Category: The Dark Forest of the Internet

Categories
Data Custody Privacy and Anonymity The Dark Forest of the Internet Wellness when Always-On

Aggressively reporting spam for everyone’s sake

We’ve often spoken on this site about ad and tracker spam on the web. But this year there’s also been an increase in spam across other mediums – phone, SMS, Whatsapp, Linkedin, Twitter and email. It’s likely this is partly because there are vastly fewer people outdoors, making any form of real-world advertising and messaging ineffective.

In any case, our messaging apps are our highest-priority inboxes. We leave notifications on because chat is both asynchronous and real-time, both personal and work related. That’s why spam on these messaging apps make a higher claim on our attention than, say, email.

Given how fragile and limited our attention is , we must take such casual abuse of attention very seriously. Each of these apps has methods to report and/or block spam. We should all use them mercilessly. It just makes your life better.

But not only is the payoff high for you, your effort makes other people’s online lives better too, by taking spammer accounts offline. None of the services we’ve listed above – and others ones you use – are decentralised. Certainly not Whatsapp, Linkedin, Twitter. Email’s become synonymous with Gmail. Your reporting and marking as spam blacklists that account for everyone else on the service. We have often discussed the dangers of ceding control of your data to large tech companies, but in this case we can use it to our advantage.

Spam is a community problem – and the only way we’ll tackle it is as a community.

Phone and SMS

India has had a do-not-distrub regulatory framework for dealing with spam for over ten years now. First, find out from your mobile operator how to get on the do-not-call registry. As of this writing, you can also send ‘START 0’ as an SMS to 1909 to opt-out of all promotional messages – but as with most government services, this doesn’t always work.

Then install the TRAI DND reporting app (iOS App Store, Google Play Store). Report every single spam SMS and phone call you get. Here’s me reporting spam:

Here’s a screenshot of my operator confirming complaints from other spammers:

I’m sure this doesn’t work 100%. See this article from the publication Moneylife on TRAI’s ineffectiveness. But I have seen a sharp decline in the SMS and phone spam I receive now versus a couple of years ago.

Email

On Gmail, when you report as spam, don’t bother with the ‘report spam and unsubscribe’ option that Gmail presents you. Bad actors take your unsubscribe response itself as proof that your account is active, resulting in further spam. Just stick to ‘report spam’:

If you’re using Gmail in another email app like Apple’s Mail.app, don’t mark as spam in that app – that feeds Apple’s filters. Take the trouble of addressing the problem at its source – go to the Gmail site or the Gmail app and mark as spam there.

Messaging apps

As for Whatsapp and Linkedin and other messaging services – reporting and blocking is 100% effective for you, and goes a long way to making sure that account doesn’t bother anyone else:

We are even more powerful on these new mediums: Whatsapp is tied to your phone number. If enough people report a spammer on Whatsapp, we’ll end up knocking that number off the service. The spammer now needs to get a new phone number, which requires going to a store and performing KYC. And yes, KYC in India can be spoofed, but the costs of getting a new number and a new SIM card are much higher than creating hundreds of new email addresses to spam from.

We can win

Just as spamming is asymmetric – a small number of spammers can impact many orders of magnitude more people – marking as spam is also asymmetrical. It only takes a small number of us to take a lot of spammers offline.

Let’s do this.

(Featured image photo credit: Nadine Shaabana/Unsplash)

Categories
Audience as Capital Discovery and Curation The Dark Forest of the Internet

Newsletters, feedback and interactivity

Mark Manson, on how his newsletter is different from his blog:

each Monday, three of my ideas go out to around half a million people. And each week, anywhere from a couple hundred to a couple thousand of you reply with your thoughts, disagreements, and suggestions. There’s an accountability and immediacy to the relationship that I have not felt since my early days as a blogger.

In the early months, I still treated it similar to how I treated my website: I wrote up declarative, advice-driven content with a kind of finality to it and posted it, thinking that was that.

