Quit sharing stories without even reading them. Quit tweeting your every outrage. Quit clicking on garbage.
Tag: social media
👓 Friction-Free Racism by Chris Gilliard | Real Life
Surveillance capitalism turns a profit by making people more comfortable with discrimination
Facebook’s use of “ethnic affinity” as a proxy for race is a prime example. The platform’s interface does not offer users a way to self-identify according to race, but advertisers can nonetheless target people based on Facebook’s ascription of an “affinity” along racial lines. In other words. race is deployed as an externally assigned category for purposes of commercial exploitation and social control, not part of self-generated identity for reasons of personal expression. The ability to define one’s self and tell one’s own stories is central to being human and how one relates to others; platforms’ ascribing identity through data undermines both. ❧
October 15, 2018 at 09:34PM
👓 Some IndieWeb WordPress tuning | EdTech Factotum
Right now, I just want to write. ❧
You might find that the micropub plugin is a worthwhile piece for this. It will give your site an endpoint you can use to post to your site with a variety of third party applications including Quill or Micropublish.net.
October 14, 2018 at 01:01AM
My hope is that it will somehow bring comments on Facebook back to the blog and display them as comments here. ❧
Sadly, Aaron Davis is right that Facebook turned off their API access for this on August 1st, so there currently aren’t any services, including Brid.gy, anywhere that allow this. Even WordPress and JetPack got cut off from posting from WordPress to Facebook, much less the larger challenge of pulling responses back.
October 14, 2018 at 01:03AM
Grant Potter ❧
Seeing the commentary from Greg McVerry and Aaron Davis, it’s probably worthwhile to point you to the IndieWeb for Education wiki page which has some useful resources, pointers, and references. As you have time, feel free to add yourself to the list along with any brainstorming ideas you might have for using some of this technology within your work realm. Many hands make light work. Welcome to the new revolution!
October 14, 2018 at 01:08AM
the autoposts from Twitter to Facebook were ❧
a hanging thought? I feel like I do this on my site all too often…
October 14, 2018 at 01:09AM
I am giving this one a go as it seems to be the most widely used. ❧
It is widely used, and I had it for a while myself. I will note that the developer said he was going to deprecate it in favor of some work he’d been doing with another Mastodon/WordPress developer though.
October 14, 2018 at 01:19AM
👓 Free Speech in the Age of Algorithmic Megaphones | Wired
Researchers have long known that local actors—as well as Russia—use manipulative tactics to spread information online. With Facebook suspending a slew of domestic accounts, a difficult reckoning is upon us.
Lies were able to go across the world before the truth had a chance to put on it’s breeches in the past, but it’s ability to do so now is even worse. We need to be able to figure out a way to flip the script.
An IndieWeb talk at WordCamp Riverside in November 2018
My talk will help to kick off the day at 10am on Saturday morning in the “John Hughes High” room. The details for the camp and a link to purchase tickets can be found below.
WordCamp Riverside 2018
&
hosted at SolarMax, 3080 12th St., Riverside, CA 92507
Tickets are available now
Given that “Looking back to go forward” is the theme of the camp this year, I think I may have chosen the perfect topic. To some extent I’m going to look at how the nascent web has recently continued evolving from where it left off around 2006 before everyone abandoned it to let corporate silo services like Facebook and Twitter become responsible for how we use the web. We’ll talk about how WordPress can be leveraged to do a better job than “traditional” social media with much greater flexibility.
Here’s the outline:
The web is my social network: How I use WordPress to create the social platform I want (and you can too!)
Synopsis: Growing toxicity on Twitter, Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal, algorithmic feeds, and a myriad of other problems have opened our eyes to the ever-growing costs of social media. Walled gardens have trapped us with the promise of “free” while addicting us to their products at the cost of our happiness, sense of self, sanity, and privacy. Can we take back our fractured online identities, data, and privacy to regain what we’ve lost?
I’ll talk about how I’ve used IndieWeb philosophies and related technologies in conjunction with WordPress as a replacement for my social presence while still allowing easy interaction with friends, family, and colleagues online. I’ll show how everyone can easily use simple web standards to make WordPress a user-controlled, first-class social platform that works across domains and even other CMSes.
Let’s democratize social media using WordPress and the open web, the last social network you’ll ever need to join.
Intended Audience: The material is introductory in nature and targeted at beginner and intermediate WordPressers, but will provide a crash course on a variety of bleeding edge W3C specs and tools for developers and designers who want to delve into them at a deeper level. Applications for the concepts can be of valuable to bloggers, content creators, businesses, and those who are looking to better own their online content and identities online without allowing corporate interests out-sized influence of their online presence.
I look forward to seeing everyone there!
👓 Welcome to Voldemorting, the Ultimate SEO Dis | Wired
When writers swap Trump for Cheeto and 45, it's not just a put-down. Removing a keyword is the anti-SEO—transforming your subject into a slippery, ungraspable, swarm.
