783 Matching Annotations
  1. Feb 2024
  2. Jan 2024
    1. From a branding perspective, it’s a bizarre and self-sabotaging move. Twitter is an established, internationally recognizable name. It’s cited in untold numbers of books, broadcasts, TV shows and news articles. Every internet-literate person knows what a tweet is. Needless to say, it will be hard to persuade regular people to refer to X as “X” instead of good ol’ Twitter. Plus, a single letter is difficult to google. These are just some of the many, many reasons why Twitter/X users are dunking on Musk’s new rebrand.
    1. Venkatesh Rao thinks that the Nazi bar analogy is “an example of a bad metaphor contagion effect” and points to a 2010 post of his about warren vs plaza architectures. He believes that Twitter, for example, is a plaza, whereas Substack is a warren: A warren is a social environment where no participant can see beyond their little corner of a larger maze. Warrens emerge through people personalizing and customizing their individual environments with some degree of emergent collaboration. A plaza is an environment where you can easily get to a global/big picture view of the whole thing. Plazas are created by central planners who believe they know what’s best for everyone.
  3. Nov 2023
    1. La obra de Don Pablo González Casanova todavía está por descubrirse...

      Raul Romero (@RaulRomero_mx 24 de noviembre de 2023) menciona en Twitter una obra algo oscura de Pablo González Casanova: "Las minorías étnicas en América Latina: del subdesarrollo colonial al socialismo".

      Encontré que se trata de un texto publicado en 1979 en:

      Desarrollo Indoamericano, núm. 47, Bogota, febrero, pp. 47-56.

      Y por lo menos ese primer párrafo es el mismo que aparece después en una obra titulada "Indios y negros en América Latina", publicada el mismo año por la UNAM (Cuadernos de Cultura Latinoamericana 97):

      https://web.archive.org/web/20191108135255/http://ru.ffyl.unam.mx/handle/10391/3041

      accessed:: 2023-11-24 23:59

      Texto de PGC, encontrado por Raúl Romeo Gallardo

  4. Oct 2023
    1. Wikipedia is inherently hierarchical and therefore subject to the biases of higher ranking editors, independent of their merits.

      True, but it should never be taken as the authoritative voice and there are ways to annotate on the internet :)

    1. Perhaps it’s not a force for good at all. Alex Shephard @alex_shephard

      The irony of still signing with your Twitter handle a piece about the demise of it. The entire thing in a nutshell. I have stopped mentioning my single remaining Twitter account as contact details on anything. My site, mail and Mastodon in that order I always mention.

    2. It’s likely that some facsimile of Twitter will exist, far into the future. But a seismic shift in how the platform is perceived has occurred. If it isn’t good for breaking news, then what good is it? Perhaps it’s not a force for good at all.

      This is the cycle that made Twitter. Real time developments, and another was the interaction/access dynamic between politicians and journalists. A very visible sign of that cycle breaking, the utility in a developing crisis/event nullified, is I think a good canary. Because in practice the amount of non-human content, trollfarming on top of the actually low user numbers mean that its heyday reputation was already no longer rightfully worn. I wonder how long the public perception of that cycle existing will lag behind the actuality of it no longer being there.

  5. Aug 2023
    1. One of the things I loved most about Twitter was the way it could throw things in front of me that I never would have even thought to go look for on my own.

      I'm afraid this is one of those sentiments that should absolutely be tossed in the because of lack of user control category

  6. Jul 2023
    1. ```js / * twitter-entities.js * This function converts a tweet with "entity" metadata * from plain text to linkified HTML. * * See the documentation here: http://dev.twitter.com/pages/tweet_entities * Basically, add ?include_entities=true to your timeline call * * Copyright 2010, Wade Simmons * Licensed under the MIT license * http://wades.im/mons * * Requires jQuery /

      function escapeHTML(text) { return $('<div/>').text(text).html() }

      function linkify_entities(tweet) { if (!(tweet.entities)) { return escapeHTML(tweet.text) }