… [but] by incorporating feedback, disagreements, and follow-up topics, the newsletter morphs into a kind of slow-moving conversation, where I can revisit topics and update prior beliefs with new information.

That baked-in feedback mechanism and willingness to evolve and improve upon itself is something that’s sorely lacking from public discourse at the moment. It’s not present in the media in any significant way. Blogging used to be like that, but blogging hardly exists anymore. And it was never possible on social media

It’s great for Mark that he’s found a medium that has both reach and interactivity. I know first-hand what it is to publish posts, see stats about them being read, but not hear back from those readers.

Blogs are in fact better suited to interactivity than newsletters. With a newsletter, your reply goes only to the writer. With a comment on a blog, you’re posting to both the writer and everyone else who reads the blog. You’d expect a robust community of loyal readers to be built around blog comments.

However, distribution trumps everything. it’s hard to follow blogs – RSS remains niche, despite the great variety of web and app based RSS readers available. Everyone has an email address, so everyone can follow someone who writes a newsletter. Email is the ultimate publish-subscribe medium.

End note: I’m wondering if chat apps like Telegram will ever replace email for newsletters. It’s hard to match email’s distribution, but orders of magnitude more people use chat apps than RSS readers. Outside of work, people now use chat much more than email. Today, for most of the world, Whatsapp is their main communication channel, and a few people I know use Whatsapp as a distribution list for stuff they publish. I’ve yet to see a community built on Whatsapp though in the manner I have on Telegram. I think it’ll only be a matter of time before you see this happen.

Categories
Discovery and Curation Privacy and Anonymity The Dark Forest of the Internet Wellness when Always-On

Different Time Bubbles

Recently I’d been dealing with some unexpected developments that required me to take a break from a few communities I was part of. When I returned I asked one community member what I’d missed. She remarked that everything I’d missed was “all captured in a different time bubble” that I could catch up on “at some point or the other”.

Beautiful.

But it’s also how I’ve thought of the many Alternate Realities we all inhabit online now. I described how I use Twitter Lists to privately follow different interests – space and astronomy, the Indian Forest Service, other wildlife, crypto, internet infrastructure, the Twitter handles of a community of startup founders I’m part of, and many others. I explicitly think of these as parallel universes running on their own time, universes I can teleport into and out of by simply toggling between list views. Ditto with Reddit’s many subreddits, Discords & Telegram groups.

Some timelines are slow, such as the small writing group I’m part of. You can return to it after a month and pretty easily connect what’s happening now with last time. Others are dizzyingly fast, like river rapids of content. A South East Asia tech community, and Crypto Twitter are like this – you can at best take in the latest snapshot, abandoning the rest for all time. Still other groups aren’t even timelines, like Wildlife Twitter. There’s no narrative. What you see before you at any point is also like what you’ve missed. They are the most peaceful and often the most rewarding to dip into.

I’m hugely excited by how inhabiting multiple personal universes, forming many lightweight and deep connections is now the norm, something we explored in our Alternate Reality series. But viewed another way, this extreme fragmentation is also cause for loneliness – it’s even harder for anyone to know the full you.

(Featured image photo credits: Christian Palmer/Unsplash)

Categories
Audience as Capital Data Custody Decentralisation and Neutrality Discovery and Curation Making Money Online Privacy and Anonymity Real-World Crypto RG.org The Dark Forest of the Internet The Next Computer Wellness when Always-On

300

7th October marks three hundred days since I began writing daily on this website.

While I have written on and off on the site from late 2002, this is the longest publishing streak the site has had. The streak began in December 2019 as something I wanted to do for myself at a time I felt low. It has now become a habit. If I remember correctly, Seth Godin had said on Tim Ferriss’ podcast that at some point after he started writing regularly on his blog, his thinking changed from ‘should I write tomorrow?’ to ‘what should I write about tomorrow?’.

