Social media

The AI glut significantly exacerbates the issue of misinformation and low-quality content. The current state of AI technology lacks the nuanced understanding and ethical judgment necessary to ensure the accuracy and integrity of the content it produces. This gap in capability opens the floodgates for misinformation to spread unchecked, fracturing discourse, heightening divides and hampering decision-making.

This all boils down to one thing. Human curation is now more critical than ever. As algorithms churn out vast quantities of information with varying degrees of accuracy and quality, the discerning judgment of human curators is the only defence against the tide of misinformation and mediocrity. Human curators bring nuanced understanding, contextual awareness, and ethical judgment to the table—qualities that AI, in its current state, is fundamentally unable to replicate. 

What I like about multiplayer cursors, cursor chat, and shared highlighting is that it’s like the opposite of a feature...

It’s not differentiation. It wouldn’t dilute me if you did it too. (But it shouldn’t be a browser feature, it’s part of the site, it’s me designing the vibe for this particular place.)

It doesn’t stand out. If there’s nobody else on this site you wouldn’t even notice.

It should be everywhere. It’s how the web should be.

If GitHub Gists could run
And AWS Lambda was fun

Val Town is a social website to write and deploy TypeScript. Build APIs and schedule functions from your browser.

...Vals are small JavaScript or TypeScript snippets of code, written in the browser and run on our servers. Create scheduled functions, email yourself, and persist small pieces of data — all from the browser

Our latest chart shows how many features social media networks have in common, ranging from livestreaming to TikTok competitors and shopping.
It’s a sign of the social media market maturing, similar to how smartphones and laptops now share similar interfaces and functions

The pandemic has also made competition even more fierce among social networks, as people spend more time online, accelerating the pace of copycat features and spawning new formats, such as live audio.

There is a large-scale, deliberate effort to manipulate culture and discourse online and in wider culture by utilising a system of bots and paid employees whose job it is to produce content and respond to content online in order to further the agenda of those they are employed by.

Large proportions of the supposedly human-produced content on the internet are actually generated by artificial intelligence networks in conjunction with paid secret media influencers in order to manufacture consumers for an increasing range of newly-normalised cultural products.

Five features of a comment section:

• Post focus vs. comment focus
• Downvotes
• Scale
• Self-sorting
• Reply-ability

For a long time, these four quadrants have been pretty distinct, because search and recommendations, while they occupy opposite ends of the same spectrum conceptually, have different tooling and architectures, and machine learning goals. You can even tell the way org structure of companies who hire for the teams have developed: usually there are distinct search and recommendations teams.

What happens in today’s world, when we have LLMs? We now have the collision of three different sets of user expectations.

Special Fish is a community site for publishing poems, journals, logs, and lists.

I have to say: I think David Brooks was joking. It’s hard for me to understand, otherwise, why he’d take a photograph of a cheeseburger, fries, and whiskey and post it to the social-media website X.com with the caption “This meal just cost me $78 at Newark Airport. This is why Americans think the economy is terrible.”

...Over the past several decades no one has been more assiduously, obsessively concerned with the socio-economic valence of restaurant experiences than Brooks. Over the course of his career, Brooks has advanced a relatively simple theory of politics: There are two kinds of Americans. One kind of Americans eats at restaurants like this, and the other kind of Americans eats at restaurants like that.

The half-dozen photographers I spoke to about the X100 all marvelled at the authenticity of the Fujifilm simulations compared with other forms of digital manipulation.

...[But] the emulation of film isn’t the camera’s only appeal. For many people, iPhone cameras are part and parcel of a broader digital addiction. They are forever at hand, which is convenient but also anxiety-inducing; the same device that lets us document our experiences serves us breaking-news alerts and work pings from the office, in addition to beckoning us to turn our photos into content. By designing a modernized camera that is simply a camera, with a fixed-length lens that can’t be swapped out, Fujifilm tapped into a desire for a more restricted kind of picture-making.

Figma is not a design tool. It is a drawing tool. That these get conflated demonstrates the shallowness of so much design practice.

What if we proactively design our games to facilitate positive human relationships? We propose that games built on a foundation of kind aesthetics can deliver greater player satisfaction, greater long term engagement, and richer human experiences.

...Let’s make kind games where players help one another in safe, supportive environments. We define kind games as multiplayer games designed from the start with systems that deliberately promote prosocial behavior:

• Systems encourage players to help one another and their community.
• Players form authentic attachments that alleviate loneliness.
• Groups interact peacefully with each other.
• Toxic behavior is carefully monitored and mediated.
• Social systems foster belonging.

