Replied to The ethics of syndicating comments using WebMentions by @edent@edent (Terence Eden’s Blog)
This blog uses WebMention technology. If you write an article on your website and mention one of my blog posts, I get a notification. That notification can then be published as a comment. It usually looks something like this: Screenshot of a comment showing that someone mentioned my post on their bl...
Not an answer to the dilemma, though I generally take the position of keeping everything unless someone asks me to take it down or that I might know that it’s been otherwise deleted. Often I choose not to delete my copy, but simply make it private and only viewable to me.

On the deadnaming and related issues, it would be interesting to create a webmention mechanism for the h-card portions so that users might update these across networks. To some extent Automattic’s Gravatar system does this in a centralized manner, but it would be interesting to see it separately. Certainly not as big an issue as deadnaming, but there’s a similar problem on some platforms like Twitter where people will change their display name regularly for either holidays, or lately because they’re indicating they’d rather be found on Mastodon or other websites.

The webmention spec does contain details for both editing/deleting content and resending webmentions to edit and/or remove the original. Ideally this would be more broadly adopted and used in the future to eliminate the need for making these choices by leaving the choice up to the original publisher.

Beyond this, often on platforms that don’t have character limits (Reddit for example), I’ll post at the bottom of my syndicated copy of content that it was originally published on my site (along with the permalink) and explicitly state that I aggregate the replies from various locations which also helps to let people know that they might find addition context or conversation at the original post should they be interested. Doing this on Twitter, Mastodon, et al. is much harder due to space requirements obviously.

While most responses I send would fall under fair use for copying, I also have a Creative Commons license on my text in an effort to help others feel more comfortable with having copies of my content on their sites.

Another ethical layer to this is interactions between sites which both have webmentions enabled. To some extent this creates an implicit bi-directional relationship which says, I’m aware that this sort of communication exists and approve of your parsing and displaying my responses.

The public norms and ethics in this area will undoubtedly evolve over time, so it’s also worth revisiting and re-evaluating the issue over time.

Read A Note to Our Readers From Steve and Jonah (thedispatch.com)
Dear Dispatch reader, Jonah and I strongly prefer covering and analyzing current events to being the news. But some developments over the past few weeks mean that we’ll be the focus of some reporting and attention and we wanted you to hear it from us first.
Center-right journalists Steve Hayes and Jonah Goldberg of The Dispatch have severed ties with Fox News over a misinformation campaign from Tucker Carlson based on the January 6 events.
Kudos to them for drawing a line on this issue.
Bookmarked Tending the Digital Commons by Alan JacobsAlan Jacobs (The Hedgehog Review | Spring 2018: The Human and the Digital)
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.
This fantastic essay touches on so many things related to IndieWeb and A Domain of One’s Own. We often talk about the “why” of these movements, but Alan Jacobs provides some underlying ethics as well.

For those who don’t have a subscription, Alan has kindly and pleasantly provided a samizdat version on his site in .pdf format.

Read Wix and Their Dirty Tricks by Matt Mullenweg (Matt Mullenweg)
Wix, the website builder company you may remember from stealing WordPress code and lying about it, has now decided the best way to gain relevance is attacking the open source WordPress community in a bizarre set of ads. They can’t even come up with original concepts for attack ads, and have tried ...
I’ve never been able to recommend people to use Wix simply for the export issue. This should have been one of their first features. Matt does a good job of indicating other reasons not to support them.

I was also a bit surprised to see him actively recommending other projects and platforms. 🙂

Read Thread by @pfrazee@pfrazee (threadreaderapp.com)

Yo, decentralizers. If our projects are ONLY about censorship resistance and NOT about better algorithms for elevating truth, and NOT about creating constrained but real powers of moderation, then we're making things worse. 1/n

It kills me, absolutely kills me, that after years of decentralization advocacy it's a moment like this when all the dweb projects pop up on HN and social media. The interest popped -- not when truth became inconvenient for corporate power, but when lies did.

Charitably, people may be reflecting on the kind of power imbalance being revealed and reflecting on how it could be abused.

https://twitter.com/pwang/status/1348335710303096833

 

Uncharitably? Do I need to even say it.

For anybody still unsure:

We have to find a way to square our ideals and our fears about monopoly control with the realities of how our technology is working. It's not enough to defend an ideal. We need to be effective.

We've all done our spiderman homework. What comes with great power?

