24 Matching Annotations
  1. Dec 2023
    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)

  2. Dec 2022
    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. 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.
  3. Nov 2022
    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

  4. Feb 2022
  5. Jan 2022
  6. Dec 2021
    1. In an effort to mitigate these issues, some book contracts now specify the number of posts required before and after a book is published.

      Perhaps better would be stipulations in the contract that incentivize authors to leverage their platforms in the form of bonuses while removing the advance money in lieu. Make the author part of the promotion, which has been part of the movement in publishing for the last decade.

    2. “It’s become more and more important as the years went on,” said Marc Resnick, executive editor at St. Martin’s Press. “We learned some hard lessons along the way, which is that a tweet or a post is not necessarily going to sell any books, if it’s not the right person with the right book and the right followers at the right time.”

      This seems like common sense to me, why hasn't the industry grokked it?

  7. Nov 2021
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  13. Feb 2021
  14. Oct 2020
    1. Newport is an academic — he makes his primary living teaching computer science at a university, so he already has a built-in network and a self-contained world with clear moves towards achievement.

      This is one of the key reasons people look to social media--for the connections and the network they don't have via non-digital means. Most of the people I've seen with large blogs or well-traveled websites have simply done a much better job of connecting and interacting with their audience and personal networks. To a great extent this is because they've built up a large email list to send people content directly. Those people then read their material and comment on their blogs.

      This is something the IndieWeb can help people work toward in a better fashion, particularly with better independent functioning feed readers.

  15. Aug 2020
  16. Jun 2020
  17. Apr 2019
    1. [An aside about exogenous social capital: you might complain that your tweets are more interesting and grammatical than those of, say, Donald Trump (you're probably right!). Or that your photos are better composed and more interesting at a deep level of photographic craft than those of Kim Kardashian. The difference is, they bring a massive supply of exogenous pre-existing social capital from another status game, the fame game, to every table, and some forms of social capital transfer quite well across platforms. Generalized fame is one of them. More specific forms of fame or talent might not retain their value as easily: you might follow Paul Krugman on Twitter, for example, but not have any interest in his Instagram account. I don't know if he has one, but I probably wouldn't follow it if he did, sorry Paul, it’s nothing personal.]

      In publishing circles, this has long been known as platform or author platform--ie that thing that made you famous in the first place that gives you the space to attempt to try to use that fame to sell books.