      // This is very naive, should find a better way to parse this
      var index_map = {}
      
      $.each(tweet.entities.urls, function(i,entry) {
          index_map[entry.indices[0]] = [entry.indices[1], function(text) {return "<a href='"+escapeHTML(entry.url)+"'>"+escapeHTML(text)+"</a>"}]
      })
      
      $.each(tweet.entities.hashtags, function(i,entry) {
          index_map[entry.indices[0]] = [entry.indices[1], function(text) {return "<a href='http://twitter.com/search?q="+escape("#"+entry.text)+"'>"+escapeHTML(text)+"</a>"}]
      })
      
      $.each(tweet.entities.user_mentions, function(i,entry) {
          index_map[entry.indices[0]] = [entry.indices[1], function(text) {return "<a title='"+escapeHTML(entry.name)+"' href='http://twitter.com/"+escapeHTML(entry.screen_name)+"'>"+escapeHTML(text)+"</a>"}]
      })
      
      var result = ""
      var last_i = 0
      var i = 0
      
      // iterate through the string looking for matches in the index_map
      for (i=0; i < tweet.text.length; ++i) {
          var ind = index_map[i]
          if (ind) {
              var end = ind[0]
              var func = ind[1]
              if (i > last_i) {
                  result += escapeHTML(tweet.text.substring(last_i, i))
              }
              result += func(tweet.text.substring(i, end))
              i = end - 1
              last_i = end
          }
      }
      
      if (i > last_i) {
          result += escapeHTML(tweet.text.substring(last_i, i))
      }
      
      return result
      

      } ```

  7. May 2023
  8. Apr 2023
    1. 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.

  9. Mar 2023
    1. Twitter banning him for saying women should "bear responsibility" for being sexually assaulted. He has since been reinstated.

      Twitter had banned and then later reinstated Andrew Tate for saying women should "bear responsibility" for being sexually assaulted.

    1. TheSateliteCombinationCard IndexCabinetandTelephoneStand

      A fascinating combination of office furniture types in 1906!

      The Adjustable Table Company of Grand Rapids, Michigan manufactured a combination table for both telephones and index cards. It was designed as an accessory to be stood next to one's desk to accommodate a telephone at the beginning of the telephone era and also served as storage for one's card index.

      Given the broad business-based use of the card index at the time and the newness of the telephone, this piece of furniture likely was not designed as an early proto-rolodex, though it certainly could have been (and very well may have likely been) used as such in practice.


      I totally want one of these as a side table for my couch/reading chair for both storing index cards and as a temporary writing surface while reading!


      This could also be an early precursor to Twitter!

      Folks have certainly mentioned other incarnations: - annotations in books (person to self), - postcards (person to person), - the telegraph (person to person and possibly to others by personal communication or newspaper distribution)

      but this is the first version of short note user interface for both creation, storage, and distribution by means of electrical transmission (via telephone) with a bigger network (still person to person, but with potential for easy/cheap distribution to more than a single person)

  10. Feb 2023
  11. Jan 2023
  12. Dec 2022
    1. We found that while some participants were aware of bots’ primary characteristics, others provided abstract descriptions or confused bots with other phenomena. Participants also struggled to classify accounts correctly (e.g., misclassifying > 50% of accounts) and were more likely to misclassify bots than non-bots. Furthermore, we observed that perceptions of bots had a significant effect on participants’ classification accuracy. For example, participants with abstract perceptions of bots were more likely to misclassify. Informed by our findings, we discuss directions for developing user-centered interventions against bots.
    1. We analyzed URLs cited in Twitter messages before and after the temporary interruption of the vaccine development on September 9, 2020 to investigate the presence of low credibility and malicious information. We show that the halt of the AstraZeneca clinical trials prompted tweets that cast doubt, fear and vaccine opposition. We discovered a strong presence of URLs from low credibility or malicious websites, as classified by independent fact-checking organizations or identified by web hosting infrastructure features. Moreover, we identified what appears to be coordinated operations to artificially promote some of these URLs hosted on malicious websites.
    1. When public health emergencies break out, social bots are often seen as the disseminator of misleading information and the instigator of public sentiment (Broniatowski et al., 2018; Shi et al., 2020). Given this research status, this study attempts to explore how social bots influence information diffusion and emotional contagion in social networks.
    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. 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.

