👓 Jack Dorsey says he’s rethinking the core of how Twitter works | Washington Post

Read Jack Dorsey says he’s rethinking the core of how Twitter works by Tony Romm and Elizabeth Dwoskin (Washington Post)

Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey said he is rethinking core parts of the social media platform so it doesn’t enable the spread of hate speech, harassment and false news, including conspiracy theories shared by prominent users like Alex Jones and Infowars.

In an interview with The Washington Post on Wednesday, Dorsey said he was experimenting with features that would promote alternative viewpoints in Twitter’s timeline to address misinformation and reduce “echo chambers.” He also expressed openness to labeling bots — automated accounts that sometimes pose as human users — and redesigning key elements of the social network, including the “like” button and the way Twitter displays users’ follower counts.

Lip service, to be sure…

👓 Are Targeted Ads Stalking You? Here’s How to Make Them Stop | New York Times

Read Are Targeted Ads Stalking You? Here’s How to Make Them Stop (nytimes.com)
Ever been haunted by an online ad for an item you researched or bought? Targeted ads were designed to follow you around everywhere. Here’s how to banish them.

👓 Accessibility concerns large and small dominate conference discussions | Inside Higher Ed

Read Accessibility concerns large and small dominate conference discussions (Inside Higher Ed)
Administrators and professors alike wonder how their institutions' progress in making course content available to all students compares with others, as advocates continue their push.

👓 QAnon and Pinterest Is Just the Beginning | Hapgood

Read QAnon and Pinterest Is Just the Beginning by Mike Caulfield (Hapgood)
I have been talking about Pinterest as a disinformation platform for a long time, so this article on QAnon memes on Pinterest is not surprising at all: Many of those users also pinned QAnon memes. …

👓 Scientists have accidentally created a completely new form of carbon | The Independent

Read Scientists have accidentally created a completely new form of carbon (The Independent)
'We now have the recipe for how to make these structures'

👓 My podcast diet: August 2018 | a.wholelottanothing.org

Read My podcast diet: August 2018 by Matt Haughey (A Whole Lotta Nothing)
I listen to several dozen podcasts, usually when doing boring tasks like errands, dishes, or car trips, on the order of 5-8 hours per week, and mostly at the expense of time I used to spend listeni…

👓 Things that baffle me about WordPress in 2018 | a.wholelottanothing.org

Read Things that baffle me about Wordpress in 2018 by Matt Haughey (A Whole Lotta Nothing)
So I’m back blogging! And I haven’t used wordpress.com in ages, but I wanted to share my running list of WTF moments over the past week of using the site and service, both at work (we j…

👓 Putting Stickers On Your Laptop Is Probably a Bad Security Idea | Motherboard / Vice

Read Putting Stickers On Your Laptop Is Probably a Bad Security Idea by Joseph Cox (Motherboard)
From border crossings to hacking conferences, that Bitcoin or political sticker may be worth leaving on a case at home.
I had a very short conversation at the IndieWeb Summit 2018 in Portland with Nate Angell about the stickers on his laptop. Who knew he was such a subject area expert that Motherboard/Vice was using his material?

Of course this also reminds me that if academics, journalists, and publications/outlets were using webmentions when they credited creative commons articles, photos, audio, or other content, then the originator would get a notification that it was being used. This could also tip the originator off that their licensed content is being properly used.

👓 Hundreds of Researchers From Top Universities Were Published in Fake Academic Journals | Motherboard

Read Hundreds of Researchers From Top Universities Were Published in Fake Academic Journals (Motherboard)
How the World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology became a multimillion dollar organization promoting bullshit science through fake conferences and journals.

👓 With Felix Salmon, Axios Continues Its Push to Commandeer the Bloomberg Set | Vanity Fair

Read With Felix Salmon, Axios Continues Its Push to Commandeer the Bloomberg Set (The Hive | Vanity Fair)
Axios is hiring Felix Salmon and Courtenay Brown to spearhead its foray into coverage of the public markets.

👓 Let’s Hope There Is No Tape of Trump Using the N-Word | Weekly Standard

Read Let’s Hope There Is No Tape of Trump Using the N-Word by Jonathan V. LastJonathan V. Last (The Weekly Standard)
But if there is …
His track record is terrifically clear, I have no more hope for him, or anyone who can’t bring themselves to speak up against him.

👓 Put your multiple personalities in Firefox Multi-Account Containers | The Firefox Frontier

Read Put your multiple online personalities in Firefox Multi-Account Containers (The Firefox Frontier)
Our new Multi-Account Containers extension for Firefox means you can finally wrangle multiple email/social accounts. Maybe you’ve got two Gmail or Instagram or Twitter or Facebook a...

