Overview: Social Web

"In physics... the Observer Effect. Electrons, photons ... behave differently when under our gaze... Social media has made us both the observed and the observers, trapped in a relentless cycle of performing and watching... the line between genuine human expression and algorithm-driven self-parody has dissolved into a soup of memes, virtue vs…

"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…

"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…

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…

Basically a restatement of echo chambers, using the language of AI."Like an AI trained on its own output, they’re growing increasingly divorced from reality, and are reinforcing their own worst habits of thought".A good definition of model collapse: "the AI is primarily talking to, and learning from, itself, and this creates a self-…

Classic example of a negative view on LinkedIn: "Unlike many others, I don’t think any reinforcement learning or reward algorithm is at play... appears to be a generic Chain-of-Thought (CoT) process that breaks tasks into several steps... Subsequent steps ... generated based on context... subsequent interactions concatenated into the context.…

“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."

An interesting take: governments should ensure "that news outlets, digital platforms, and political leaders provide the best available knowledge" and enshrine a new to not "be lied to by the powerful" in a world optimised for enragement: "one study showing that each additional negative word in a headline increased the clic…

Good piece on how "the free speech warriors... [behind] Truth Social and the ... decay of Twitter ... the “Festung” cities of unrestricted expression... still not happy... shouting into an echo chamber isn’t nearly as satisfying as they thought it would be... What they’re really after ... is our attention... The thrill of provocation quickly…

After so many years of spam, splog, slop, phishing and above all trolling, "Our guard is up. Our filters are activated. Our default mode is suspicion", something that's only going to get worse with AI: are those photos too good to be true? Can that video actually be real? Is that a spambot, or just "someone who isn’t neurotypic…

A podcast with Charles Broskoski. founder of Arena, which "boasts a healthy, creative community and stable finances while rejecting many of the hallmarks of popular social media".

Applying Dawkins' selfish gene perspective to the evolution of AI

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

Michael Foster's "top ten unfinished building blocks" are:trust & safety: "heart of an ethical social web... [currently] delegated to a small group of volunteers... [but] green shoots emerging"spam filters: "there are some amazing tools now... Pixelfed has shown what can be done"safe spaces / bridging & f…

"A deep dive into Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone", over 20 years later, by "former New_ Public Research Fellow Serena Chao".Social capital, according to Putnam, "is the “connections among individuals — social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them”... [making] a strong case for a…

Anuj Ahooja asks, on Threads' first birthday, the "existential question... Why does Threads exist? ... an alternative to Elon Musk's X. But ... a platform can't exist to be "an alternative." It should be able to stand alone with its unique purpose and be built to incentivize users to follow that purpose... [unfortunat…

"Channels enable any user to create a curated feed with a mix of post type, hashtags, lists, filters and mutes. Customised timelines which anyone can post to via their app or web UI, or by using a dedicated hashtag or emoji."This exists already outside the Fediverse: "The Farcaster app, Warpcast, has a fully formed and fast growing …

What happens when we make machines "that we can’t help but treat them as people"?While "GPT-4o doesn’t represent a huge leap ... it more than makes up in features that make it feel more human... an ability to “see” and respond to images and live video in real time, to respond conversationally ... to “read” human emotions from visual…

Interesting ideas but innocent of how they could create as much harm as good."The internet caters to our baser interests... like wanting to be healthy, but finding yourself in a food court where the only options are burgers and milkshakes. What option do we have but to be our baser selves?... But what if we created an arena of virtue ... wou…

Micro.blog ... combines blog hosting with a social media-style timeline and community" - yet another blogging platform, but interesting features and pricing for myhub:paid hosting from $5-15 / m, can use own domain, custom themes, css from short to full posts, automated photo gallery, podcast and videosbookmarking: an archive of web page book…

"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 :"…

One of the snippets from a ZNLive interview I did in December 2023: "emerging social media platforms like Mastodon and Bluesky face a humorous yet real challenge - they're like "Twitter, but without your friends."With the European launch of Threads, the question arises: Can it offer a unique appeal to draw users? Will [they]...…

One of my favourite writers/thinkers on all things digital future is "finally, definitely, fully leaving X, and probably all social media..."

A repost of one of my experiments with the massive.wiki team, where we "developed an approach ... which simultaneously enriches blogging by adding some of the best aspects of wikis, and allows wikis to better host something resembling blogs."

ChatGPT-powered, the "‘My AI’ bot will ... initially only available for $3.99 a month Snapchat Plus subscribers.., eventually all... we’re going to talk to AI every day" - useful, if you're a messaging service.It's a "fast mobile-friendly version of ChatGPT inside Snapchat... trained to adhere to the company’s trust and sa…

When James West "joined a small wave of users granted early access" to the new Bing (I'll call and tag it "BingGPT"), powered by the same LLM behind ChatGPT, which is "a great party trick ... powerful work tool, capable of jumpstarting creativity, automating mundane tasks", he soon "noticed strange inconsist…