    3. We found that users who followed elites who made more false or inaccurate statements themselves shared news from lower-quality news outlets (as judged by both fact-checkers and politically-balanced crowds of laypeople), used more toxic language, and expressed more moral outrage.

      Elite mis and disinformation sharers have a negative effect on followers.

    4. 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.

    5. Aligned with prior work finding that people who identify as conservative consume15, believe24, and share more misinformation8,14,25, we also found a positive correlation between users’ misinformation-exposure scores and the extent to which they are estimated to be conservative ideologically (Fig. 2c; b = 0.747, 95% CI = [0.727,0.767] SE = 0.010, t (4332) = 73.855, p < 0.001), such that users estimated to be more conservative are more likely to follow the Twitter accounts of elites with higher fact-checking falsity scores. Critically, the relationship between misinformation-exposure score and quality of content shared is robust controlling for estimated ideology
    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. We find that, during the pandemic, no-vax communities became more central in the country-specificdebates and their cross-border connections strengthened, revealing a global Twitter anti-vaccinationnetwork. U.S. users are central in this network, while Russian users also become net exporters ofmisinformation during vaccination roll-out. Interestingly, we find that Twitter’s content moderationefforts, and in particular the suspension of users following the January 6th U.S. Capitol attack, had aworldwide impact in reducing misinformation spread about vaccines. These findings may help publichealth institutions and social media platforms to mitigate the spread of health-related, low-credibleinformation by revealing vulnerable online communities
    1. We estimated the contribution of veri-fied accounts to sharing and amplifying links to Russian propagandaand low-credibility sources, noticing that they have a dispropor-tionate role. In particular, superspreaders of Russian propagandaare mostly accounts verified by both Facebook and Twitter, likelydue to Russian state-run outlets having associated accounts withverified status. In the case of generic low-credibility sources, a sim-ilar result applies to Facebook but not to Twitter, where we alsonotice a few superspreaders accounts that are not verified by theplatform.
    2. On Twitter, the picture is very similar in the case of Russianpropaganda, where all accounts are verified (with a few exceptions)and mostly associated with news outlets, and generate over 68%of all retweets linking to these websites (see panel a of Figure 4).For what concerns low-credibility news, there are both verified (wecan notice the presence of seanhannity) and not verified users,and only a few of them are directly associated with websites (e.g.zerohedge or Breaking911). Here the top 15 accounts generateroughly 30% of all retweets linking to low-credibility websites.
    3. Figure 5: Top 15 spreaders of Russian propaganda (a) andlow-credibility content (b) ranked by the proportion ofretweets generated over the period of observation, with re-spect to all retweets linking to websites in each group. Weindicate those that are not verified using “hatched” bars

    4. Figure 4: Top 15 spreaders of Russian propaganda (a) andlow-credibility content (b) ranked by the proportion of in-teractions generated over the period of observation, withrespect to all interactions around links to websites in eachgroup. Given the large number of verified accounts, we indi-cate those not verified using “hatched” bars.

