1,159 Matching Annotations
  1. Jun 2022
    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)

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

    1. Mike Caulfield. (2021, March 10). One of the drivers of Twitter daily topics is that topics must be participatory to trend, which means one must be able to form a firm opinion on a given subject in the absence of previous knowledge. And, it turns out, this is a bit of a flaw. [Tweet]. @holden. https://twitter.com/holden/status/1369551099489779714

    1. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1514938507407421440.html

      A former Redditor's perspective on Musk's purchase offer of Twitter. Sounds like he gets many parts right, but doesn't address the specific toxicity of social media's part in amplifying it all using metrics and algorighms which encourage the fringes to fight. Simply turning off algorithms and tamping down on amplifying marginal content would make it all vastly more human.

    1. 3. Who are you annotating with? Learning usually needs a certain degree of protection, a safe space. Groups can provide that, but public space often less so. In Hypothes.is who are you annotating with? Everybody? Specific groups of learners? Just yourself and one or two others? All of that, depending on the text you’re annotating? How granular is your control over the sharing with groups, so that you can choose your level of learning safety?

      This is a great question and I ask it frequently with many different answers.

      I've not seen specific numbers, but I suspect that the majority of Hypothes.is users are annotating in small private groups/classes using their learning management system (LMS) integrations through their university. As a result, using it and hoping for a big social experience is going to be discouraging for most.

      Of course this doesn't mean that no one is out there. After all, here you are following my RSS feed of annotations and asking these questions!

      I'd say that 95+% or more of my annotations are ultimately for my own learning and ends. If others stumble upon them and find them interesting, then great! But I'm not really here for them.

      As more people have begun using Hypothes.is over the past few years I have slowly but surely run into people hiding in the margins of texts and quietly interacted with them and begun to know some of them. Often they're also on Twitter or have their own websites too which only adds to the social glue. It has been one of the slowest social media experiences I've ever had (even in comparison to old school blogging where discovery is much higher in general use). There has been a small uptick (anecdotally) in Hypothes.is use by some in the note taking application space (Obsidian, Roam Research, Logseq, etc.), so I've seen some of them from time to time.

      I can only think of one time in the last five or so years in which I happened to be "in a text" and a total stranger was coincidentally reading and annotating at the same time. There have been a few times I've specifically been in a shared text with a small group annotating simultaneously. Other than this it's all been asynchronous experiences.

      There are a few people working at some of the social side of Hypothes.is if you're searching for it, though even their Hypothes.is presences may seem as sparse as your own at present @tonz.

      Some examples:

      @peterhagen Has built an alternate interface for the main Hypothes.is feed that adds some additional discovery dimensions you might find interesting. It highlights some frequent annotators and provide a more visual feed of what's happening on the public Hypothes.is timeline as well as data from HackerNews.

      @flancian maintains anagora.org, which is like a planet of wikis and related applications, where he keeps a list of annotations on Hypothes.is by members of the collective at https://anagora.org/latest

      @tomcritchlow has experimented with using Hypothes.is as a "traditional" comments section on his personal website.

      @remikalir has a nice little tool https://crowdlaaers.org/ for looking at documents with lots of annotations.

      Right now, I'm also in an Obsidian-based book club run by Dan Allosso in which some of us are actively annotating the two books using Hypothes.is and dovetailing some of this with activity in a shared Obsidian vault. see: https://boffosocko.com/2022/03/24/55803196/. While there is a small private group for our annotations a few of us are still annotating the books in public. Perhaps if I had a group of people who were heavily interested in keeping a group going on a regular basis, I might find the value in it, but until then public is better and I'm more likely to come across and see more of what's happening out there.

      I've got a collection of odd Hypothes.is related quirks, off label use cases, and experiments: https://boffosocko.com/tag/hypothes.is/ including a list of those I frequently follow: https://boffosocko.com/about/following/#Hypothesis%20Feeds

      Like good annotations and notes, you've got to put some work into finding the social portion what's happening in this fun little space. My best recommendation to find your "tribe" is to do some targeted tag searches in their search box to see who's annotating things in which you're interested.

    1. Judging from the copies now extant, the number of compilations, especially florilegia and encyclopedic compendia, continued to grow as more writers engaged in selecting and summarizing for their own use and that of others.16

      There is a parallel between these practices and the same sort of practices seen in social media posting, annotating, and bookmarking, however in the digital realm the user interface is so simple that one needn't put very much thought into the process and the results become almost instantaneously meaningless. Was this the case in the medieval context as well, or did the readers/compilers get more out of their practices?

