• for: quote, quote - Robert Epstein, quote - search engine bias,quote - future of democracy, quote - tilting elections, quote - progress trap, progress trap, cultural evolution, technology - futures, futures - technology, progress trap, indyweb - support, future - education
• quote
  • The big tech companies, left to their own devices , have already had a net negative effect on societies worldwide.
  • At the moment, the three big threats these companies pose
    • aggressive surveillance,
    • arbitrary suppression of content,
      • the censorship problem, and
    • the subtle manipulation of
      • thoughts,
      • behaviors,
      • votes,
      • purchases,
      • attitudes and
      • beliefs
    • are unchecked worldwide
• author: Robert Epstein
  • senior research psychologist at American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology
• paraphrase
  • Epstein's organization is building two technologies that assist in combating these problems:
    • passively monitor what big tech companies are showing people online,
    • smart algorithms that will ultimately be able to identify online manipulations in realtime:
      • biased search results,
      • biased search suggestions,
      • biased newsfeeds,
      • platform-generated targeted messages,
      • platform-engineered virality,
      • shadow-banning,
      • email suppression, etc.
  • Tech evolves too quickly to be managed by laws and regulations,
    • but monitoring systems are tech, and they can and will be used to curtail the destructive and dangerous powers of companies like Google and Facebook on an ongoing basis.
• reference
  • seminar paper on monitoring systems, ‘Taming Big Tech -: https://is.gd/K4caTW.

• for: titling elections, voting - social media, voting - search engine bias, SEME, search engine manipulation effect, Robert Epstein
• summary
  • research that shows how search engines can actually bias towards a political candidate in an election and tilt the election in favor of a particular party.

• for: search engine manipulation effect, SEME, voting, voting - bias, voting - manipulation, voting - search engine bias, democracy - search engine bias, quote, quote - Robert Epstein, quote - search engine bias, stats, stats - tilting elections
• paraphrase
• quote
  • In our early experiments, reported by The Washington Post in March 2013,
    • http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/could-google-tilt-a-close-election/2013/03/29/c8d7f4e6-9587-11e2-b6f0-a5150a247b6a_story.html?ref=hackernoon.com
  • we discovered that Google’s search engine had the power to shift the percentage of undecided voters supporting a political candidate by a substantial margin without anyone knowing.
  • 2015 PNAS research on SEME
    • http://www.pnas.org/content/112/33/E4512.full.pdf?with-ds=yes&ref=hackernoon.com
    • stats begin
    • search results favoring one candidate
    • could easily shift the opinions and voting preferences of real voters in real elections by up to 80 percent in some demographic groups
    • with virtually no one knowing they had been manipulated.
    • stats end
    • Worse still, the few people who had noticed that we were showing them biased search results
    • generally shifted even farther in the direction of the bias,
    • so being able to spot favoritism in search results is no protection against it.
    • stats begin
    • Google’s search engine 
      • with or without any deliberate planning by Google employees 
    • was currently determining the outcomes of upwards of 25 percent of the world’s national elections.
    • This is because Google’s search engine lacks an equal-time rule,
      • so it virtually always favors one candidate over another, and that in turn shifts the preferences of undecided voters.
    • Because many elections are very close, shifting the preferences of undecided voters can easily tip the outcome.
    • stats end

Similar to the browser extension / "bug" that shows other Hypothes.is conversations and annotations.

This would be cool if it could be expanded to personal search to show you blog conversations or Twitter conversations of people you follow.

Link to: - https://boffosocko.com/2022/06/18/wikilinks-and-hashtags-as-a-portal-to-cross-site-search/ - https://boffosocko.com/2019/06/29/social-reading-user-interface-for-discovery/

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.

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

The online information environment | Royal Society. (n.d.). Retrieved January 21, 2022, from https://royalsociety.org/topics-policy/projects/online-information-environment/

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

Beytía, P., & Infante, C. C. (2020). Digital Pathways, Pandemic Trajectories. Using Google Trends to Track Social Responses to COVID-19 [Preprint]. SocArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/yndb7

Research, B. and S. S. at N. (2020, May 25). Imagining a different online world. Behavioural and Social Sciences at Nature Research. http://socialsciences.nature.com/users/397838-philipp-lorenz-spreen/posts/imagining-a-different-online-world

Using Facebook Ad Library | Webinar with Maddy Webb and Laura Garcia. (2020, May 22). First Draft. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YuzUr0V_fEk&feature=emb_logo

Makhortykh, M., Urman, A., & Ulloa, R. (2020). How search engines disseminate information about COVID-19 and why they should do better. Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review, 1(COVID-19 and Misinformation). https://doi.org/10.37016/mr-2020-017

Hope, T., Borchardt, J., Portenoy, J., Vasan, K., & West, J. (2020, May 6). Exploring the COVID-19 network of scientific research with SciSight. Medium. https://medium.com/ai2-blog/exploring-the-covid-19-network-of-scientific-research-with-scisight-f75373320a8c

This is a critical distinction.

we’re at a pivotal point not just in the life of our democracy, but in how we think, read, and make choices. Selective information is being presented to us in a way that encourages selective reading and offers psychological and social rewards for, to put it bluntly, being stupid and submissive and spreading stupid to submit others.

...

What’s different now is that this propaganda is being gamed by professionals in a massive, orchestrated data campaign at a volume, pace, and consistency that not only muddies the truth, but completely eclipses the truth. Destroys the very notion of truth.

...

The truth about the truth is that we believe because we want to, because our ability to think independently is a point of pride for Americans. The people behind the curtain are telling us the same story we tell ourselves about ourselves. But this is also a vulnerability: Independence is in its purist form a kind of division. If you exploit it the right way, you can turn a democracy against itself.