    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 found that social bots played a bridge role in diffusion in the apparent directional topic like “Wuhan Lab”. Previous research also found that social bots play some intermediary roles between elites and everyday users regarding information flow [43]. In addition, verified Twitter accounts continue to be very influential and receive more retweets, whereas social bots retweet more tweets from other users. Studies have found that verified media accounts remain more central to disseminating information during controversial political events [75]. However, occasionally, even the verified accounts—including those of well-known public figures and elected officials—sent misleading tweets. This inspired us to investigate the validity of tweets from verified accounts in subsequent research. It is also essential to rely solely on science and evidence-based conclusions and avoid opinion-based narratives in a time of geopolitical conflict marked by hidden agendas, disinformation, and manipulation [76].
    2. In Figure 6, the node represented by human A is a high-degree centrality account with poor discrimination ability for disinformation and rumors; it is easily affected by misinformation retweeted by social bots. At the same time, it will also refer to the opinions of other persuasive folk opinion leaders in the retweeting process. Human B represents the official institutional account, which has a high in-degree and often pushes the latest news, preventive measures, and suggestions related to COVID-19. Human C represents a human account with high media literacy, which mainly retweets information from information sources with high credibility. It has a solid ability to identify information quality and is not susceptible to the proliferation of social bots. Human D actively creates and spreads rumors and conspiracy theories and only retweets unverified messages that support his views in an attempt to expand the influence. Social bots K, M, and N also spread unverified information (rumors, conspiracy theories, and disinformation) in the communication network without fact-checking. Social bot L may be a social bot of an official agency.

    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. In advance of deleting my Twitter account, I made this web page that lets you search my tweets, link to an archived version, and read whole threads I wrote.https://tinysubversions.com/twitter-archive/I will eventually release this as a website I host where you drop your Twitter zip archive in and it spits out the 100% static site you see here. Then you can just upload it somewhere and you have an archive that is also easy to style how you like it.

      https://friend.camp/@darius/109521972924049369

    1. https://www.movetodon.org/

      What a lovely looking UI.

      The data returned will also give one a strong idea of how many of their acquaintances have made the jump as well as how active they may be, particularly for those who moved weeks ago and are still active within the last couple of days. For me the numbers are reasonably large. 860 of 4942 have accounts presently and in scrolling through it appears that 80% or so have been active within a day or so regardless of account age.

    1. Twitter has, like its fellow social media platforms, been working for years to make the process of moderation efficient and systematic enough to function at scale. Not just so the platform isn’t overrun with bots and spam, but in order to comply with legal frameworks like FTC orders and the GDPR.
    1. The trolling is paramount. When former Facebook CSO and Stanford Internet Observatory leader Alex Stamos asked whether Musk would consider implementing his detailed plan for “a trustworthy, neutral platform for political conversations around the world,” Musk responded, “You operate a propaganda platform.” Musk doesn’t appear to want to substantively engage on policy issues: He wants to be aggrieved.
    1. Twitter has never been able to deal with the fact its users both hate using it and also hate each other.
    2. The most typical way users encounter trending content is when a massively viral tweet — or subtweets about that tweet or the discourse it created — enters their feed. Then it’s up to them to figure out what kind of account posted the tweet, what kind of accounts are sharing the tweet, and what accounts are saying about the tweet.
    3. my best guess is it’s the moderation
    1. The presence of Twitter’s code — known as the Twitter advertising pixel — has grown more troublesome since Elon Musk purchased the platform.AdvertisementThat’s because under the terms of Musk’s purchase, large foreign investors were granted special privileges. Anyone who invested $250 million or more is entitled to receive information beyond what lower-level investors can receive. Among the higher-end investors include a Saudi prince’s holding company and a Qatari fund.

      Twitter investors may get access to user data

      I'm surprised but not surprised that Musk's dealings to get investors in his effort to take Twitter private may include sharing of personal data about users. This article makes it sound almost normal that this kind of information-sharing happens with investors (inclusion of the phrase "information beyond what lower-level investors can receive").

    1. Last night I posted a message to both Mastodon and Twitter saying how great M's support for RSS is. Apparently a lot of people on Masto didn't know about it and the response has been resounding. And the numbers are very lopsided. The piece has been "boosted" (the Masto equiv of RT) 1.1K times, yet I only have 3.7K followers there. Meanwhile on Twitter, where I have 69K followers, it has been RTd just 17 times. My feeling was previously that Mastodon was more alive, it's good to have a number to put behind that.

      http://scripting.com/2022/12/03.html#a152558

      Anecdotal evidence for the slow death of Twitter and higher engagement on Mastodon.