1. Pick a stance that that could be mistaken as contrarian, but in reality most people actually agree with.
2. Posit your argument as if there are "people" who have been spreading the opposing view. You don't have to be specific about who it is. In fact, they don't actually have to exist.
3. Make the subject matter something that people get emotional about: gender inequality in tech, TypeScript vs. JavaScript, hiring processes, etc.
4. Watch the engagement from people agreeing with you/bonding over your common enemy roll in.

It seems ridiculous to have to spell this out explicitly, but the point of a protest is to enact concrete change related to the thing you’re protesting against. That requires planning, strategy, and discipline. Protesting without a plan to make an impact in the real world is just political self-gratification.

Social media plays a key role here. Given two actions – one quiet but effective, and one loud but ineffective – the latter will be a thousand times more viral than the former.

In value capture, we outsource the process of deliberating on our values, and that outsourcing cuts off one of the key benefits of personal deliberation. When we tailor our values to ourselves, we can fine-tune them to fit our own particular psychology and place in the world. However, in value capture, it's as if we're buying our values off the rack.

I love the way the web still works without any social media influence. Here's the internet rabbit trail that led me to creating this post:

1. I was adding a link to omg.lol, a blog and email hosting service that's cute AND easy AND (relatively) cheap, to my newsletter.
2. While browsing their help and info page, I saw that they offer a /now/ feature that lets you update the world on what you're working on, reading, watching, etc... now. Old school internet at it's best.
3. I clicked through to the omg.lol /now garden which has examples of how people are using /now to update the world.
4. I randomly picked Rebecca Owen's /now page.
5. Then I clicked back through to her omg.lol page to see how she was using it.
6. I saw she had a blog, so I checked that out.
7. The most recent post on Rebecca's blog was one called Default Apps 2023. That's clickbait-up-arrow.gif material for me.
8. She had included a link to an episode a podcast called Hemispheric Views, and this defaults page.

Which is how I got around to posting a list of my defaults. No Meta / Twitter / TikTok needed.

This is a game about language and rules.

The rule says, "No vehicles in the park."

...It was about content moderation. Specifically, some people think that there could be simple rules for Internet content that are easy to apply. I want to problematize this.

When their expected readership is boomers, books emphasize the decline of respectable centrist media institutions and the rise of “extremism.” When the expected readership is yuppie millennials, well, you get disquisitions on Instagram photos of Iceland, taxonomies of third-wave coffee shops, and nostalgic paeans to … CD binders.

...None of this is wrong, of course. Physical media is wonderful, and Spotify is evil. But it does nothing to deter my suspicion that the alternate, algorithm-free dimension to which “Filterland” is being compared isn’t a possible future utopia toward which we might work, but instead a hazy millennial ‘90s to which our generation of imperfect shoppers wants to return.

While people might be able to "agree to disagree" on whether or not a a non-functioning WW-II era tank that's part of a memorial violates the "no vehicles in the park" rule (resulting in a a pair of positions that accounts for 15% of the vote), in reality, people often have a hard time agreeing to disagree over what outsiders would consider very small differences of opinion. Charged issues are often fractally contentious, causing disagreement among people who hold all but identical opinions, making them significantly more difficult to agree on than our "no vehicles in the park" example.

...No large platform can satisfy user preferences because users will disagree over what content should be moderated off the platform and what content should be allowed. And, of course, this problem scales up as the platform gets larger.

Most websites have a link that says “about”. It goes to a page that tells you something about the background of this person or business. For short, people just call it an “about page”.

Most websites have a link that says “contact”. It goes to a page that tells you how to contact this person or business. For short, people just call it a “contact page”.

So a website with a link that says “now” goes to a page that tells you what this person is focused on at this point in their life. For short, we call it a “now page”.

First, Generation Z was bringing back the point-and-shoot digital cameras of the early 2000s, but now TikTok users are bringing back the Fujifilm X100 — and dramatically driving up the price of the camera with it.

FujiAddict reports that the prices of Fujifilm X100 cameras have skyrocketed recently, specifically in the past few days, due to TikTok users praising the camera on the social media platform.

Every day, we browse the Web and scroll our timelines. And every day, we find even more interesting websites, blog posts, articles, videos, podcasts, and other insights and ideas that we want to document, preserve, and share. The most obvious way to save something of interest still is to create a good old bookmark. And there are many different ways to do this.

...But all those solutions are missing an important bit: the social aspect of bookmarking, also known as sharing links with others. Once upon a system time, sites like Zootool, StumbleUpon, or Delicious not only let us save bookmarks, but also made it possible to discover new, interesting links that others had saved. This social aspect, this way of curating and sharing a collection of links that others can follow, has become a lost art.

