social media | Chris Aldrich

Listened to @ Future of Web Apps: Google's Kevin Marks on social networking trends by

Jemima Kiss from the Guardian

Kevin Marks, Google's developer advocate for Open Social, talked today about the unpredictable, organic growth of social networks

Jemima Kiss interviews Kevin about Open Social at FOWA. Thu 9 Oct 2008 15.50 EDT

Kevin Marks, Google's developer advocate for Open Social, talked today about the unpredictable, organic growth of social networks. Even the biggest networks have seen their audience bases grow exponentially in unexpected communities; this is partly because of the dynamics of relationships between people, who mostly want to connect - or feel most comfortable connecting to people like themselves.

Despite some derogatory write-ups of Google's Orkut social network in the US press - "it's not a proper social network and is full of Brazilian prostitutes" - it's a perfect example of a social networking site with a strong community in one language. A community tends to mould the site to its own culture, which makes it less appealing for other languages and cultures. Clearly those with a strong English-language audience have a big advantage, despite the cultural differences of the Anglo-speaking world.

I asked Marks to explain a bit more about trends in social networking and how Open Social is trying to both facilitate growth, and respond to change. Open Social doesn't have a three-year road map, but is constantly adjusting its templates around the mapping of social information.

Some interesting philosophy of social networks from 2008 that’s still broadly applicable today. This sort of design thinking is something that IndieWeb as a service platforms like Micro.blog, WithKnown, WordPress, and others will want to keep in mind as they build.

People tend to be members of more than one network for a reason.

Originally bookmarked on December 06, 2019 at 09:00PM

Read a Twitter thread by

Mx. Aria Stewart (Twitter)

It just crystallized for me what I think has been mistaken about thinking of unwanted interaction on social networks as a "privacy" problem. It's not.

A privacy problem is things becoming known more widely than they should, subject to surveillance and contextless scrutiny.

The onslaught of sexual harassment on platforms like early Twitter (and later twitter for people of notability), @KeybaseIO, every naive social network is an attack on the right to exist in public. It is the inverse of a privacy problem.

But the conceiving of this as a privacy problem brings the wrong solutions. It means we are offered tools to remove ourselves from public view, to restrict our public personas, to retreat from public life. It means women are again confined to private sphere, denied civic life.

It's so endemic, so entrenched, and so normal that women should have to retreat to protect ourselves that we think of this as part of femininity. A strong civic life is seen as unfeminine, forward. It poisons us politically, socially, and personally.

It is, at its core, an attack on democracy as well.

The only way to undo this is to reconceive of this, not as a privacy problem but as an attack on public life. There will be new problems with this but at least they will be new.

There has been work done on this, but I've never seen it connected to civic life, and this connects with my thoughts and work on community. The unit that social networks must focus on cannot be the individual. We do not exist as individuals first but as members of our communities

When a new user joins a social network, their connection must be to their peers, their existing social relationships. A new user can only be onboarded in the context of relationships already on the network.

Early adopters form such a community, but extrapolating from the joining of those initial members to how to scale the network misses the critical transition: from no community to the first, not from the first users to the next.

New communities can only be onboarded by connections from individuals that span communities. New communities must be onboarded collectively, or the network falls to the army of randos.

The irony is that surveillance capitalism has the information to do this but not the will, because as objects of marketing, we are individuals, statistics and demographics, not communities. The reality lies in plain sight.

There have been attempts at social networks, sadly none dense enough to succeed, but that treat people as part of a web, and that their peers can shield and protect them. The idea is solid.

The other alternative is to stop trying to give people a solitary identity, a profile and onboarding to a flat network, but instead only provide them with community connections. Dreamwidth is this to a large degree, if too sparse for most people to connect.

Our social networks must connect us, not to our "friends" but to our communities. The ones that succeed do this by intent or by accident.

Facebook has a narrow view of community, but for those it matches, it works. With major flaws, but it does.

Twitter, its community of early adopters, its creepy onboarding by uploading your contacts and mining data to connect you works. If I were to join and follow a few people I know, it would rapidly suggest many more people in my queer and trans community. It works.

And this is why Ello failed. This is why Diaspora failed. This is why Mastodon succeeded, if only by scraping by the bare minimum. This is why gnu social failed. This is why a random vbulletin forum can succeed. The ones that succeed connect a dense community.