    1. The real question isn’t whether platforms like Twitter and Facebook are public squares (because they aren’t), but whether they should be. Should everyone have a right to access these platforms and speak through them the way we all have a right to stand on a soap box downtown and speak through a megaphone? It’s a more complicated ask than we realize—certainly more complicated than those (including Elon Musk himself) who seem to think merely declaring Twitter a public square is sufficient.
    2. This tweet, along with the reinstatement of Donald Trump’s Twitter account, has caused a whirlwind of discussion and debate on the platform—the same arguments about free speech and social media as the “digital public square” that seem to go nowhere, regardless of how often we try. And part of the reason they go nowhere is because the situation is both more simple and more complicated than many of us want to recognize.
    1. What I missed about Mastodon was its very different culture. Ad-driven social media platforms are willing to tolerate monumental volumes of abusive users. They’ve discovered the same thing the Mainstream Media did: negative emotions grip people’s attention harder than positive ones. Hate and fear drives engagement, and engagement drives ad impressions. Mastodon is not an ad-driven platform. There is absolutely zero incentives to let awful people run amok in the name of engagement. The goal of Mastodon is to build a friendly collection of communities, not an attention leeching hate mill. As a result, most Mastodon instance operators have come to a consensus that hate speech shouldn’t be allowed. Already, that sets it far apart from twitter, but wait, there’s more. When it comes to other topics, what is and isn’t allowed is on an instance-by-instance basis, so you can choose your own adventure.

      Attention economy

      Twitter drivers: Hate/fear → Engagement → Impressions → Advertiser money. Since there is no advertising money in Mastodon, it operates on different drivers. Since there is no advertising money, a Mastodon operator isn't driven to get the most impressions. Because there isn't a need to get a high number of impressions, there isn't a need to fuel the hate/fear drivers.

    1. https://www.downes.ca/post/74564

      Stephen Downes is doing a great job of regular recaps on the shifts in Twitter/Mastodon/Fediverse lately. I either read or saw all these in the last couple of days myself.

  13. 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. Literature, philosophy, film, music, culture, politics, history, architecture: join the circus of the arts and humanities! For readers, writers, academics or anyone wanting to follow the conversation.
    1. hcommons.social is a microblogging network supporting scholars and practitioners across the humanities and around the world.

      https://hcommons.social/about

      The humanities commons has their own mastodon instance now!

    1. Davidson: I think the interface on Mastodon makes me behave differently. If I have a funny joke or a really powerful statement and I want lots of people to hear it, then Twitter’s way better for that right now. However, if something really provokes a big conversation, it’s actually fairly challenging to keep up with the conversation on Twitter. I find that when something gets hundreds of thousands of replies, it’s functionally impossible to even read all of them, let alone respond to all of them. My Twitter personality, like a lot of people’s, is more shouting. Whereas on Mastodon, it’s actually much harder to go viral. There’s no algorithm promoting tweets. It’s just the people you follow. This is the order in which they come. It’s not really set up for that kind of, “Oh my god, everybody’s talking about this one post.” It is set up to foster conversation. I have something like 150,000 followers on Twitter, and I have something like 2,500 on Mastodon, but I have way more substantive conversations on Mastodon even though it’s a smaller audience. I think there’s both design choices that lead to this and also just the vibe of the place where even pointed disagreements are somehow more thoughtful and more respectful on Mastodon.

      Twitter for Shouting; Mastodon for Conversation

      Many, many followers on Twitter makes it hard for conversations to happen, as does the algorithm-driven promotion. Fewer followers and anti-viral UX makes for more conversations even if the reach isn't as far.

    1. The JFK assassination episode of Mad Men. In one long single shot near the beginning of the episode, a character arrives late to his job and finds the office in disarray, desks empty and scattered with suddenly-abandoned papers, and every phone ringing unanswered. Down the hallway at the end of the room, where a TV is blaring just out of sight, we can make out a rising chatter of worried voices, and someone starting to cry. It is— we suddenly remember— a November morning in 1963. The bustling office has collapsed into one anxious body, huddled together around a TV, ignoring the ringing phones, to share in a collective crisis.