👓 Indieweb.xyz: Difficult or Silo? | Kicks Condor

Read Indieweb.xyz: Difficult or Silo? by Kicks CondorKicks Condor (kickscondor.com)
Ok, Indieweb.xyz has been open for a month! The point of the site is to give you a place to syndicate your essays and conversations where they’ll actually be seen. In a way, it’s a silo—a central info container. Silos make it easy. You go there and dump stuff in. But, here in the Indieweb, we want No Central. We want Decentral. Which is more difficult because all these little sites and blogs out there have to work together—that’s tough! Ok so, going to back to how this works: Brad Enslen and I have been posting our thoughts about how to innovate blog directories, search and webrings to the /en/linking sub on Indieweb.xyz. If you want to join the conversation, just send your posts there by including a link like this in your post:

This was also posted to /en/linking.

If your blog supports Webmentions, then Indieweb.xyz should be notified of the post when you publish it. But even if your blog doesn’t support Webmentions, you can just submit your link by hand. How Indie Do I Need to Be? One of my big projects lately has been to make it very easy for you all out there to participate. You no longer need a ton of what they call ‘microformats’ everywhere on your blog. You literally just need to: Include the link above in your blog post. (You don’t even need the class="u-syndication" part, but I would still recommend it. If you have multiple links to Indieweb.xyz in your post, the one marked u-syndication will be preferred.) Send the Webmention. It helps if you have the microformats—this makes it easy to figure out who the author of the post is and so on. But Indieweb.xyz will now fallback to using HTML title tags (and RSS feed even) to figure out who is posting and what they are posting. The Blog Directory A feature I’m incredibly excited about is the blog directory, which lists all the blogs that post to Indieweb.xyz—and which also gives you a few hundred characters to describe your blog! (It uses the description meta tag from your blog’s home page.) I think of Indieweb.xyz as an experiment in building a decentralized forum in which everyone contributes their bits. And Indieweb.xyz merges them together. It’s decentralized because you can easily switch all your Indieweb.xyz links to another site, send your Webmentions—and now THAT site will merge you into their community. In a way, I’m starting to see it as a wiki where each person’s changes happen on their own blog. This blog directory is like a wiki page where everyone gets their little section to control. I’m going to expand this idea bit-by-bit over the next few months. Just to clarify: the directory is updated whenever you send a Webmention, so if you change your blog description, resend one of your Webmentions to update it. Bad Behavior and the Robot Police We are a long way off from solving abuse on our websites. We desperately want technology to solve this. But it is a human problem. I am starting to believe that the more we solve a problem with technology, the more human problems we create. (This has been generally true of pollution, human rights, ecology, quality of life, almost every human problem. There are, of course, fortuitous exceptions to this.) Decentralization is somewhat fortuitous. Smaller, isolated communities are less of a target. The World Trade Tower is a large, appealing target. But Sandy Hook still happens. A smaller community can survive longer, but it will still degenerate—small communities often become hostile to outsiders (a.k.a newcomers). So while a given Mastodon instance’s code of conduct provides a human solution—sudden, effortless removal of a terrorist—there will be false positives. I have been kicked out, hellbanned, ignored in communities many times—this isn’t an appeal for self-pity, just a note that moderation powers are often misdirected. I moved on to other communities—but I earnestly wanted to participate in some of those communities that I couldn’t seem to penetrate. So, yeah: rules will be coming together. It’s all we have. I’m impressed that the Hacker News community has held together for so long, but maybe it’s too much of a monoculture. HN’s guidelines seem to work. Commenting Last thing. A recent addition is a comment count on each submission. These comment counts are scraped from the blog post. It seems very “indieweb” to let the comments stay on the blog. The problem is that the microformats for comments are not widely supported and, well, they suck. It’s all just too complicated. You slightly change an HTML template and everything breaks. Not to mention that I have no idea if the number is actually correct. Are these legit comments? Or is the number being spoofed? I will also add that—if you submit a link to someone else’s blog, even if it’s an “indieweb” blog—the comment count will come from your blog. This is because the original entry might have been submitted by the author to a different sub. So your link contains the comments about that blog post for that sub. Really tight microformat templates will need to become widespread for this to become really useful. In the meantime, it’s a curious little feature that I’m happy to spend a few characters on.
I really should be syndicating to Indieweb.xyz more. It’s the type of interesting experiment I’m really enjoying watching unfold.

👓 The Right Time to Burn A Match | Spoke and Hub

Read The Right Time to Burn A Match by Alyson IndrunasAlyson Indrunas (Spoke & Hub)
There’s a saying in bike racing that I always find interesting. “You need to be strategic about where you’re willing to burn a match in a race.” In race reports, you might r…