I clicked on this link because it's something that I've been thinking about doing. I feel the motivations section captures some of reasons why I want to take a break from social media. Increasing mindfulness, and reconnecting with nature are two strong reasons.

When discussing the effects of social media, the benefits of it are usually not talked about. I think finding an online community is a way to further propel your passions with those with similar interests as you. The community can be a stepping stone leading to in real life event planning, or a place to work together thousands of miles away.

I was thinking about this, and I feel like if I didn't read the definition on social media, I don't think I could describe to someone what a meme is. It's like a funny image, but used in so many different contexts that it becomes a theme/symbol. Since the early 2000s, memes have evolved from funny pet photos, to now a recent meme called "brain rot", which is content that has no artistic or educational substance. It's really interesting the transformation of memes across the cultures of internet history.

I think as a content creator with a small following, it's really hard to intentionally go viral. I think what makes viral content so good sometimes is how genuine it seems. It would take a lot of effort into staging a viral clip compared to unintentionally going viral. With Tiktok, anyone has the chance to go viral with the use of hashtags and enough shares, but it's getting to that point that is challenging intentionally.

Targeted ads on social media have been something I've experienced. I can be talking about a certain product or company and then an ad magically appears as if the app is listening to my conversations. It's strangely accurate sometimes.

I think this is really smart. From a user's experience, they can curate their content timeline in one location by switching how it's sorted by. It's interesting how the sort by titles are only one word, with 3/4 of the words being only 3 letters. With how simple these categories are, is this intuitive enough for users?

This source talks about a syndrome that I have not heard about. The symptoms are extreme fatigue that lasts at least 6 months. The cause of it is unknown and there is not 1 defining test to determine if you have it. This can be scary because you can brush this off as just being constantly tired from your daily life.

This reminds me of an analogy that I've heard about the role of UX designers and software engineers. UX designers are the architects and software engineers are the construction workers that build and make that vision come to life. Both are essential for a user's experience, especially in the lens of accessibility and making sure underrepresented groups are heard.

I find it interesting how right to privacy was not put in the constitution explicitly. Instead, privacy is determined through laws and policies made in the court. This works out because in the day of technology, privacy has so many niche elements and privacy's role in our daily lives have changed throughout the last few decades - even beyond that.

This is something I've read online about where employees abuse their power. There were stories spread on social media where an employees accessed accounts without permission. This was a violation of power and privacy.

When looking at this wikipedia article about web tracking, it states that law enforcement agencies may use web tracking to spy on individuals. This is interesting to me because this could be a violation of privacy. I wonder how they usually go about this, and what happens if the individual that they are tracking is innocent. Do websites or companies online have to give permission to law enforcement for them to conduct this?

Whenever I have concluded using data visualizations, I've always thought that it was pretty straightforward in looking at increasing or decreasing trends. This statement makes me think hard about the complexity of data, and how conclusions might be made too early that can lead to a skew of results or interpretations of a study. It's essential to know there might be coincidences so visualizing it in multiple iterations or digging deeper into a specific trend is important.

This is my first time hearing about this term. It seems like it is a more subtle form of trolling, aiming to be immersed and pretend to be in the community. They then "sow seeds of doubt" in order to try to act like they are thinking for the benefit of the community but actually aim to spread uneasiness.

This illustrates how powerful "Stan" / fanbase culture can be in coordinated action on social media. Celebrities have a lot of power in their platforms and what or who they endorse. They can affect political campaigns, stocks, and sway opinions.

I read this story about a person fabricating someone's death on Twitter. They created a persona who had Covid-19, was Indigenous, and a victim of sexual harassment. Throughout the story, it shows how her story was debunked. One instance was that scientists found out that the claimed persona was interacting a lot with the account of McLaughlin. The goal was to get a wide amount of people to get behind the MeTooSTEM movement.

One of the examples that I've seen was viral videos or accounts on Tiktok. People use inauthentic behaviors to try to get sympathy or pity interactions on social media. For example, there have been people that have pretended to have disabilities. This misrepresentation, and also GoFundMe efforts is concerning as it illustrates the extremes that people will go to online for money and fame.

This sources covers what email is, how it's used, and what it can and can't contain in every message. One compelling statistic I found on the page was that "The percentage of spam email in 2021 is estimated to be 85%." This is really concerning, and illustrates the pros and cons of how cheap and efficient emails can be. In addition to spam email, there can also be malware and spoofing to scam users. One form of email attacks I didn't know about is email bombing. This is where messages are constantly being sent to overwhelm an email address and cause it to be unusable.

This seems like the beginning of what we know as social media today. I think about platforms like myspace, and how it eventually dwindled down in less than 20 years. I wonder if the popular social media apps that we use today will be gone in a few decades. Also, how will content be different for each platform 10+ years from now? Will short form media get even shorter?

This source goes into detail defining what tuples in Python are, and how to create them. They key points are that tuples are ordered, unchangeable, and used to store multiple items in an assigned variable. The items within the tuples are also indexed, starting at 0. It is an object, and the data type for it is 'tuple'.

This is something that we did in info 360. We designed our apps with older adults in mind. This took into account poorer eyesight, hearing, and cultural differences between generations of age groups. This was really compelling to me because it was the first time that I designed for an older age group, and it made me more conscious about my design approach when doing our projects.

This article covers the bot TayandYou, and how the bot ended up being racist and hateful as the result of the internet. It describes how this was preventable, and that the creators of the bot massively underestimated how hateful people over the internet can be. It covers people of the bot making community, and practices that they use to try to prevent bots they create from being hateful. This includes censoring slurs, and any snippets of words that could be turned into slurs.

This reminds me of how bots are harnessed to coordinate review bombs of movies or tv shows to skew and affect ratings. Whenever there is a series or movie that is rising in popularity on websites like IMBD and has good ratings, there is a sizable chunk of the distribution of scores that are 0. Objectively, a series with rising ratings wouldn't have such a big amount of 0 star ratings unless it was done purposely. This illustrates the toxicity that fandoms can have in having their favorite series retain a high ranking spot.

This reminds me of an experiment where a person was isolated from communication from other people and became insane. It illustrated how it's necessary for humans to interact with each other. This communication has evolved from conversations in person, on the phone, and now on social media.

This statement got me thinking about the grey area of threats online, and how to determine whether to bring attention to police. The anonymous profiles that users can have can lead to more extreme things being said compared to real life. It's compelling to think about how far someone would have to say online in order to get attention from authorities.