      May I just miss the core of this bit entirely and mention coming home to Betty on the couch, letting the kids watch, unsure of what to do.

      And the fucking Campbells, dressed up for a wedding in front of the TV, unsure of what to do.

      Though, if I might add, comparing Twitter to the abstract of television, itself, would be unfortunate, if unfortunately accurate, considering how much more granular the consumptive controls are to the user. Use Twitter Lists, you godforsaken human beings.

    1. Part of what makes Twitter’s potential collapse uniquely challenging is that the “digital public square” has been built on the servers of a private company, says  O’Connor’s colleague Elise Thomas, senior OSINT analyst with the ISD. It’s a problem we’ll have to deal with many times over the coming decades, she says: “This is perhaps the first really big test of that.”

      Public Square content on the servers of a private company

  14. tinysubversions.com tinysubversions.com
    1. A tool that turns Twitter threads into blog posts, by Darius Kazemi.

      https://tinysubversions.com/spooler/

      <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'>Darius Kazemi</span> in Darius Kazemi: "thread unroller apps" - Friend Camp (<time class='dt-published'>11/16/2022 08:27:44</time>)</cite></small>

    1. Another big, big difference with Mastodon is that it has no algorithmic ranking of posts by popularity, virality, or content. Twitter’s algorithm creates a rich-get-richer effect: Once a tweet goes slightly viral, the algorithm picks up on that, pushes it more prominently into users’ feeds, and bingo: It’s a rogue wave.On Mastodon, in contrast, posts arrive in reverse chronological order. That’s it. If you’re not looking at your feed when a post slides by? You’ll miss it.

      No algorithmic ranking on Mastodon

      To drive the need to make the site sticky and drive ads, Twitter used its algorithmic ranking to find and amplify viral content.

    1. It's not entirely the Twitter people's fault. They've been taught to behave in certain ways. To chase likes and retweets/boosts. To promote themselves. To perform.

      Twitter trains users to behave a certain way. It rewards a specific type of performance. In contrast, until now at least, M is focused on conversation (and the functionality of the apps reinforce that, with how boosts and likes work differently)

    2. It is the very tools and settings that provide so much more agency to users that pundits claim make Mastodon "too complicated".

      Indeed.

    3. I hadn't fully understood — really appreciated — how much corporate publishing systems steer people's behaviour until this week. Twitter encourages a very extractive attitude from everyone it touches.

      This stands out indeed.

    4. Early this week, I realised that some people had cross-posted my Mastodon post into Twitter. Someone else had posted a screenshot of it on Twitter. Nobody thought to ask if I wanted that.

      Author expects to be asked consent before posting their words in another web venue, here crossposting to Twitter. I don't think that's a priori a reasonable expectation. The entire web is a public sphere, and expressions in it are public expressions. Commenting on them, extending on them is annotation, and that's fair game imo. Problems arise from how that annotation is used/positioned. If it's part of the conversation with the author and others that's fine depending on tone e.g. forcefully budding in, yet even if unwelcomed. If it is quoting an author and commenting as performance to one's own audience, then the original author becomes an object, a prop in that performance. That is problematic. I can't judge (no links) here which of the two it is.

    1. or the type of services I offer and my target audience, Twitter is an unlikely place for me to connect with potential clients

      I've seen it mostly as place for finding professional peers, like my blog did. But that is the 2006 perspective, pre-algo. I wrote about FBs toxicity and quit it, I removed LinkedIn timeline. Twitter I did differently: following #'s on Tweetdeck and broadcasting my blogposts. I fight to not be drawn into discussions, unless they're responses to my posts. In the past 4 yrs I have had good conversations on Mastodon. No clients either though, not in my line of work. Some visibility to existing professional network does very much play an active role though.

