4,618 Matching Annotations
  1. Apr 2021
    1. I still have a photograph of the breakfast I made the morning I ended an eight-year relationship and canceled a wedding. It was an unremarkable breakfast—a fried egg—but it is now digitally fossilized in a floral dish we moved with us when we left New York and headed west. I don’t know why I took the photo, except, well, I do: I had fallen into the reflexive habit of taking photos of everything. Not long ago, the egg popped up as a “memory” in a photo app. The time stamp jolted my actual memory.

      Example of unwanted spaced repetition via social media.

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

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

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

  2. Mar 2021
    1. There's a reasonably good overview of some ideas about fixing the harms social media is doing to democracy here and it's well framed by history.

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

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

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

      An example of social media for proactive government action.

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

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

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

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

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

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

    1. In the Camerer, Loewenstein and Weber's article, it is mentioned that the setting closest in structure to the market experiments done would be underwriting, a task in which well-informed experts price goods that are sold to a less-informed public. Investment bankers value securities, experts taste cheese, store buyers observe jewelry being modeled, and theater owners see movies before they are released. They then sell those goods to a less-informed public. If they suffer from the curse of knowledge, high-quality goods will be overpriced and low-quality goods underpriced relative to optimal, profit-maximizing prices; prices will reflect characteristics (e.g., quality) that are unobservable to uninformed buyers ("you get what you pay for").[5] The curse of knowledge has a paradoxical effect in these settings. By making better-informed agents think that their knowledge is shared by others, the curse helps alleviate the inefficiencies that result from information asymmetries (a better informed party having an advantage in a bargaining situation), bringing outcomes closer to complete information. In such settings, the curse on individuals may actually improve social welfare.

      How might one exploit this effect to more proactively improve and promote social welfare?

    1. The Kindle indicated with a subtle dotted underline and small inline text that those final sentences had been highlighted by “56 highlighters.” Other humans! Reading this same text, feeling the same impulse. Some need to mark those lines.

      Social annotation is definitely part of the future of text. Distributing it across modalities may be the difficult part.

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

      I love the idea of social peripheral vision online.

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

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

      We definitely need more things like this on the web.

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

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

    3. How often have you been on the phone with a friend, trying to describe how to get somewhere online? Okay go to Amazon. Okay type in “whatever”. Okay, it’s the third one down for me… This is ridiculous! What if, instead, you both went to the website and then you could just say: follow me.

      There are definitely some great use cases for this.

    1. la DEPP31 révèlent que l’orientation vers les classes et filières conçues pour les élèves handicapés (ULIS, SEGPA, ITEP, IME) est fortement liée à l’origine sociale. Ainsi, parmi les enfants affectés dans ces classes pour des troubles intellectuels et cognitifs, 6% viennent d’un milieu social favorisé, contre 60% d’un milieu très défavorisé.
    1. Cintia, P., Fadda, D., Giannotti, F., Pappalardo, L., Rossetti, G., Pedreschi, D., Rinzivillo, S., Bonato, P., Fabbri, F., Penone, F., Savarese, M., Checchi, D., Chiaromonte, F., Vineis, P., Guzzetta, G., Riccardo, F., Marziano, V., Poletti, P., Trentini, F., … Merler, S. (2020). The relationship between human mobility and viral transmissibility during the COVID-19 epidemics in Italy. ArXiv:2006.03141 [Physics, Stat]. http://arxiv.org/abs/2006.03141

    1. Schoch-Spana, M., Brunson, E. K., Long, R., Ruth, A., Ravi, S. J., Trotochaud, M., Borio, L., Brewer, J., Buccina, J., Connell, N., Hall, L. L., Kass, N., Kirkland, A., Koonin, L., Larson, H., Lu, B. F., Omer, S. B., Orenstein, W. A., Poland, G. A., … White, A. (2020). The public’s role in COVID-19 vaccination: Human-centered recommendations to enhance pandemic vaccine awareness, access, and acceptance in the United States. Vaccine. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.vaccine.2020.10.059

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

      We have built strong communities on social platforms

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    1. The urgent argument for turning any company into a software company is the growing availability of data, both inside and outside the enterprise. Specifically, the implications of so-called “big data”—the aggregation and analysis of massive data sets, especially mobile

      Every company is described by a set of data, financial and other operational metrics, next to message exchange and paper documents. What else we find that contributes to the simulacrum of an economic narrative will undeniably be constrained by the constitutive forces of its source data.

    1. So when I’m searching for information in this space, I’m much less interested in asking “what is this thing?” than I am in asking “what do the people who know a lot about this thing think about it?” I want to read what Vitalik Buterin has recently proposed regarding Ethereum scalability, not rote definitions of Layer 2 scaling solutions. Google is extraordinarily good at answering the “what is this thing?” question. It’s less good at answering the “what do the people who know about the thing think about it?” question. Why? 

      According to Devin Google is good at answering a question such as "what is this thing?", but not good at answering a questions "what do people who know a lot about this thing say about it?"

      This reminds me of social search

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

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

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

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

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

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

    1. Aknin, L., Neve, J.-E. D., Dunn, E., Fancourt, D., Goldberg, E., Helliwell, J., Jones, S. P., Karam, E., Layard, R., Lyubomirsky, S., Rzepa, A., Saxena, S., Thornton, E., VanderWeele, T., Whillans, A., Zaki, J., Caman, O. K., & Amour, Y. B. (2021). A Review and Response to the Early Mental Health and Neurological Consequences of the COVID-19 Pandemic. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/zw93g

    1. Kit Yates. (2021, January 22). Is this lockdown 3.0 as tough as lockdown 1? Here are a few pieces of data from the @IndependentSage briefing which suggest that despite tackling a much more transmissible virus, lockdown is less strict, which might explain why we are only just keeping on top of cases. [Tweet]. @Kit_Yates_Maths. https://twitter.com/Kit_Yates_Maths/status/1352662085356937216

    1. The city

      This also feels like it would create some sort of comradely between the people who live in "the city." A shared sense of belonging brings people together and makes them feel like they are a part of something greater.