Over the past five years, I've noticed an increasingly large number of people make the opposite claim, that only large companies can do decent moderation, spam filtering, fraud (and counterfeit) detection, etc. We looked at one example of this when we examined search results, where a Google engineer said

Somebody tried argue that if the search space were more competitive, with lots of little providers instead of like three big ones, then somehow it would be more resistant to ML-based SEO abuse.

And... look, if google can't currently keep up with it, how will Little Mr. 5% Market Share do it?

And a thought leader responded

like 95% of the time, when someone claims that some small, independent company can do something hard better than the market leader can, it’s just cope. economies of scale work pretty well!

But when we looked at the actual results, it turned out that, of the search engines we looked at, Mr 0.0001% Market Share was the most resistant to SEO abuse (and fairly good), Mr 0.001% was a bit resistant to SEO abuse, and Google and Bing were just flooded with SEO abuse, frequently funneling people directly to various kinds of scams.

For the first time in human history, our brain is the bottleneck. For all history, transmitting information was slow. Brains were fast. After sending a letter, we had days or months to think before receiving an answer. Erasmus wrote his famous "Éloge de la folie" in several days while travelling in Europe. He would never have done it in a couple of hours in a plane while the small screen in the backseat would show him advertisements.

...There’s no silver bullet. There will not be any technological solution. If we want to claim back our focus and our brain cycles, we will need to walkaway and normalise disconnected times. To recognise and share the work of those who are not seeking attention at all cost, who don’t have catchy slogans nor spectacular conclusions. We need to start to appreciate harder works which don’t offer us immediate short-term profit.

Our mind, not the technology, is the bottleneck. We need to care about our minds. To dedicate time to think slowly and deeply.

We need to bring back Sapiens in Home Sapiens Sapiens.

After an opinion piece was recently published in The Atlantic critiquing fringe voices on the platform, many Substack writers began calling for moderation. They want the platform to decide who can say what, and who can be here.

But I, and the writers who have signed this post, are among those who hope Substack will not change its stance on freedom of expression, even against pressure to do so.

...I am not advocating for a lack of moderation, I’m advocating for community moderation. I’m advocating for democratized moderation. I’m advocating for decentralized moderation. Together, we’re advocating for a future internet where we decide what we read, and what gets reach on this platform—not an algorithm or a company.

The creator economy may seem like a tempting path to success for aspiring creators. We lift up success stories as though they're case studies, and we spread this idea that a million dollar career is one viral piece of content away.

But the creator economy is, to be frank, a dead end, a gilded cage that places a ceiling on what you can achieve.

What's the alternative?

Is there an alternative?

I like to talk about the DIY economy. The indie economy.

Once you start pondering the idea of a collective trap, you see them everywhere. Tall, heavy cars such as SUVs are an example. Why does anyone drive such an inefficient, impractical vehicle in an urban environment? The answer, surely, is that they are worried about being hit by another tall, heavy car. 

You could broaden the argument to the car itself. People often drive when they could walk or cycle (or let their children walk or cycle) because they do not feel safe on the roads. But the main danger on the roads? All those people driving, many of whom are only driving because they do not feel safe.

It’s at times like these that the libertarian slumbering deep inside me splutters awake and warns that individual freedom is precious. True, true. I do not actually think either Instagram or driving should be illegal. But collective traps are real. There are times and places (near schools in particular) where almost everyone would be better off if nobody was allowed a smartphone or, for that matter, a car.

I think we would all be happier if spent more time introducing our friends to each other; if, to borrow Duncan’s phrase, we imagined that we are “head of people operations for the entire hedge fund ecosystem”; if we focused less on our criteria and more on seeing people, letting our curiosity steer the relationships where they want to go.

Platforms are like Rumpelstiltskin: they promise to spin you some gold, but in the end demand your first-born child.

One thing I love about the blogging world right now — and by “world” I mean the “webdev tech blogging world” that I live in — is that there are very few, if any, substantial monetary incentives. All the incentives to make a living producing content are over on other platforms, which means those who are blogging are doing it out of love, passion, or some other reason that’s (yet) to be tainted by substantial outside influence.

...Love, passion, and curiosity — more than money — fuel the majority of posts that show up in my RSS feed every day and I love it.

Forget the days of Google Reader, now is a golden era of blogging.

I think LinkedIn has a unique opportunity - a cultural moment around work, coupled with a unique proposition: real networks and real utility.

What if LinkedIn positioned itself not as a professional network or social network but as a learning network. A personal learning network for every user - centered on their personal development.

The history of the internet is filled with people from traditional media finding out about a new way of doing things online, dismissing it as frivolous and unworthy of their time, and then getting histrionic when that new thing succeeds despite their disapproval.