  4. Mar 2022
    1. Prof Peter Hotez MD PhD. (2021, December 30). When the antivaccine disinformation crowd declares twisted martyrdom when bumped from social media or condemned publicly: They contributed to the tragic and needless loss of 200,000 unvaccinated Americans since June who believed their antiscience gibberish. They’re the aggressors [Tweet]. @PeterHotez. https://twitter.com/PeterHotez/status/1476393357006065670

    1. The current mass media such as t elevision, books, and magazines are one-directional, and are produced by a centralized process. This can be positive, since respected editors can filter material to ensure consistency and high quality, but more widely accessible narrowcasting to specific audiences could enable livelier decentralized discussions. Democratic processes for presenting opposing views, caucusing within factions, and finding satisfactory compromises are productive for legislative, commercial, and scholarly pursuits.

      Social media has to some extent democratized the access to media, however there are not nearly enough processes for creating negative feedback to dampen ideas which shouldn't or wouldn't have gained footholds in a mass society.

      We need more friction in some portions of the social media space to prevent the dissemination of un-useful, negative, and destructive ideas swamping out the positive ones. The accelerative force of algorithmic feeds for the most extreme ideas in particular is one of the most caustic ideas of the last quarter of a century.

    1. pratik This may be too late to be a Micro Camp topic but does anyone knows if any UX research exists on the ideal post length for a timeline view? Twitter has 280 chars (a remnant from SMS). I think FB truncates after 400 chars. But academic abstracts are 150-300 words (not chars).

      @pratik Mastodon caps at 500 as a default. The information density of the particular language/character set is certainly part of the calculus.

      Here's a few to start (and see their related references): - https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/How-Constraints-Affect-Content%3A-The-Case-of-Switch-Gligoric-Anderson/de77e2b6abae20a728d472744557d722499efef5 - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-019-0280-3

  5. Feb 2022
    1. Stephan Lewandowsky. (2022, January 15). This is an extremely important development. The main vector for misinformation are not fringe websites but “mainstream” politicians who inherit and adapt fringe material. So keeping track of their effect is crucial, and this is a very welcome first step by @_mohsen_m @DG_Rand 1/n [Tweet]. @STWorg. https://twitter.com/STWorg/status/1482265289022746628

  6. Jan 2022
    1. “youth culture”

      Definition: Youth culture refers to the societal norms of children, adolescents, and young adults

      • today's societal norms I feel like would revolve around the likes of something such as Tiktok. The app that blew up over quarantine is definitely something that I feel creates modern "youth culture". Almost everything from the hottest celebrities, and fashion and makeup trends, to sabotaging political activities is found within this app.
    1. Companies should not assume they can release a product without thinking about its unintended uses and then undo the harm that results. This often doesn’t work.Some technology

      Many products, including technology and social media products, can have a multitude of uses including unintended off-label uses. This can lead to harmful and deleterious effects on large groups of people.

      On the other hand, some users may also see great benefits from off-label use cases. As an example, despite it being a vector for attacks and abuse, some marginalized groups have benefited from social media through increased visibility, the ability to create community, and expand their digital access.

      As a result it's important to look at how a product is being used in the marketplace and change or modify it or create similar but different products to amplify the good and mitigate the bad.

    1. Budak, C., Soroka, S., Singh, L., Bailey, M., Bode, L., Chawla, N., Davis-Kean, P., Choudhury, M. D., Veaux, R. D., Hahn, U., Jensen, B., Ladd, J., Mneimneh, Z., Pasek, J., Raghunathan, T., Ryan, R., Smith, N. A., Stohr, K., & Traugott, M. (2021). Modeling Considerations for Quantitative Social Science Research Using Social Media Data. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/3e2ux

    1. The mere scribe and the mere compiler have disappeared (almost completely), and the mere commentator has become very rare. Each exists only insofar as any author in creating his own work cannot do without some copying, some compiling (or research), and some commenting.

      The digital era has made copying (scriptor) completely redundant. The click of a button allows the infinite copying of content.

      Real compilators are few and far between, but exist in niches. Within social media many are compiling and tagging content within their accounts.

      Commentators are a dime a dozen and have been made ubiquitous courtesy of social media.

      Content creators or auctors still exist, but are rarer in the broader field of writing or other contexts.