Note that gnu social and mastodon are the same protocol! But they are different social networks. The difference in their affordances and the community structures they encourage are vastly different, despite interoperating.

I'd say I don't know how apparent this problem is to white men — the ones largely designing these networks — but I do know. I know because of the predictable failures we see.

Part of this, I think boils down to how invisible community is when you are the default user.

At no time am I unaware that I am trans, that I am a woman, that the people I follow and who follow me are distinct from the background. I can spot my people in a crowd on the internet with precision, just like a KNN clustering can.

Trans culture in particular is Extremely Online. We are exceptionally easy to onboard to a new platform. But the solution can scale if we focus on solving it. And by knowing who is in the community (likely) and who is not, we can understand what is and is not harassment.

We don't need to even know what the communities are — Twitter does not — and yet it knows how we cluster, and that suffices.

If we stop thinking of this as a privacy problem — letting us hide from the connections that are our solution — we can enlarge public life.

That exceptional article —

That Uplifting Tweet You Just Shared? A Russian Troll Sent ItMusic, Film, TV and Political News Coveragehttps://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/russia-troll-2020-election-interference-twitter-916482/

— about how bots sow division shows us another facet of this problem and way of thinking. Conceiving of this as a privacy problem fundamentally reacts with division when solidarity is needed.

We can only fight this with a new, loose solidarity and an awareness of community boundaries. We can build technology that makes space for us to be safe online by being present with those that support us, and react together, rather than as individuals and separating us for safety

This thread has meandered a bit, but I'm dancing around something important. We fundamentally need to stop organizing online activity the way we do. Follow and be followed is not where it's at.

It's join, manage attention, build connection.

Stop sorting things topically and trying to find connections in content.

Start looking for clusters of relationships between people.

The question should not be "what is this about?" but "who is this for?"

Some interesting ideas on social hiding in here.

Followed Dr. Alexandra Samuel (alexandrasamuel.com)

I am a freelance writer, researcher and speaker, and the author of Work Smarter with Social Media: A Guide to Managing Evernote, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Your Email (Harvard Business Review Press, 2015). My work helps people and organizations cope with the transition to a digital world by tackling everything from the business and social impact of big-picture trends like the emergence of the collaborative economy, to the nitty-gritty of making productive use of digital tools.

I am a regular contributor to The Wall Street Journal, The Harvard Business Review and The Christian Science Monitor’s Passcode, and the digital columnist for JSTOR Daily. My writing on technology issues has appeared in media outlets like Macworld, Oprah.com, The Atlantic.com, The Toronto Star, CBC Radio, Business 2.0, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. I am a frequent commentator on tech stories, appearing regularly in broadcast and print to talk about the business of tech, the latest digital scandals or the drama of managing kids’ screen time.

My perspective on the tech world is informed by my experience as a web strategist and by my research background. I am the former Vice President of Social Media at Vision Critical, a customer intelligence software provider, where I worked with the company’s F1000 customers to develop innovative approaches to social media research and to deliver groundbreaking reports like Sharing is the New Buying and What Social Media Analytics Can’t Tell You About Your Customers. Before joining Vision Critical, I was the Director of the Social + Interactive Media Centre at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, where I worked on applied research challenges with BC-based companies.

As the founder and principal with Social Signal, one of the world’s first social media agencies, I have shaped the online strategy for a wide range of online community projects, including Tyze, Change Everything and NetSquared. This work builds on my consulting, research and writing on online community and civic participation by harnessing the latest generation of web tools — tools like blogging, Facebook, Twitter, and RSS — to the challenge of community engagement.

Read What Happened to Tagging? by

Aaron Davis (Read Write Collect)

Alexandra Samuel reflects on tagging and its origins as a backbone to the social web. Along with RSS, tags allowed users to connect and collate content using such tools as feed readers. This all changed with the advent of social media and the algorithmically curated news feed. Samuel wonders if we h...

Alexander Samuel reflects on tagging and its origins as a backbone to the social web. Along with RSS, tags allowed users to connect and collate content using such tools as feed readers. This all changed with the advent of social media and the algorithmically curated news feed. ❧

Tags were used for discovery of specific types of content. Who needs that now that our new overlords of artificial intelligence and algorithmic feeds can tell us what we want to see?!