    2. Pretending Twitter is the answer to gaining respect for and engagement with my work is an addict’s excuse that removes responsibility from myself.

      ouch. The metrics of engagement (likes, rts) make it possible to 'rationalise' this perception of needing it for one's work/career eg.

    1. https://pinafore.social/

      Pinafore is a web client for Mastodon, designed for speed and simplicity.

      <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'>Jessica Smith</span> in Small Web - Jayeless.net (<time class='dt-published'>07/03/2021 23:34:42</time>)</cite></small>

    1. And here’s the other thing: if they can manage to fight on, survive and thrive despite all that, I’m pretty sure you can deal with some ugliness in your timeline.
    1. The problem when the asset is people is that people are intensely complicated, and trying to regulate how people behave is historically a miserable experience, especially when that authority is vested in a single powerful individual.
    2. The essential truth of every social network is that the product is content moderation, and everyone hates the people who decide how content moderation works.
    1. federated mastodon is neat. that “ericajoy”can exist on any server is going to be a problem, especially around impersonation. a third party “verification” player will be necessary if mastodon gains broad traction.

      Poster implies that a benefit of globally centralised structures like Twitter, FB and LinkedIn is verification. I think impersonation is rife there, and will be less on Mastodon. Apart from basic measures (rel-me verification against your website, use your own domain for an instance), there are similar to T/FB/LinkedIn ways to verify someone outside the platform itself, where people check it's you through a channel they already know it's you. Above all the potential benefit of impersonation does not exist on M: no immediate global audience, no amplification of messages through self-feeding loops of engagement. Your reach is limited to your own follow(er)s mostly, and they won't fall for an impersonation, as you're already there among them. The power assymmetry inherent in T/FB's algo's doesn't exist on M. So impersonating would cost the impersonator way more, and become unsustainable to them.

  15. Oct 2022
    1. Mastodon gained 22,139 new accounts this past week and 10,801 in the day after Musk took over, said Mastodon chief executive Eugen Rochko. The site now has more than 380,000 monthly active users, while Twitter has 237.8 million daily active users.

      Comparison of Mastodon and Twitter active user counts

      Several orders of magnitude different.

    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. the problems with Twitter are not engineering problems. They are political problems. Twitter, the company, makes very little interesting technology; the tech stack is not the valuable asset. The asset is the user base: hopelessly addicted politicians, reporters, celebrities, and other people who should know better but keep posting anyway.

      Twitter's primary asset is not their technology, but their addicted user base.

    1. The end of Twitter

      Ben Werdmüller sees the Musk take-over as one of more signs that Twitter as we know it is sunsetting. Like FB it is losing its role as the all-in-one communal 'space'. I think the decline is real, but also think it will be long drawn out decline. Early adopters and early main stream may well jump ship, if they haven't already some time ago. The rest, including companies, will hang around much longer, if only for the sunk costs (socially and capital). An alternative (hopefully a multitude as Ben suggests) needs to clearly present itself, but hasn't in a way the mainstream recognises I think. It may well hurt to hold on for many, but if there's no other thing to latch onto people will endure the pain. Boiling frog and all that.

    1. Twitter is the preferred platform for our elites. Journalists and media pundits

      Case in point, October 21, 2022 headline from Bloomberg News: "Musk Gutting Twitter Would Be a Threat to Us All." This hysterical headline highlights Mr. MacIntyre's point, which I quoted here, about Twitter and elites. Moreover, the wording leads one to wonder whether Bloomberg News has contacts inside Twitter.

    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.

  16. Sep 2022
    1. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/jeff-bezos-under-fire-after-tweet-about-queen-s-b2165039.html

      Jeff Bezos should know better than to punch down like this. Uju Anya got put in Twitter jail for not deleting her post which Twitter took down anyway.

