social media | Chris Aldrich

👓 Two alternatives to #WomenBoycottTwitter that don’t rely on women’s silencing | Another Angry Woman

Read Two alternatives to #WomenBoycottTwitter that don’t rely on women’s silencing by Zoe Stavri (Another Angry Woman)

After Twitter extending their risible “abuse” policy to a suspension of a celebrity white woman speaking out against sexual violence, the problems in their model have been laid bare, and to my pleasant surprise, people are talking about taking action (I’d been pessimistic about this). Unfortunately, it’s entirely the wrong kind of action: a women’s boycott. This is a problem, because once again, it forces us to do the heavy lifting. And once again, it forces us to silence ourselves: the very opposite of what we should be doing. So, here’s two things that can be done. One is an activity for men who consider themselves allies. The other is for all of us. Especially women.

I took part in #WomenBoycottTwitter today and it honestly wasn’t too difficult, though I did miss out on some of the scientific chatter that crosses my desk during the day. Since I post mostly to my own website more often and syndicate to Twitter only occasionally, the change didn’t feel too drastic to me, though there were one or two times I almost accidentally opened Twitter to track down people’s sites. Fortunately I’ve taken control of more of my online experience back for myself using IndieWeb principles.

This particular post has some seemingly interesting methods for fighting against the status quo on Twitter for those who are entrenched though. The first #AmplifyWomen sounds a lot like the great advice I heard from Valerie Alexander a few months ago at an Innovate Pasadena event.

Some of the others almost seek to reverse-gamify Twitter’s business model. People often complain about silos and how they work, but few ever seek to actively subvert or do this type of reverse-gamification of those models. This is an interesting concept though to be as useful tools as they might be, it may be somewhat difficult to accomplish in some cases and may hamper one’s experience on such platforms. This being said, having ultimate control over your domain, data, and interactions is still a far preferable model.

And while we’re thinking about amplifying women, do take a look at some of Zoe’s other content, she’s got a wealth of good writing. I’ll be adding her to my follow list/reader.

h/t Richard Eriksson

👓 Towards a more democratic Web | Tara Vancil

Read Towards a more democratic Web by Tara Vancil (Tara Vancil)

Many people who have suffered harassment on Twitter (largely women), are understandably fed up with Twitter’s practices, and have staged a boycott of Twitter today October 13, 2017. Presumably the goal is to highlight the flaws in Twitter’s moderation policies, and to push the company to make meaningful changes in their policies, but I’d like to argue that we shouldn’t expect Twitter’s policies to change.

I think I believe Tara when she says about Twitter:

It’s not going to get better.

I think there are a lot of people, including myself, who also think like she does here:

I want online media to work much more like a democracy, where users are empowered to decide what their experience is like.

The difference for her is that she’s actively building something to attempt to make things better not only for herself, but for others. This is tremendously laudable.

I’d heard of her project Beaker and Mastodon before, but hadn’t heard anything before about Patchwork, which sounds rather interesting.

h/t Richard Eriksson for highlighting this article on Reading.am though I would have come across it tomorrow morning likely in my own feed reader.

👓 Twitter CEO promises to crack down on hate, violence and harassment with “more aggressive” rules | Tech Crunch

Read Twitter CEO promises to crack down on hate, violence and harassment with “more aggressive” rules by Matthew Panzarino (Tech Crunch)

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey took to…Twitter today to promise a “more aggressive” stance in its rules and how it enforces them. The tweet storm was based in a response to the #WomenBoycottTwitter protest, as well as work that Dorsey says Twitter has been working ‘intensely’ on over the past few months. Dorsey says that critical decisions were made today in how to go about preventing the rampant and vicious harassment many women, minorities and other users undergo daily on the platform. “We decided to take a more aggressive stance in our rules and how we enforce them,” Dorsey says. “New rules around: unwanted sexual advances, non-consensual nudity, hate symbols, violent groups, and tweets that glorifies violence. These changes will start rolling out in the next few weeks. More to share next week.”

