Via Ross Dawson on LinkedIn: "A core part of human intelligence is the ability to work flexibly with others to achieve both individual and collective goals". Unfortunately, intelligence is usually considered as a property of individual or collective, never both, and so "not in a way that can be used to understand how groups can make…

From the basic Nostr intro video - "Nostr: Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays is a simple protocol that allows users to sign and share notes using websockets". Users use their cryptographic key pair to sign a note, verifying its source.NIPS are "Nostr implementation possibilities ... standards allow clients to communicate .…

"The new social layer allows us to meet the needs of those who want a completely open “town square” and those who prioritize carefully managed and curated experiences... Private companies cannot be public squares, but protocols can be".While Nostr or Farcaster can be "censorship-resistant because ... no one can send them deletion re…

My mid November 2024 newsletter summarises how a deep dive into Bluesky has changed how I view #AI4Communities, and summarises some of the most influential things I've read recently.

Bluesky's announcement of their open-sourcing of "Ozone, our collaborative moderation tool... individuals and teams can work together to review and label content", coupled with the ability for people and communities to "run your own independent moderation services, seamlessly integrated into the Bluesky app".This enables &…

Good intro to Bluesky custom feeds on the "Skyfeed ... third party app that helps you manage and organize you Bluesky experience. Within Skyfeed is a custom Feed Builder", which tbh is probably the only reason to use Skyfeed - the interface takes some getting used to.By the time I read this I'd already created my first custom feed u…

My late October 2024 newsletter introduces my ongoing work exploring #AI4Communities, and provides some of the resources going into the next version.

I think I'll call these 'centaur papers' - scientific papers describing how best to combine human and AI.Apparently theory and practice aren't matching up: "While frameworks on augmentation theorize how to best divide work between humans and AI, the empirical literature ... [shows] inconclusive findings. Interaction challe…

"Decentralizing the Web means people ... store their data wherever they want, while still getting the services they need... requires major changes in the way we develop applications... In this post, I discuss three paradigm shifts a decentralized Web brings"Rather than "accept package deals we cannot customize", redecentralisin…

According to Mark Zuckerberg, "Consumers no longer control their social-media feeds. Meta’s algorithm... is showing users “a lot of stuff” not posted by people they had connected with... future feeds [will] show you “content that’s generated by an A.I. system.”" Fortunately, "Our legal system is starting to recognize this shift and …

"Only people can trust, but only machines scale well. Today’s websites and apps are built to compensate for an absence of trust, rather than to support its growth."Instead we have the 'I accept' button: "we know we are lying the moment we touch it, as does the author of the legalese no one expects anyone to read. Navigatin…

Brander with a great intro to the role Nostr could play in tomorrow's online landscape. A choice of architecturesWalled gardens of surveillance capitalismHe starts by walking us through the various architectures, starting with that "of a typical app: a big centralized server in the cloud supporting many clients... grants the server tota…

As AI drives a flood of new content, "algorithms to help people sort through information must evolve rapidly" - ie, we need AI to solve AI-created problems.Today's algorithms belong to for-profit platforms, mainly social media, and lack transparency: while you can influence it through who you follow, "your ability to truly cust…

The Brave browser project shows that it was ahead of the curve back in late 2023, pointing out:to train an LLM you need training data which is "diverse... span[ning] a wide variety of genres, topics, viewpoints, languages, and more... [to] reduce the errors, biases, and misrepresentations that might be more pronounced in smaller data sets... …

“About one in four people who began the experiment believing a conspiracy theory came out the other end without that belief... challenges conventional wisdom that evidence and arguments rarely help to change believers’ minds... [as they're] adopting such beliefs to meet various needs – such as a desire for control."The researchers develo…

"The most common AI-based functionalities in participation tools are toxicity screening, analysis of inputs and translation. The first two in particular are meant to lighten the workload" of community managers."Toxicity screening ... is used to flag hateful or inappropriate inputs." Text is usually flagged and post-moderated, b…

"As AI-generated content blurs the line between human and machine online, “model collapse” might help us find new value in well-managed human communities."

Profile of New_Public, founded by Eli Pariser of Filter Bubble and Upworthy fame, and Deepti Doshi "from from Meta, where she’d spent much of her tenure leading the company’s Community Partnerships... supporting, Facebook group admins... as well as UT Austin professor Talia Stroud, who remains on the board, and their drive to stimulate "…

"What happens to GPT generations GPT-{n} as n increases?... the use of LLMs at scale to publish content on the Internet will pollute the collection of data to train their successors: data about human interactions with LLMs will be increasingly valuable."

The Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure's manifesto sets out the three legs upon which an open public sphere must rest.

"The indiscriminate proliferation of AI-generated content will not empower the underrepresented or democratise knowledge creation... [but] dilute and fragment the authenticity and reliability of information ... the discerning judgment of human curators is the only defence against misinformation and mediocrity".Why? Human curators :"…

The 3rd part of my 1/1/2023 bundle of 5 posts looks at how AI could turbocharge collective intelligence "and finance the resulting ecosystem, providing an alternative to Big Tech AI monopolies".

The second in my 1/1/2023 bundle of 5 posts exploring collective intelligence looks at the role of decentralised social networks: "A personalised, decentralised Social Knowledge Graph for each user multiplies the knowledge available to them via a trusted network of Followers and Friends, and creating collaborative possibilities more akin to w…

"I first decided to try scribing the Betaworx Render session on Plexus using Obsidian and try publishing it via GitHub (context). That didn't work, so when I saw [[rtnf md]] I thought I'd give it a whirl... the idea [of Plexus] is simple:post your thoughts into a defined shared brain on Plexus - eg : https://render.plexus.earth/the …

"Most criticisms lodged against the content creators that chose to work with the platforms are made with the benefit of hindsight... the decision many publishers made to close down their comment sections should be considered one of the industry’s worst blunders.... editors looked down into their article comments sections and did not like what…

reddit community called Change My View ... a ready-made natural experiment ... feed it into programs ... to understand the back-and-forth between human beings ... discovered two things: what kind of arguments are most likely to change people’s minds, and what kinds of minds are most likely to be changed. https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/ : po…