[Rachel Tashjian writes in Real Fashion For the Era of Fake Trends],

“Mostly it seems that people are doing things humans have done for most of the past century—relaxing, working hard, having martinis, not having martinis—but now we cannot resist the urge to package them into something that feels more meaningful than mere consumer choices.”

In the atomized landscape of contemporary culture, to merely express a personal observation, disconnected from any broader significance, is to risk the cardinal sin of irrelevance. The microtrend is thus a vehicle for making something matter, however illusory, And it’s not just our audience we must convince but ourselves—that we’re not just shouting into the void. Mireille Silcoff argued recently that online aesthetics and microtrends provide a source of ersatz community, filling the vacuum created by the decline of physically grounded youth subcultures. That may be a stretch, but the practice does seem oriented toward meeting a deeper need.

...Rather than being part of a mass culture that we can either participate in or rebel against, like the punks of yore, our online selves are unique data profiles that are aggregated or disaggregated as different contexts require. Being part of a hive mind has its drawbacks, but isolation is not one of them.

While it’s probably one of the corniest things I’ll ever write in this column, I’ve come to believe that developing taste is not so unlike going to therapy; it’s an inefficient, time-consuming process that mostly entails looking inward and identifying whatever already moves you. It’s the product of devouring ideas, images and pieces of culture not because someone you respect likes them, but because you simply can’t look away. Developing taste is an exercise in vulnerability: it requires you to trust your instincts and preferences, even when they don’t align with current trends or the tastes of your peers. Because while having taste is cool, taste itself reflects a certain type of uncool earnestness – a commitment to one’s own obsessions and quirks.

Her favorite photo of her mom
The caption says:
"I can't believe it
It's been a decade since you've been gone
Mama, I miss you
I miss sitting with you in the front yard
Still figuring out how to keep living without you
It's got a little better, but it's still hard
Mama, I got a job I love and my own apartment
Mama, I got a boyfriend, and I'm crazy about him
Your little girl didn't do too bad
Mama, I love you, give a hug and kiss to Dad"

There has always been the type of person who is performative of their own interests or pursues their work because of the kind of attention it will get them. There’s always been the pressure to act upon the desires of one’s own ego. But this mode feels much more pervasive as time goes on. Environments are emotionally contagious, and if the environment you spend a lot of time in is hyper-competitive and performative, you’re going to feel pressure to act competitive and performative as well. The dominant model of social media codifies and enhances that pressure.

...I know this isn’t quite the same thing as one’s interests being strategic, but it is a mode we live in where you have to think of content or information as a resource. And doing so means that in some ways you’re producing or consuming in order to cultivate a position, rather than treating content as something out there to be curious about, to be fascinated by, or to love.

The distinction between the two modes I’m trying to define is that one side takes the position that being fascinated with something or someone in the world has a benefit that is self-evident. Being able to feel love towards something or someone is a gift in and of itself. The other side (the side that annoys me) orients fascination or association or effort towards a direction with the primary goal of having some kind of quantifiable reward. But if you’re really focusing on the moment, on something you love, on something in the world that feels like it’s made for you, you can’t be thinking about how it will benefit you, or how it will reflect back on you. These two modes are at odds with each other. True attention requires that you don’t view something in the world through the lens of “what can this thing do for me?”

aboutideasnow.com exists to help you find your people.

1000s of personal websites exist on the internet, outside of social media — created by creators, thinkers, and doers of all sorts.

We index the /about, /ideas, and /now pages of these independent sites to give you a handy way of searching through them.

Toxic positivity requires fake contexts because real life is too messy. Selfcare Withwall ultimately cheapens the complexity of annotation and reduces the agency of readers.

Randi Zuckerberg is Mark Zuckerberg’s sister. Randi put out a music video about cryptocurrency this week. It is, without question, the worst thing I have ever seen. It contains so much cringe per second (CpS) that I became physically exhausted trying to watch the entire thing in one sitting. And, even after breaking up the two-and-a-half minute video into smaller, more manageable chunks to watch, I still haven’t been able to finish it.

In the years since I became fully aware of the vulnerability of what the Internet likes to call my "content," I have made some changes in how I live online. But I have also become increasingly convinced that this vulnerability raises wide-ranging questions that ought to be of general concern. Those of us who live much of our lives online are not faced here simply with matters of intellectual property; we need to confront significant choices about the world we will hand down to those who come after us. The complexities of social media ought to prompt deep reflection on what we all owe to the future, and how we might discharge this debt.

A high gravity community is one that excels at attracting and retaining members by providing an outstanding member experience and increasing the bonds between members.

Though academics may wring our hands about influencer culture, social media promotion is now a necessary evil.