📺 The Facebook Dilemma (Part 2) | Frontline | PBS

Watched The Facebook Dilemma (Part 2) from FRONTLINE | PBS

A major, two-night investigation of the powerful social media platform’s impact on privacy and democracy in the U.S. and around the world.

SEASON 37: EPISODE 4: The promise of Facebook was to create a more open and connected world. But from the company’s failure to protect millions of users’ data, to the proliferation of “fake news” and disinformation, mounting crises have raised the question: Is Facebook more harmful than helpful? On Monday, Oct. 29, and Tuesday, Oct. 30, 2018, FRONTLINE presents The Facebook Dilemma. This major, two-night event investigates a series of warnings to Facebook as the company grew from Mark Zuckerberg’s Harvard dorm room to a global empire. With dozens of original interviews and rare footage, The Facebook Dilemma examines the powerful social media platform’s impact on privacy and democracy in the U.S. and around the world.

This documentary focuses on just one of the major failings of Facebook and its attendant effects on society. If you’re using Facebook, you should watch both parts before continuing to support them.

I’m not quite sure what to label this particular type of failure. Tragedy of the commons? It’s painfully obvious that Facebook not only has no real idea how to solve this problem, but it’s even more telling that they don’t seem to have any desire or drive to solve it either.  The more I watch what they’re doing to their product and their users, the more I think that they have absolutely no ethics or morality at all. In particular Mark Zuckerberg  is completely tone deaf in these areas, and as a result the entire fish stinks from the head.

The only solution may be massive regulation. The sadder part is that with both their financing and lobbying power, not to mention their social influence power which could be leveraged completely via dark posts, they could have a painfully out-sized influence on elections to get their own way.

I’m really worried that things will get far worse before they get better.

👓 Why no one is laughing in Baltimore | Washington Post

Read Why no one is laughing in Baltimore (Washington Post)
The president of Baltimore’s police union didn’t find a “Saturday Night Live” sketch funny, but instead of just shaking his head and grumbling to the person next to him and moving on, he took a bold and very public step. He wrote a letter to the show’s creator, Lorne Michaels, expressing “great disappointment over the distorted representation of Baltimore Police Officers.”

👓 I am 18. I belong to the massacre generation. | Washington Post

Read I am 18. I belong to the massacre generation. (Washington Post)
It was last Saturday when it hit me that my entire life has been framed by violence. I don’t remember being born on Jan. 28, 2000, and I don’t remember being a year and a half old when 9/11 happened. I don’t remember the panic of my mother as she stepped outside our house in Washington and smelled the smoke of the burning Pentagon. I don’t remember her knowing I would grow up in a changed world.

👓 November 3rd, 2018 | Adactio

Read a post by Jeremy Keith (adactio.com)
Picture 1Picture 2 Organising the schedule for Indie Web Camp Berlin. Each session has a hashtag. Fun fact: this is literally why hashtags were invented (tagging sessions at an unconference). cc @ChrisMessina
Wish I could have been there…

👓 How do we replace Flickr? #Indieweb #Yesvember | Kevin Marks

Read How do we replace Flickr? #Indieweb #Yesvember by Kevin MarksKevin Marks (Kevin Marks's Known site)
Flickr, like all successful social software, is different things to different people. When something is done well, we internalize the communities that we interact with on it as part of the character of the place. Just two average guys, minding their own business, walking down the street in SF. The u...

👓 Why I stopped using feeds | Manu Moreale

Read Why I stopped using feeds by Manuel Moreale (manuelmoreale.com)
I’m a fan of feeds. Whether is a curated RSS feed, a nice Twitter account or a great newsletter. All these are great tools to stay always up to date with things I care about and don’t miss out on “important news”.
While this seems like an interesting take on doing things, I view my feeds in my feed reader much the same way as I view the recordings on my DVR. They’re there waiting for the day or time I feel like visiting a particular channel and catching up. I definitely don’t look at it like a queue of things I might either miss out on or that I have to consume. They’re just there when I care to dip in and read a bit.

👓 My New Articles Archive | EddieHinkle.com

Read My New Articles Archive by Eddie HinkleEddie Hinkle (eddiehinkle.com)
So as I mentioned earlier today, I've added a database that keeps a searchable cache of my posts in my website so I don't have to open hundreds of files in order to build the various pages of my website. It's allowed me to move almost all of my pages off of Jekyll and later this month I'll be removing Jekyll from even being on my server. The database as made a lot of things easier, one is that it is now quick and easy for me to create feeds of posts. Right now I have two types of feeds, tag feeds and channel feeds. Tag feeds show all the posts I have created with a given tag. Channels Channel feeds are a bit different, I have two types of Channels: static and dynamic. A static channel isn't too much different than a tag, when I create a post I either manually add the channel to the post or I have a preset rule inside my server that attached the channel to the post. The key to a static channel is that it just shows all the posts that have been assigned to it. The dynamic channels are really where its at. Dynamic channels allow me to provide an id (which becomes the url that you use to access it), a name (which displays at the top), a layout (currently I have 3 types of layouts: Cards, Gallery and Archives) and finally a "query". The query is where the magic is, this is essentially a set of properties that will be passed into the database query. That means I can dynamically, without writing any code (just a config file) create a new page providing it's url, name, layout and some requirements around what type of information I want to display. Articles Archives One thing my new channels has allowed me to do is to create the Archives layout and set up a query that fetches all the articles I've written and display them in a list. It was super easy to set this up because of the way my database cache is working and the way I've configured my channels. I group them by year, then by month and display each article on it's own line. I really like how it turned out. I was heavily influenced by Manu Moreale and the article archive they display on their site. I imagine mine will grow more into it's own design and style over time but everything starts somewhere and I like starting mine based on Manu's work (Thanks for the inspiration!). You can check it out over here, or below is an example of the articles archive as of today The other nice thing is that because my website already supports Dark Mode, on macOS Mojave with Dark Mode turned on, all the colors will automatically invert on this page with no extra work!