If we really believe that free speech is important -- as I do -- and we want to protect it, then we need to work hard to make sure that free speech provides value to people. Otherwise they're going to shrug and let it drift away, "a nice idea, but impractical, really"

The question isn't "how do we make moderation impossible?" The question is, how do we make moderation trustworthy.

That, it turns out, is much harder than p2p tweets

It's also about *checking* power, not just distributing it. Like code-forking: FOSS doesn't always mean "anybody can contribute," but it definitely means that the users can fork if the core devs abuse their position. How can we get that kind of check on power here?

It's nuanced. It's harder to sell than "censorship resistance." Maybe we need a new framework for discussing this, a new set of words. I don't know what to tell you, but the reward is equal to the challenge. n/n

Read “I started crying”: Inside Timnit Gebru’s last days at Google (MIT Technology Review)
Two weeks after her forced exit, the AI ethics researcher reflects on her time at Google and the state of the AI field.

It’s long past time to divest my personal data from Google. Reading this article on holiday reminds me that I’ve got time to start making the necessary changes.

Bookmarked A Defense of Abortion by Judith Jarvis Thomson (Philosophy & Public Affairs, Vol. 1, no. 1 (Fall 1971))
Most opposition to abortion relies on the premise that the fetus is a human being, a person, from the moment of conception. The premise is argued for, but, as I think, not well. Take, for example, the most common argument. We are asked to notice that the development of a human being from conception through birth into childhood is continuous; then it is said that to draw a line, to choose a point in this development and say "before this point the thing is not a person, after this point it is a person" is to make an arbitrary choice, a choice for which in the nature of things no good reason can be given. It is concluded that the fetus is, or anyway that we had better say it is, a person from the moment of conception. But this conclusion does not follow. Similar things might be said about the development of an acorn into an oak trees, and it does not follow that acorns are oak trees, or that we had better say they are. Arguments of this form are sometimes called "slippery slope arguments"—the phrase is perhaps self explanatory—and it is dismaying that opponents of abortion rely on them so heavily and uncritically.
Ben Burgis in Judith Jarvis Thomson (1929–2020) ()
Read Judith Jarvis Thomson (1929–2020) by Ben Burgis (jacobinmag.com)
Judith Jarvis Thomson was one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century. Her justly famous essay in defense of abortion rights is a model for how to combine philosophical rigor with political engagement in the real world.
Interesting article. I’ll have to look at some other material Jacobin is putting out. Definitely a bit further to the left than is my usual taste, but seems generally well edited and topically interesting.
TWELVE

By taking the content AND the conversation around it out of the hands of “big social media” and their constant tracking and leaving it with the active participants, we can effect far more ethical EdTech.

Gif of grain silo on a farm collapsing in on itself.

 
 
Read Polite Toolbox (www.polite.one)
Polite is a part think tank, and part studio focused on the ethical renaissance of the Internet. We have designed the Polite Toolbox.

We advocate for a Slow Web Movement.
We are what we eat, and we are also what we consume online.
Data-driven advertising, BlackBox algorithms, and the competition between Big Tech to keep us “engaged“ has created an addiction to low-value content. It is time to reset our digital consumption and create healthier habits.
Since the last decade, with a set of guidelines, the Slow Web Movement is changing Software to make it care about us again.
Think of it as the equivalent of “Organic” for Technology.

As solid a pitch for the slow web movement as I’ve seen yet from an analogy perspective.
Annotated on February 01, 2020 at 09:13AM

The right to Non-manipulative design.

see also dark patterns.
Annotated on February 01, 2020 at 09:14AM

Read It’s Time to Get Personal by Laura KalbagLaura Kalbag (24ways.org)
Is it just me or does nobody have their own website anymore? OK, some people do. But a lot of these sites are outdated, or just a list of links to profiles on big tech platforms. Despite being people who build websites, who love to share on the web, we don’t share much on our own sites. Of course ...
Some great ethical reasons for why go IndieWeb. I like that she’s got some concrete examples here and then goes into how she’s done what she has for herself.
Read No, Absolutely Not by Robin RendleRobin Rendle (CSS-Tricks)
I think the difference between a junior and senior front-end developer isn't in their understanding or familiarity with a particular tech stack, toolchain, or whether they can write flawless code. Instead, it all comes down to this: how they push back against bad ideas.
Bookmarked a tweet by AoverKAoverK (Twitter)