Of course we still need tags!!! How are you going to know serendipitously that you need more poetry in your life until you run into the tag on a service like IndieWeb.xyz? An algorithmic feed is unlikely to notice–or at least in my decade of living with them I’ve yet to run into poetry in one.
–December 04, 2019 at 10:56AM

Watched What obligation do social media platforms have to the greater good? by

Eli Pariser from ted.com

Social media has become our new home. Can we build it better? Taking design cues from urban planners and social scientists, technologist Eli Pariser shows how the problems we're encountering on digital platforms aren't all that new -- and shares how, by following the model of thriving towns and cities, we can create trustworthy online communities.

I liked Pariser’s idea of a video facepalm UI around the 12:25 mark.

I also loved the analogy of Facebook and 1970’s New York… I was sort of surprised at the audience applause at his comment, but this is such a heartwarming sign.

Listened to Designed to Intimidate from On the Media | WNYC Studios

Millions tuned into impeachment hearings this week — the first two of five already scheduled. On this week’s show, why shifts in public opinion may not necessarily sway the GOP. Plus, what we can learn from the predatory tactics that enriched Bill Gates.

1. Nicole Hemmer [@pastpunditry], author of Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics, on the false premise underlying hope for President Trump's removal. Listen.

2. John Dean [@JohnWDean] former White House counsel, on the lessons he's applying from Watergate to the impeachment hearings for President Trump. Listen.

3. Former Labor Secretary Rob Reich [@RBReich] and Goliath author Matt Stoller [@matthewstoller] on how billionaires like Bill Gates use their power and wealth to force their vision on society. Listen.

IndieWeb is the beginning of the end of the gilded age of social media. Major corporations like Facebook, Twitter, et al. have made having an internet presence and communicating with others simple and free. We now know that their definition of “free” is far from our definition.

It’s like the drug dealer who says you can get bribed or you can get a bullet. […] What you always see with monopolists who control an important platform: they use control of that platform to take control of markets that have to live on that platform.

— Matt Stoller, a Fellow at the Open Markets Institute, in On the Media: Designed to Intimidate [November 15, 2019]
Previously, Stoller was a Senior Policy Advisor and Budget Analyst to the Senate Budget Committee and also worked in the US House of Representatives on financial services policy, including Dodd-Frank, the Federal Reserve, and the foreclosure crisis.

Facebook values you at around $158.^[1]

Facebook profits off of its 1.4 billion daily users in a big way: According to its most recent filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the average revenue per user in 2017 was $20.21 ($6.18 in the fourth quarter alone). Users in the U.S. and Canada were worth even more because of how big the markets are.

—Money.com in March 2018

Now that you know what you and your data are worth, why not invest in yourself instead?

For about $5 a month or $60 a year, you can pay for an account on micro.blog and have a full suite of IndieWeb tools at your disposal. It’s simple, beautiful, but most importantly it gives you control of your own data and an open and independent presence on the entire web instead of a poor simulacrum of it walled away from everyone else. Of course there are other options available as well, just ask how you can get started.

Watched Connecting to the IndieWeb Movement by

Jim Groom from bavatuesdays

Tomorrow at 12 PM Eastern/ 9 AM Pacific I’ll be be hosting a Connected Courses discussion that will explore the IndieWeb movement as a people-centered response to the corporate web. How do core IndieWeb principles such as owning your content, remaining better connected, and redefining control online intersect with the values of connected learning? Take a bit of time tomorrow and join myself, Mikhail Gershovich, Ben Werdmuller, Erin Jo Richey, and Simon Thomson to find out more.

I particularly love how they all underline the humanity that should and does underlie the web. This is certainly a classic for the area of IndieWeb and education. I’m not sure how I hadn’t seen this before.

[Withknown is] the posterchild of the IndieWeb.
— Jim Groom

I’ll agree that it is pretty darn awesome!

Some slight rephrasings from Ben in the video that I thought were spot on:

IndieWeb: allowing people to connect online without caring about what platforms or services they’re using.

IndieWeb puts the learner first. The LMS, which primarily serves an administrative function, should not be the center of the process.