I’ve gotten somewhat comfortable with drafting, writing and scheduling posts for the week ahead. Now I plan to build a healthy information consumption habit. My reading is too scattered, both in subject and in time. It doesn’t leave me with enough time to absorb things and think them through. I plan to trim my reading sources and structure my week so there are distinct chunks for reading, thinking and writing.

Community
This site has always explored questions about how you and I deal with technology in our lives. Those questions are so much more important in 2020 than they were eighteen years ago. My framework to understand this are the Five Megatrends and Five Big Questions.

Ultimately I’d love for the readers of this site to be a community that discusses and helps each other navigate opportunities that tech brings to our lives, and the challenges we face to our mental and physical health and to our relationships: by being conscious that tech serves us instead of us serving tech, or serving those that control tech. About Living Well in the Always-On.

Interested in being an early community member? Get in touch: Email or Twitter.

(Featured image photo credit: Jeff Golenski)

Categories
Data Custody Decentralisation and Neutrality Discovery and Curation Privacy and Anonymity The Dark Forest of the Internet Wellness when Always-On

Alternate realities – Part 3

(Part 2)

8/ And its why real-world consequences of online behaviour, such as the people jailed for merely like-ing a Facebook post critical of politicians, is distressing. As George on Seinfeld cried, World Are Colliding.

9/ All of this works both ways. Communities of fringe loonies will use the same tools to block you from injecting reason into their online dialogue. And when reporting online harassment results in a real-world arrest we are gladdened.

This is a plot point in several movies or books that involve virtual worlds. They are never fully independent of the physical world, and their interaction with the physical isn’t always sanguine. It’s often the case in the real real world. People have been jailed for writing their mind, for sharing videos in jest, even simply liking Facebook posts – usually pricking the fragile ego of a person in power. Mere anonymity is often not enough. Even when you’re all wearing masks, your virtual town square can be invaded by the real-world Basij.

However benevolent and forward-looking the authorities online may be, they’ll clash with – and usually lose against – authorities in the real world. Just look at Twitter’s transparency report regarding data requests from governments. According to themselves, they complied with four out of every ten such requests. Facebook complied with 3 out of every 4 requests, and nearly 90% of requests from the US and the UK.

10/ In any case, this kaleidoscope theory accommodates more of what we are seeing happening than the more common polarisation theory. It posits that polarisation is a special case of the sharding of reality.

Most reporting frames the problem as one of polarisation – like a dumbbell, there is a concentration of people around two diametrically opposite viewpoints.

This is not new: most of the US’ 20th century relationship with the world outside through the lens of communism versus capitalism, never mind those that didn’t care, didn’t matter, were explicitly non-aligned, or had widely varying interpretations of each economic system. It has resulted in a with-us-or-against-us mindset. If you weren’t a committed communist, you were a capitalist pig. If you weren’t for the Vietnam war, you had to be against it – and therefore unpatrioric. Ditto with the 21st century Iraq occupation. Then it was Christianity versus Islam. Today the country’s much more insular, so it’s supposed to be Democrat versus Republican.

In India you’re either a secular, used as a pejorative term, or a mindless devotee of the Hindu right, never mind what secularism was supposed to mean or the many schools of Hinduism. The definitions of each now form narrow edges meant to cleave.

But online, while the war of polar opposites is fomented and waged, myriad cultures form, thrive and die, each with their own biases and rivalries. For the first time they can exist freely and openly without having to pick sides in someone else’s battle. This freedom is important – so far only the privileged have been able to declare themselves against ‘the world’. Now any group that feels marginalised in real life can do so.

11/ Either way, we’d entered this age of infinite realities sometime in the 2010s. The diminishing of the physical space this year marks an inflection point, when a critical mass of us begins defecting into our online realities and being shaped by their cultures.

The pandemic has cause the diminishing of our real world public spaces, making online ones all that much more important. New types of closed communities hog attention – Houseparty, Clubhouse – and several other similar apps – but the other inevitable shift will be to true public spaces. Today there is little other than Twitter.