  7. Dec 2021
    1. Timothy Caulfield. (2021, December 30). #RobertMalone suspended by #twitter today. Reaction: 1) Great news. He has been spreading harmful #misinformation. (He has NOT contributed to meaningful/constructive scientific debate. His views demonstrably wrong & polarizing.) 2) What took so long? #ScienceUpFirst [Tweet]. @CaulfieldTim. https://twitter.com/CaulfieldTim/status/1476346919890796545

    1. Intellectual historians have never really abandoned the GreatMan theory of history. They often write as if all important ideas in agiven age can be traced back to one or other extraordinary individual– whether Plato, Confucius, Adam Smith or Karl Marx – rather thanseeing such authors’ writings as particularly brilliant interventions indebates that were already going on in taverns or dinner parties orpublic gardens (or, for that matter, lecture rooms), but whichotherwise might never have been written down

      The Great Man theory of history is the misconception that all the most important ideas can be traced back to a single great individual—usually a man—and ignoring the fact that they had likely been brewing in the social milieu of their time before being encapsulated, like a bug in ember, by a particular writer who then gets an outsized amount of credit for "inventing" the idea.


      I wonder if the effect of social media and ubiquity of communication will dampen this effect?

    1. She thinks the companies themselves are behind this, trying to manipulate their users into having certain opinions and points of view.

      The irony is that this is, itself, somewhat a conspiracy theory.

      Though, I think a nuanced understanding may be closer:

      • The real purpose is not to influence people to believe anything. It's money. It's ad spend and data collection to sell. We need to demonstrate to advertisers that their ads are actually getting seen. The more they get seen, the more money we make. And, the more time is spent on the service, the more data we have to sell... which is as valuable as the add spend.
      • Companies jigger algorithms to maximize time spent on the service.
      • As the Bible is clear, the heart of man is wicked, and the kinds of things that maximize time spent are themselves attitudes of evil, malice, wickedness, and hatred, and the list of things Paul repeatedly tells us to avoid. Go figure.
      • So, people feel the platforms are basically like smoking, and yet, they can't stop.
    2. About 7 in 10 Americans think their phone or other devices are listening in on them in ways they did not agree to.

      I'm enough of a tinfoil hat wearer to this this might be true. Especially since my google home talks to me entirely too much when I'm not talking to it.

    3. Only 10 percent say Facebook has a positive impact on society, while 56 percent say it has a negative impact and 33 percent say its impact is neither positive nor negative. Even among those who use Facebook daily, more than three times as many say the social network has a negative rather than a positive impact.

      Here's the rub. Only 1 out of 10 Americans surveyed think Facebook is a good idea.

      Over half of Americans surveyed actually think Facebook is bad for them and society as a whole. And yet, the general sense is now that life is impossible without it.

      How does the church respond to this? Do we tell people to get off or "use in moderation?"

    1. Health Nerd. (2021, December 13). Accusing everyone you disagree with of being a shill for pharmaceutical companies is a very simple way to tell anyone with even the slightest insight that you have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about and no desire to do simple things to educate yourself [Tweet]. @GidMK. https://twitter.com/GidMK/status/1470287869168152576

    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. Tamika D. Mallory, a social activist with over a million Instagram followers, was paid over $1 million for a two-book deal. But her first book, “State of Emergency,” has sold just 26,000 print copies since it was published in May, according to BookScan.

      Following numbers can't matter as much as something like daily or weekly engagement, which might be a better predictor for book sales.

    3. “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?

    1. An analogous situation is the use of visiting cards: “ One arrives at one of the famous spas, a couple of hours after arriving one sends out a few hundred visiting cards, and the same day one is introduced to the whole society of the resort, and acquainted with two to three hundred people as if one had already lived

      with them for many years.” 62

      What ever happened to visiting cards? They should make a resurgence in the social media space, n'cest pas?

    Tags

    Annotators

  8. Nov 2021
    1. The purpose here is not to reinvestigate or relitigate any of their cases. Some of those I interviewed have behaved in ways that I, or readers of this article, may well consider ill-judged or immoral, even if they were not illegal. I am not here questioning all of the new social codes that have led to their dismissal or their effective isolation. Many of these social changes are clearly positive.

      This sounds a lot like the article How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life though in that case it was a single instance and these examples here may go beyond social media.

      Though I'm curious if all of them will entail social media as a (major?) factor in how they played out.