      Twitter taking down Dr. Anya's post is disingenuous with respect to the tons of crap that they leave up... and much of that far worse than the content here.

      read on 2022-09-09 at 1:58 PM

    1. Whatever Musk ends up doing, this possibility is what the right is actually celebrating.

      It is quite clear that the right "celebrates" Elon Musks eventual purchase of twitter as his political views as a billionaire would align closer to what the right views than what those on the left would. This would make Elon Musk buying twitter a larger advantage than one would think in the grand scheme. Twitter is heavily used throughout the political atmosphere to spread beliefs, campaigns and other politic related movements. By removing a previous owner who has been known to "censor" what is being tweeted, (which has prominently been on the right side, politically) , right wing ideas will have a greater chance of sticking with larger amounts of people. This is why this move is seen as worth celebrating on the right side of the political spectrum.

  17. Aug 2022
    1. NASA launches Artemis I

      NASA launchING Artemis 1... tomorrow. No need to lie unless you're the sort of people who have to lie about everything.

    1. If your site is using multiple widgets you can set up Twitter widgets in your pages once, which will make your site faster, and widgets such as embedded Tweets will be more reliable for authors when using content management systems.

      ```html

      <script>window.twttr = (function(d, s, id) { var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0], t = window.twttr || {}; if (d.getElementById(id)) return t; js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id; js.src = "https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"; fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs); t._e = []; t.ready = function(f) { t._e.push(f); }; return t; }(document, "script", "twitter-wjs"));</script>

      ```

    1. ```js export function Tweet({ tweetID, }) { const tweetRef = useRef(null); const [isLoading, setIsLoading] = useState(true);

      useEffect(() => { const tweetEl = tweetRef?.current if (window.twttr && tweetEl) (async() => { await window.twttr.ready(); await window.twttr.widgets.createTweet( tweetID, tweetEl, { align: 'center', conversation: 'none', dnt: true, } ); setIsLoading(false); console.log('Tweet loaded') })(); return () => { tweetEl?.remove(); } }, [tweetID, tweetRef]);

      return ( <div ref={tweetRef} className="w-full bg-gray-100 h-fit animate-fadeIn" id={tweetID}> {isLoading &&

      🐦

      } </div> ); }; ```

  18. Jul 2022
    1. List management TweetDeck allows you to manage your Lists easily in one centralized place for all your accounts. You can create Lists in TweetDeck filtered by by your interests or by particular accounts. Any List that you have set up or followed previously can also be added as separate columns in TweetDeck.   To create a List on TweetDeck: From the navigation bar, click on the plus icon  to select Add column, then click on Lists  .Click the Create List button.Select the Twitter account you would like to create the List for.Name the List and give it a description then select if you would like the List to be publicly visible or not (other people can follow your public Lists).Click Save.Add suggested accounts or search for users to add members to your List, then click Done.   To edit a List on TweetDeck: Click on Lists  from the plus icon  in the navigation bar.Select the List you would like to edit.Click Edit.Add or remove List members or click Edit Details to change the List name, description, or account. You can also click Delete List.When you're finished making changes, click Done.     To designate a List to a column: Click on the plus icon  to select Add column.Click on the Lists option from the menu.Select which List you would like to make into a column.Click Add Column.   To use a particular List in search: Add a search column, then click the filter icon  to open the column filter options.Click the  icon to open the User filter. Select By members of List and type the account name followed by the List name. You can only search across your own Lists, or others’ public Lists.

      While you still can, I'd highly encourage you to use TweetDeck's "Export" List function to save plain text lists of the @ names in your... Lists.

    1. With Lucerne, I can search for interesting conversations happening on Twitter by experimenting with these filters. When any filter seems particular useful, I can save it to check again later, by adding it to the left sidebar with a name. As I use the app, I end up curating an ever-changing personalized collection of these channels in my sidebar that provide multiple different views onto the firehose of Twitter.
    2. The biggest change I’ve noticed from using the client is that it turns Twitter from a consumption experience into an exploratory experience.
    3. Lucerne isn’t meant to be a Twitter replacement. Twitter’s web app is still great for writing and following threads, for example, and I don’t want to have to re-create something that’s already fine for my use. But for my two main workflows of learning and tracking my progress on Twitter, Lucerne works better for me.
    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...