It’s going to be fantastic to look back in ten years’ time at the movement of people’s social lives to such online worlds – all run by private entities. In a decade, 2020 is going to seem as quaint as the web of twenty five years go – Lycos, DMOZ, Photobucket, Kozmo – seems today.

End note: The other development we haven’t explored in this series is the increasing popularity of game-oriented virtual worlds like Animal Crossing and Minecraft. They fall somewhere between closed communities like groups & subreddits on the one hand and town squares like Twitter. World-building is more deliberate, more visual, more explicit. But they also provide the same sort of open endedness of Twitter and the creation of communities. In fact, as we have seen, of entire economies.

(end)

Featured image photo credit: William Álvarez/Unsplash

Categories
Decentralisation and Neutrality Discovery and Curation Privacy and Anonymity The Dark Forest of the Internet Wellness when Always-On

Alternate realities – Part 2

(Part 1)

5/ The vastness of Twitter is what gives this the scope of a whole reality. A Facebook or Slack group or email list seems closed in comparison, a direct digital analogy of a forum or group meeting. Twitter seems like whole new worlds.

6/ Imagining hundreds of such alternative realities is heartening. This was already true – it’s what we speak of when we speak of VC Twitter, Crypto Twitter, Infosec Twitter. We are now seeing this more evenly distributed.

Twitter is an extraordinary phenomenon, the closest we have to an internet within the Internet. It’s smaller than other social networks, a fraction of Facebook’s size, but its easy publish-subscribe nature gives it a limitless feel that no other comes close to. Twitter’s natural velocity is also faster than, say, Facebook or Instagram. It’s not quite a messaging app, but you don’t see the equivalent of tweet-storms on other networks.

This openness and quickness is a big contributor to multiple subcultures coexisting on the same fabric, and you can plug yourself into any number of them. In its early days Twitter described itself as a giant world-wide town square. It still remains that, and because it’s virtual, you can participate in many simultaneous gatherings in that square, ambiently aware of innumerable such conversations around you. It’s a testament to Twitter’s versatility that it can feel like a vast open space and an echo chamber at the same time.

7/ I think that’s why there’s such pressure on Twitter from its most ardent users for tools to combat trolls and abuse. It’s to keep out those who impinge on their reality.

Social media gets flak for encouraging escape for the real world. This is in fact the Internet’s biggest benefit. Usenet, a precursor of bulletin boards, was among the Internet’s earliest use-cases. When you participated in different usenet groups with their own argot, inside jokes and community cultures, you plugged yourself into alternative realities. The more open the group the faster it grows and at some point generates its own culture. But that same openness leaves it open to interference from what it considers outsiders. It’s easier online than in real life to hijack discussions, brigade entire threads, disrupt a whole group.

How do groups counter this? Groups have moderators, empowered in some manner to enforce conduct that’s been agreed upon. Disrupters can be banned, words and topics can censored, threads can be locked, accounts can be limited to posting only a certain number of messages every hour. With active moderation, the work required to consistently disrupt a group often dwarfs the hoped-for benefit. The group fights off the infection and lives another day. This is how Reddit works.

But Twitter isn’t a group. Consequently, there are no moderators but Twitter itself. This leaves Twitter uniquely vulnerable to harassment, abuse, hate speech, stalking. Because people can retweet with a single tap, the effects of the already devastating act of doxxing – publishing someone’s real-life details like house address, person phone number, children’s names – are magnified. The effects of these are a topic by themselves. But consider the context in which we’re discussing this:

Twitter’s a place where people can be their own selves in an open environment – this combination is what makes it an alternative world. If this world has intruders like above, it’s the equivalent of being accosted by those people in a cafe or a park bench or walking down the street. Because you’re not in a digital bar, there are no bouncers to throw the offending party out. It’s a public space, and police are – until recently – absent.