    2. In America, of course, we don’t have that kind of state coercion. There are currently no laws that shape what academics or journalists can say; there is no government censor, no ruling-party censor. But fear of the internet mob, the office mob, or the peer-group mob is producing some similar outcomes. How many American manuscripts now remain in desk drawers—or unwritten altogether—because their authors fear a similarly arbitrary judgment? How much intellectual life is now stifled because of fear of what a poorly worded comment would look like if taken out of context and spread on Twitter?

      Fear of cancel culture and social repercussions prevents people from speaking and communicating as they might otherwise.

      Compare this with the right to reach, particularly for those without editors, filtering, or having built a platform and understanding how to use it responsibly.

    1. ffost guides to research devote a few pages to methods of note takingW but they lag behind thenew technologiesi seeW for exampleW xacques parzun and venry tY uraffW The ́odern ResearcherS]gcei postonW ]gg‘TY

      Might be interesting to look at this reference to see what she's referring to specifically.

      It would be interesting to see how note taking is changing with even newer digital tools like Hypothes.is, Diigo, Twitter, Readwise, etc.

      Perhaps the growth of digital gardens in public may be a place for study as well? Though one would need to be wary of the idea of performative note taking as these are often done specifically in public as opposed to private as is more common in the past.

  9. Oct 2021
    1. Facebook could shift the burden of proof toward people and communities to demonstrate that they’re good actors—and treat reach as a privilege, not a right.

      Nice to see someone else essentially saying something along the lines that "free speech" is not the same as "free reach".

      Traditional journalism has always had thousands of gatekeepers who filtered and weighed who got the privilege of reach. Now anyone with an angry, vile, or upsetting message can get it for free. This is one of the worst parts of what Facebook allows.

    2. Facebook has dismissed the concerns of its employees in manifold ways. One of its cleverer tactics is to argue that staffers who have raised the alarm about the damage done by their employer are simply enjoying Facebook’s “very open culture,” in which people are encouraged to share their opinions, a spokesperson told me.
      1. Share opinions
      2. Opinions viewed as "fact"
      3. "Facts" spread as news.
      4. Platform accelerates "news".
      5. Bad things happen
      6. Profit
    1. <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'>Peter Hagen</span> in Peter Hagen (@peterhagen_) / Twitter (<time class='dt-published'>10/25/2021 09:47:19</time>)</cite></small>

    1. We propose a tri-relationship embedding framework TriFN, which models publisher-news relations and user-news interactions simultaneously for fake news classification. We conduct experiments on two real-world datasets, which demonstrate that the proposed approach significantly outperforms other baseline methods for fake news detection.

      It was said in the conclusion that the TriFN can have a good fake news detection performance in the early stage of information dissemination because of the interactions in social media. User credibility was also mentioned since low credibility users tend to spread fake news.

      This means that users play a big part in detecting and reducing fake news in social media. Let's be responsible to only share credible news articles and report the misleading ones.

  10. Sep 2021
    1. Are women generally more interested in other social causes besides online surveillance and the negative cultural impacts of social media companies?

      Most of the advanced researchers I seen on these topics are almost all women: Safiya Umoja Noble, Meredith Broussard, Ruha Benjamin, Cathy O'Neil, Shoshana Zuboff, Joan Donovan, danah boyd,Tressie McMillan Cottom, to name but a few.

      The tougher part is that they are all fighting against problems created primarily by privileged, cis-gender, white men.

    1. Ben Collins on Twitter: “A quick thread: It’s hard to explain just how radicalized ivermectin and antivax Facebook groups have become in the last few weeks. They’re now telling people who get COVID to avoid the ICU and treat themselves, often by nebulizing hydrogen peroxide. So, how did we get here?” / Twitter. (n.d.). Retrieved September 26, 2021, from https://twitter.com/oneunderscore__/status/1441395300002848769?s=20

    1. For better or worse, our brains seem activated by conflict.

      How might we use the fact that are brains are activated by conflict to potentially make the social media space better (healthier)?

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

      Buzzwords for understanding the new internet

      Importance of words (neologisms) for helping us to communicate.

      retweets as a means of bringing new faces into your stream to expand your in-group.