To my experience, the phrase “bird site” was generally used as a derogatory phrase on Mastodon (represented by a Mastodon character instead of a bird), by people who were fed up by Twitter and the interactions they found there. I recall instances of it as early as April 2017.
In addition to potential SEO implications, this phenomenon is also interesting for its information theoretic implications.
I particularly like the reference in the van der Nagle paper
[…] screenshotting, or making content visible without sending its website traffic – to demonstrate users’ understandings of the algorithms that seek to connect individuals to other people, platforms, content and advertisers, and their efforts to wrest back control.
This seems like an awesome way to skirt around algorithms in social sites as well as not rewarding negative sites with clicks.
👓 The breach that killed Google+ wasn’t a breach at all | The Verge
A bug in the rarely used Google+ network has exposed private information for as many as 500,000 users. Should Google have shared more sooner?
👓 Project Strobe: Protecting your data, improving our third-party APIs, and sunsetting consumer Google+ | Google
Findings and actions from Project Strobe—a root-and-branch review of third-party developer access to Google account and Android device data and of our philosophy around apps’ data access.
👓 Just a Thought: Design for Selfishness | Powazek
In 1996, Paulina Borsook wrote a story that, frankly, really pissed me off. In "Cyberselfish," published in Mother Jones and eventually turned into a book, she wrote about how new have-it-your-way technology was creating a generation of spoiled brats with computers. I took umbrage. Not only was I a proud member of the generation she was lambasting (a generation that is now oldschool on the internet, for whatever that's worth), but I had personally observed just the opposite. I witnessed people using new digital tools to collaborate. I saw more selflessness and altruism online than off.
Highlights, Quotes, Annotations, & Marginalia
I think the internet’s core message can be summed up in one word: Share. ❧
An early reference to the sharing economy?
October 04, 2018 at 09:08AM
The last thing most people need is another microphone. They need something to say. (And time to say it.) ❧
Interesting to hear this from 2006 and looking back now…
October 04, 2018 at 09:12AM
Designing for selfishness does not mean abandoning the group good. ❧
October 04, 2018 at 09:14AM
Except that the aggregate selfish behavior of millions of people tagging billions of photos means that the public tag pages make entertaining surfing for everyone. ❧
Reading this reminds me of some of Brad Enslen and Kicks Condor‘s conversations about discovery on the net.
How can one leverage selfish behaviour to the benefit of all?
October 04, 2018 at 09:15AM
Extending a User Interface Idea for Social Reading Online
I mention it because I was specifically intrigued by a small piece of excellent user interface and social graph data that Reading.am unearths for me. I’m including a quick screen capture to better illustrate the point. While the UI allows me to click yes/no (i.e. did I like it or not) or even share it to other networks, the thing I found most interesting was that it lists the other people using the service who have read the article as well. In this case it told me that my friend Jeremy Cherfas had read the article.1
In addition to having the immediate feedback that he’d read it, which is useful and thrilling in itself, it gives me the chance to search to see if he’s written any thoughts about it himself, and it also gives me the chance to tag him in a post about my own thoughts to start a direct conversation around a topic which I now know we’re both interested in at least reading about.2
The tougher follow up is: how could we create a decentralized method of doing this sort of workflow in a more IndieWeb way? It would be nice if my read posts on my site (and those of others) could be overlain on websites via a bookmarklet or other means as a social layer to create engaged discussion. Better would have been the ability to quickly surface his commentary, if any, on the piece as well–functionality which I think Reading.am also does, though I rarely ever see it. In some sense I would have come across Jeremy’s read post in his feed later this weekend, but it doesn’t provide the immediacy that this method did. I’ll also admit that I prefer having found out about his reading it only after I’d read it myself, but having his and others’ recommendations on a piece (by their explicit read posts) is a useful and worthwhile piece of data, particularly for pieces I might have otherwise passed over.
In some sense, some of this functionality isn’t too different from that provided by Hypothes.is, though that is hidden away within another browser extension layer and requires not only direct examination, but scanning for those whose identities I might recognize because Hypothes.is doesn’t have a specific following/follower social model to make my friends and colleagues a part of my social graph in that instance. The nice part of Hypothes.is’ browser extension is that it does add a small visual indicator to show that others have in fact read/annotated a particular site using the service.
I’ve also previously documented on the IndieWeb wiki how WordPress.com (and WordPress.org with JetPack functionality) facepiles likes on content (typically underneath the content itself). This method doesn’t take things as far as the Reading.am case because it only shows a small fraction of the data, is much less useful, and is far less likely to unearth those in your social graph to make it useful to you, the reader.
I seem to recall that Facebook has some similar functionality that is dependent upon how (and if) the publisher embeds Facebook into their site. I don’t think I’ve seen this sort of interface built into another service this way and certainly not front and center the way that Reading.am does it.