(Part 3)

Categories
The Dark Forest of the Internet The Next Computer Wellness when Always-On

Mental health tech cannot be like regular tech – Part 4

(Part 3 – My personal experience with seeking help with my mental health)

I’d called it simply Someone To Talk To.

Someone To Talk To – a chatbot

Background:
Several – most? – people with anxiety or mild depression would benefit tremendously from just having someone to talk to. Someone who is receptive and non-judgemental, and doesn’t have any other relationship with the person. It’d be ideal if people had someone like this to talk to in person, but it is impractical: not just because it involves travel for one or both people but also that it requires scheduling and therefore a set time, and that people may feel the need to talk at any point in the day. The mobile phone, a deeply personal device available 24×7, is ideal.

Now, this need goes far beyond mood-logging apps that ask for a rating or emoticon to describe one’s mood. Not only do people’s emotions vary significantly during the day (especially those that are anxious or mildly depressed), not only are they more likely than not to rate their overall day as negative, thereby further feeling down at their own constant negative rating of their days, but more importantly that their needs go beyond such a one-point (or even multi-point) rating. They need an outlet for thoughts and anxieties and fears, to put in words.

Another approach to this is journaling apps, including visually beautiful ones like Day One. Journaling apps take on many types, inluding 5 Minute Journals and Gratitude Journal. But the prospect of filling up a blank screenful, especially day after day, is too often overwhelming for someone who has low emotional bandwidth in the first place.

Here are the characteristics of what I think will make a good Someone To Talk To:

It will be conversational. It’ll feel like a chat (and in fact will be one, with pictures and links sent both ways just like in a regular chat) instead of a set of screens and buttons. The bot will be able to organize what one says, with context, into a journal of sorts for the person’s reference any time later. The person will be able to share with the bot not only text, but also pictures and other media. The bot should be able to respond with at least some context – gentle encouragement or reassurance – but must take great care to not overdo it or sound artificial. Not responding is better than responding like, well, a bot. The bot will also learn about the person over time – what the person seems to like and not, and whether that changes over time, specific people, persons, places that the person refers to and their relationship to the person. The person may give them appellations that are not their real names/descriptions, and that is by choice. The bot will know this.

It will be empathetic and sensitive. It will be designed knowing that a regimental approach of asking for a mood update, or a diary entry at the same time every day, as many apps seem to do, is counter-productive and causes more stress than it relieves. It will be designed knowing that on occasion a notification or picture or video or piece of music can trigger anxiety/sadness/distress in people and they may not even recognise it as such, much less know why. Finally, it will know when the person is looking for a response from it, and when it simply needs to ‘listen’, providing occasional acknowledgement of its ‘presence’.

It will be gently intelligent. While it will often initiate conversation, it won’t ask with every interaction if it felt right, or if the person liked it or not. Being the one expected to be ‘in charge’ of the bot-human relationship can feel challenging. If the bot is designed to be a stand-in for a human companion, it must do better than ask for feedback often (wouldn’t it be stressful to have a friend do so?) Just like making decisions, being made to pass judgement also brings pressure. It will never expect anything from the person it engages with, such as a response in a certain amount of time, or at all. It will also be able to gauge improvement or decline in mood over time and adjust accordingly.

In addition to being empathetic, sensitive and intelligent, it will also be realistic. It will never make empty promises about things always getting

As things turned out, I returned to my day job and never actually worked on this beyond a few simple test versions with a couple of other collaborators. But this, still, is exactly how I’d go about bridging the gap between dealing with mild mental health issues on one’s own, and full-fledged therapy.