I don’t have very high hopes for the climate changing on this issue though I did participate in the Twitter boycott today.

📺 The Decentralized Social Web by Keith J. Grant

Bookmarked The Decentralized Social Web by Keith J. Grant (Recall Act)

We tend to have a love/hate relationship with social networks. The ability to interact with friends, colleagues, and even celebrities is wonderful, but the lack of control over privacy or content algorithms is troubling. A better way lies ahead, where you aren't tied to large social networks and where you can own your own data. Recorded at Atlanta Connect.Tech 2017 on 9/21/2017

https://player.vimeo.com/video/237349014

A few weeks back Keith gave a great non-platform specific overview to some of the moving pieces of the IndieWeb at Connect.Tech 2017 in Atlanta. I wish I could have been there in person, but glad that it was archived on video for posterity.

Somehow I managed to get a mention in his talk as did our friend Jeremy Cherfas.

The slides for his talk are archived, naturally, on his own website.

👓 Unverified | Hack Education

Read Unverified by Audrey Watters (Hack Education)

I’ve tried half a dozen times now to get my Twitter account verified. Each time, I’ve been rejected. “We reviewed the account, and unfortunately it is not eligible to be verified at this time.”

I’m surprised that Twitter wouldn’t verify Audrey, particularly given her body of written work and the journalistic nature of some of it. Most of the verified people I know are writers and/or journalists. I’m half tempted to create several impersonating accounts so she can claim to need verification for that reason.

👓 Relicensing React, Jest, Flow, and Immutable.js | Facebook

Read Relicensing React, Jest, Flow, and Immutable.js by Adam Wolff (Facebook)

Next week, we are going to relicense our open source projects React, Jest, Flow, and Immutable.js under the MIT license. We're relicensing these projects because React is the foundation of a broad ecosystem of open source software for the web, and we don't want to hold back forward progress for nontechnical reasons. This decision comes after several weeks of disappointment and uncertainty for our community. Although we still believe our BSD + Patents license provides some benefits to users of our projects, we acknowledge that we failed to decisively convince this community.

This won’t bode well for large portions of the web…

👓 The botnet cometh | PushPullFork

Read The botnet cometh by Kris Shaffer (Kris Shaffer)

This morning, I woke up to several hundred notifications on Twitter. But these weren't your regular spam.

👓 Facebook Figured Out My Family Secrets, And It Won’t Tell Me How | Gizmodo

Read Facebook Figured Out My Family Secrets, And It Won't Tell Me How by Kashmir Hill (Gizmodo)

Rebecca Porter and I were strangers, as far as I knew. Facebook, however, thought we might be connected. Her name popped up this summer on my list of “People You May Know,” the social network’s roster of potential new online friends for me.

👓 Show authors more ❤️ with 👏’s | Medium

Read Introducing Claps, a new way to react on Medium by Katie Zhu (Medium)

Rolling out to Medium users over the coming week will be a new, more satisfying way for readers to give feedback to writers. We call it “Claps.” It’s no longer simply whether you like, or don’t like, something. Now you can give variable levels of applause to a story. Maybe clap once, or maybe 10 or 20 times. You’re in control and can clap to your heart’s desire.

Yet another way to “like” a post….

This reminds me a lot of Path’s pivot to stickers. We all know how relevant it has made them since.

And all this just after Netflix, the company that has probably done more research on ranking than any other, has gone from a multi-star intent to a thumbs up/thumbs down in the past month.

Most of the measurements social media and other companies are really trying to make are signal to noise ratios as well as creating some semblance of dynamic range. A simple thumbs up creates almost no dynamic range compared to thumbs up/nothing/thumbs-down. Major platforms drive enough traffic that the SNR all comes out in the wash. Without the negative intent (dis-like, thumbs down, etc.) we’re missing out on some important data. It’s almost reminiscent to the science community only publishing their positive results and not the negative results. As a result scientific research is losing a tremendous amount of value.

We need to be more careful what we’re doing and why…