The closest thing I can think of to this type of functionality in the analog world was in my childhood when library card slips in books had the names of prior patrons on them when you signed your own name when checking out a book, though this also had the large world problem that WordPress likes have in that one typically wouldn’t have know many of the names of prior patrons necessarily. I suspect that the Robert Bork privacy incident along with the evolution of library databases and bar codes have caused this older system to disappear.
This general idea might make an interesting topic to explore at an upcoming IndieWebCamp if not before. The question is: how to add in the social graph aspect of reading to uncover this data? I’m also curious how it might or might not be worked into a feed reader or into microsub related technologies as well. Microsub clients or related browser extensions might make a great place to add this functionality as they would have the data about whom you’re already following (aka your social graph data) as well as access to their read/like/favorite posts. I know that some users have reported consuming feeds of friends’ reads, likes, favorites, and bookmarks as potential recommendations of things they might be interested in reading as well, so perhaps this would be an additional extension of that as well?
[1] I’ve certainly seen this functionality before, but most often the other readers are people I don’t know or know that well because the service isn’t huge and I’m not using it to follow a large number of other people.
[2] I knew he was generally interested already as I happen to be following this particular site at his prior recommendation, but the idea still illustrates the broader point.
👓 Where Will the Current State of Blogging and Social Media Take Us? | jackyalciné
I’m not an veteran blogger but I do wonder what blogging or just sharing our thoughts on the Internet will look like in the next decade or so.
📺 Facebook: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) | YouTube
Facebook’s global expansion has been linked to political turmoil overseas, so maybe their ads should focus less on how they “connect the world” and more on why connecting people isn’t always the best idea.
👓 White House distances itself from reports that Trump could target Facebook, Google and Twitter with a new executive order | Washington Post
Trump slams Google for 'RIGGED' results
The White House sought to distance itself Saturday from reports that President Trump is considering an executive order that would subject tech giants like Facebook, Google and Twitter to federal investigations into alleged political bias.
For weeks, top tech companies have been on edge, fearing that the Trump administration could seek to regulate the industry in response to the president’s tweets attacking social media sites for silencing conservatives online. Their worst suspicions seemed to come true Friday night, with the emergence of a draft executive order that called for nearly every federal agency to study how companies like Facebook police their platforms and refer instances of “bias” to the Justice Department for further study.
👓 Wil Wheaton Leaves Mastodon | jeffmueller.net
I’m done with social media. Maybe I just don’t fit into whatever the social media world is. I mean, the people who are all over the various Mastodon instances made it really clear that I wasn’t welcome there (with a handful of notable, joyful, exceptions, mostly related to my first baby steps ...
👓 The Last Goodbye | Path: Simple, Personal Social Networking
It is with deep regret that we announce that we will stop providing our beloved service, Path.
We started Path in 2010 as a small team of passionate and experienced designers and engineers. Over the years we have tried to lay out our mission: through technology and design we aim to be a source of happiness, meaning, and connection to our users. Along our journey we have laughed and cried with you, and learned valuable lessons. And it is now inevitable to wind down the service to prioritize our work to serve you with better products and services. It has been a long journey and we sincerely thank each one of you for your years of love and support for Path.
The specific shutdown schedule is as below:
- 9.17.2018 : Notice on Path service discontinuation
- 10.1.2018: Unable to download/update the app in iTunes and Google Play
- 10.18.2018: Termination of the Service (Unable to access to Path)
- 11.15.2018: Path related customer service will be closedThe Path service and Terms of Use governing your use of Path will terminate on [10.18.2018].
Prior to [10.18.2018], you can restore retrieve a copy of your data (i.e. your images, text, videos) by following below steps:
1. Visit https://path.com/settings/backups
2. Log in with your Path account
3. Click the button and enter email address that you wish to receive the backup files
OR
1. Open your Path app and go to Setting
2. Click the button and enter your email address that you would like to receive the backup files.
*Please make sure that your Path app is the latest ver.Please note that you will not be able to access the backup service site after [10.18.2018]. We may not retain copies of any of your data on and from that date. Accordingly, you are encouraged to download and keep copies of your data if you wish to have access from [10.18.2018].
I do notice that because part of the service’s cachet was either private or limited audience posts, that a lot of my early posting (from 11/29/10 to around December 2014) included photographs that I posted directly to Path and didn’t share very widely. As a result, a lot of my early posting wasn’t done from my own website, so I’m requesting a downloadable backup of all my data before the service goes under. If you used the service, I hope you’re requesting your download as well.
It’s kind of sad that amidst the toxicity of Twitter which gamifies following that a service that limited following and focused on the small and personal is collapsing.
Thanks for all the laughs and fun Path, and thanks for giving at least some warning before shutting down all your servers with all of that user data.
Mostly I’m glad that I’m able to post most of my content to my own site now without the reliance on third party social networks to save and maintain my data. If you’re worried about how social services use and abuse your data or may disappear with it altogether–Path will not be the last–and want more control over it, stop by IndieWeb.org to see how you can take back your online identity and data. I and many others are always happy to help those who are interested.