values of to, cc, and/or audience on the original ob

      Here's where things get spicy

    1. Arguing about the future of Twit­ter is a loser’s game; a dead end. The plat­form’s only con­clu­sion can be abandonment: an over­due MySpace-ification.

      I love the verbifification of MySpace here. Its one of the earliest and most popular social media platforms which is now primarily known for its spectacular collapse and death as a social platform.

  23. Apr 2022
    1. We have to endlessly scroll and parse a ton of images and headlines before we can find something interesting to read.

      The randomness of interesting tidbits in a social media scroll help to put us in a state of flow. We get small hits of dopamine from finding interesting posts to fill in the gaps of the boring bits in between and suddenly find we've lost the day. As a result an endless scroll of varying quality might have the effect of making one feel productive when in fact a reasonably large proportion of your time is spent on useless and uninteresting content.

      This effect may be put even further out when it's done algorithmically and the dopamine hits become more frequent. Potentially worse than this, the depth of the insight found in most social feeds is very shallow and rarely ever deep. One is almost never invited to delve further to find new insights.


      How might a social media stream of content be leveraged to help people read more interesting and complex content? Could putting Jacques Derrida's texts into a social media-like framing create this? Then one could reply to the text by sentence or paragraph with their own notes. This is similar to the user interface of Hypothes.is, but Hypothes.is has a more traditional reading interface compared to the social media space. What if one interspersed multiple authors in short threads? What other methods might work to "trick" the human mind into having more fun and finding flow in their deeper and more engaged reading states?

      Link this to the idea of fun in Sönke Ahrens' How to Take Smart Notes.

    1. Aaron Tay, a librarian at Singapore Management University who studies academic search tools, gets literature recommendations from both Twitter and Google Scholar, and finds that the latter often highlights the same articles as his human colleagues, albeit a few days later. Google Scholar “is almost always on target”, he says.

      Anecdotal evidence indicates that manual human curation as evinced by Twitter front runs Google Scholar by a few days.

    1. "Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated," said Mr. Musk. "I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans. Twitter has tremendous potential – I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it."

      Elon Musk acquires Twitter and shares some words about what he hopes to do: open source algorithms, defeat spam bots, authenticate humans.