👓 O’Connor, Rehnquist And A Supreme Marriage Proposal | NPR

Read O'Connor, Rehnquist And A Supreme Marriage Proposal (NPR)
Some personal secrets are so well-kept that even family and friends are oblivious. So it is with the story of the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist's marriage proposal to a Stanford Law School classmate in the early 1950s. When 19-year-old Sandra Day entered Stanford Law School in 1949, her frequent seatmate was 26-year-old Bill Rehnquist, attending Stanford on the GI Bill. The two shared their equally meticulous class notes and eventually were dating regularly. But by December of their second year, she broke up with him while somehow retaining what she called their "study buddy" relationship; she even entered the moot-court competition with Rehnquist, and the pair finished second.

👓 I live among the neo-Nazis in eastern Germany. And it’s terrifying | Anonymous | Opinion | The Guardian

Read I live among the neo-Nazis in eastern Germany. And it’s terrifying by Anonymous (the Guardian)
Chemnitz is the tip of an ugly iceberg, says an anonymous writer

👓 What Does Gab’s Demise Mean For Federation? | Interdependent Thoughts

Read What Does Gab’s Demise Mean For Federation? by Ton Zijlstra (zylstra.org)
The Twitter-like platform Gab has been forced offline, as their payment providers, hosting provider and domain provider all told them their business was no longer welcome. The platform is home to people with extremist views claiming their freedom of speech is under threat. At issue is of course wher...

👓 Syndication Links 4.0.0 Released | David Shanske

Read Syndication Links 4.0.0 Released by David ShanskeDavid Shanske (David Shanske)
Today, from my hotel room in Berlin, Germany, where I am preparing to attend Indiewebcamp Berlin, my first European Indiewebcamp, I released Syndication Links 4.0.0. The major version number change is because in this version, Syndication Links takes on a new role. As promised previously, I’ve buil...
Yet another update from the unstoppable David Shanske! I can’t wait to try this out.

👓 Reply to Ben Werdmüller | Interdependent Thoughts

Read Reply to Gab and the decentralized web by Ben Werdmüller by Ton Zijlstra (zylstra.org)

I think this is a false dilemma, Bernd.

I’d say that it would be great if those extremists would see using a distributed tool like Mastodon as the only remaining viable platform for them. It would not suppress their speech. But it woud deny them any amplification, which they now enjoy by being very visible on mainstream platforms, giving them the illusion they are indeed mainstream. It will be much easier to convince, if at all needed, instance moderators to not federate with instances of those guys, reducing them ever more to their own bubble. They can spew hate amongst themselves for eternity, but without amplification it won’t thrive. Jotted down some thoughts on this earlier in “What does Gab’s demise mean for federation?“

👓 Gab and the decentralized web | Ben Werdmüller

Read Gab and the decentralized web by Ben WerdmüllerBen Werdmüller (Ben Werdmüller)
As a proponent of the decentralized web, I've been thinking a lot about the aftermath of the domestic terrorism that was committed in Pittsburgh at the Tree of Life synagogue over the weekend, and how it specifically relates to the right-wing social network Gab. In America, we're unfortunately used ...
I couldn’t have put it any better myself.

👓 Why we’re changing Flickr free accounts | Flickr

Read Why we’re changing Flickr free accounts (Flickr Blog)
Today, we’re announcing updates to our Free and Pro accounts that mark a new step forward for Flickr. To be candid, we’re driving toward the future of Flickr with one eye on the rearview mirror; we…
Nice to see that they’ve looked at the data to come up with what will hopefully be a reasonable dividing line.

Having a worthwhile community there would be the only thing to make me want to syndicate my photos to it, particularly with backfeed coming from Brid.gy. I haven’t gotten much, if any, interaction from Flickr in quite a long time.

I suspect that having a curated community there will actually dovetail with helping out the IndieWeb in the long run. What they’d like to have sounds a lot more like what micro.blog has become for me in the past year. It also sounds a lot more like how SoundCloud works to some extent.

👓 Some OwnYourSwarm Updates | Aaron Parecki

Read Some OwnYourSwarm Updates by Aaron PareckiAaron Parecki (Aaron Parecki)

Today I launched some updates to OwnYourSwarm, the service that sends your Swarm checkins to your own website. It does this by watching your Swarm account and sending checkins to your site via Micropub.

 

Private Posts
I made two changes to how OwnYourSwarm can handle private posts. Private posts ar...

 
This is awesome Aaron! Thanks for continuing to push the boundaries.