      <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'>Kevin Marks </span> in Epeus' epigone: Publics, Flow, Phatic, Tummeling and Out-groups - New Words You Need to Know to Understand the Web (<time class='dt-published'>09/06/2021 15:15:38</time>)</cite></small>

    1. Build commitment  After connecting, you need to build students’ commitment. Educationalist Daniel Willingham argues that students are driven by a mixture of curiosity and laziness: they want to find out new things and solve puzzles, but they don’t want to invest too much effort in the process. That means the best way to build commitment is start out with a task that piques their interest but doesn’t take much effort. Once they have completed this task, they are much more likely to commit to your next task. The trick then becomes slowly ratcheting up that commitment as the course progresses. 

      Students want to discover, learn new things, and solve puzzles, but they don't want to invest too much effort into the process.

      How does this fit into or relate to the idea of flow?

      What relationship does it have to addictive behaviors like scrolling social media which are low effort, but provide new discovery?

  11. minus.social minus.social
    1. Just like life, Minus has limits. Try it out today and see what online interaction feels like on a social network designed for less.
    2. Minus is a finite social network where you get 100 posts—for life.

      What a great idea, and not just for conceptual art!

  12. Aug 2021
    1. Have you ever … In December 2008, I came across this post from someone who was on my blogroll, or in my feeds, or something. They listed 100 things that one might have done in one’s life, and invited one to indicate those that one had actually done. I took the challenge on as a lark and then decided that the same list could prompt individual blog posts, so I started doing that.2 And now I’m resurrecting the meme, and tagging Amanda Rush and ladyhope. I hope they will participate, link to this, and tag two more people.3 Of course, if you are inspired to do it too, then just go ahead.

      There's something here that sounds like the idea of a friendship book, but in online/blog form.

      It's also a bit reminiscent of a social startup in the late 00s called Formspring.me.

      Everything old is new again?

    1. Stephan Lewandowsky. (2021, June 20). Our amazing @SciBeh volunteers are launching on TikTok with messages about vaccine hesitancy: Https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMdSt4fEm/ @Sander_vdLinden @roozenbot @adamhfinn @CorneliaBetsch @PhilippMSchmid @philipplenz6 @AnaSKozyreva [Tweet]. @STWorg. https://twitter.com/STWorg/status/1406671504465670144

    1. I like the differentiation that Jared has made here on his homepage with categories for "fast" and "slow".

      It's reminiscent of the system 1 (fast) and system2 (slow) ideas behind Kahneman and Tversky's work in behavioral economics. (See Thinking, Fast and Slow)

      It's also interesting in light of this tweet which came up recently:

      I very much miss the back and forth with blog posts responding to blog posts, a slow moving argument where we had time to think.

      — Rachel Andrew (@rachelandrew) August 22, 2017
      <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

      Because the Tweet was shared out of context several years later, someone (accidentally?) replied to it as if it were contemporaneous. When called out for not watching the date of the post, their reply was "you do slow web your way…" #

      This gets one thinking. Perhaps it would help more people's contextual thinking if more sites specifically labeled their posts as fast and slow (or gave a 1-10 rating?). Sometimes the length of a response is an indicator of the thought put into it, thought not always as there's also the oft-quoted aphorism: "If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written a Shorter Letter".

      The ease of use of the UI on Twitter seems to broadly make it a platform for "fast" posting which can often cause ruffled feathers, sour feelings, anger, and poor communication.

      What if there were posting UIs (or micropub clients) that would hold onto your responses for a few hours, days, or even a week and then remind you about them after that time had past to see if they were still worth posting? This is a feature based on Abraham Lincoln's idea of a "hot letter" or angry letter, which he advised people to write often, but never send.

      Where is the social media service for hot posts that save all your vituperation, but don't show them to anyone? Or which maybe posts them anonymously?

      The opposite of some of this are the partially baked or even fully thought out posts that one hears about anecdotally, but which the authors say they felt weren't finish and thus didn't publish them. Wouldn't it be better to hit publish on these than those nasty quick replies? How can we create UI for this?

      I saw a sitcom a few years ago where a girl admonished her friend (an oblivious boy) for liking really old Instagram posts of a girl he was interested in. She said that deep-liking old photos was an obvious and overt sign of flirting.

      If this is the case then there's obviously a social standard of sorts for this, so why not hold your tongue in the meanwhile, and come up with something more thought out to send your digital love to someone instead of providing a (knee-)jerk reaction?

      Of course now I can't help but think of the annotations I've been making in my copy of Lucretius' On the Nature of Things. Do you suppose that Lucretius knows I'm in love?