(ends)

Categories
The Dark Forest of the Internet The Next Computer Wellness when Always-On

Mental health tech cannot be like regular tech – Part 3

(Part 2 – What happens where you run a mental health service as a Valley-type startup)

Several years ago, I had had first-hand experience with poor mental health and sought help via in-person therapy and medication. During that time, I realized the following: 

  • mental health help is binary: either there’s nothing or there are sessions with a mental health professional
  • the financial cost puts it out of the reach of most people
  • the time investment makes it difficult to balance work, home and this

At the same time, I had observed how my health had deteriorated over time, beginning with mild depressive symptoms with a decrease in drive and discipline. Today, I know that in others depression first manifested as increased anxiety. At that point, you know something’s not right, but doesn’t seem anywhere close to needing to see a psychotherapist. So you plod along until things begin to slide faster. By the time you seek help or someone does on your behalf, you’ve suffered quite a bit. 

Therefore, I understood that

  • people needed – still need – something handy that didn’t warrant full-fledged medical care but provided some minimal level of support for those with mild symptoms. There are now several studies showing that a plurality of the population, especially urban, have poor mental health
  • because people would likely end up being somewhat dependent on it, it needed to be low-overhead enough to be offered free. 
  • and counterintuitively, it needed to be low-tech enough that its limits would be clear right away so that it would not disappoint later.

(Part 4 – My 2017 manifesto for such a service)

Categories
The Dark Forest of the Internet The Next Computer Wellness when Always-On

Mental health tech cannot be like regular tech – Part 2

(Part 1 – the NYT investigates a mental health tech service for practices that aren’t in patients’ best interests)

Continuing our conversation about the NYT’s investigation into the practices at Talkspace, the remote mental health therapy app.

The problem stems from running a healthcare service like this as a business. Worse, a startup. Having spent the vast majority of my professional life at startups, I am all too familiar with the incentives to scale, to perform according to metrics, to employ ‘growth hacks’. When a healthcare startup employs these, the effects are much worse than a game or a social media app.

[the company] has questionable marketing practices and regards treatment transcripts as another data resource to be mined. Their accounts suggest that the needs of a venture capital-backed start-up to grow quickly can sometimes be in conflict with the core values of professional therapy, including strict confidentiality and patient welfare.

In 2015 and 2016, according to four former employees, the company sought to improve its ratings: It asked workers to write positive reviews. One employee said that Talkspace’s head of marketing at the time asked him to compile 100 fake reviews in a Google spreadsheet, so that employees could submit them to app stores.

When convenient, the company spins itself as a healthcare provider: “users can’t delete their transcripts, for example, because they are considered medical records.”, but those transcripts are used by the company for customer engagement and retention:

[A therapist on the platform] said that after she provided a client with links to therapy resources outside of Talkspace, a company representative contacted her, saying she should seek to keep her clients inside the app… “I was like, ‘How do you know I did that?’” Ms. Brennan said. “They said it was private, but it wasn’t.”

Finally, the disconnect between offering a private healthcare service and the exigencies of operating a startup is clear in the company’s public statements:

On Nov. 9, 2016, the morning after the election of Donald Trump, Mr. Frank wrote on Twitter: “Long night in NYC. Woke up this morning to record sales.” The Trump election tweets are examples of the sometimes unfiltered social media presence of Mr. Frank and Talkspace — an irreverence familiar among start-ups but unusual among organizations devoted to mental health care.

In 2016, a man named Ross complained on Twitter that the company’s subway ads “were designed to trigger you into needing their services.” Talkspace’s official Twitter account responded, “Ads for food make people hungry, right?” and added, “I get what you’re saying, Ross, but medical professionals need people to buy things.”

The problems of misincentives of private healthcare are well known and well debated, though nowhere close to being resolved. And startups get a lot more attention than a more traditional healthcare provider would. And Talkspace may have begun with noble ambitions. Regardless, what it has built isn’t anywhere what I think mental health care tech should look like.

How it approaches conflict between what is good for itself versus what is good for its customers – patients – diminishes trust. When it come to data privacy, to marketing, to its incentives for therapists, its responses indicate that it will choose its financial health over people’s mental health. Unfortunately, it’s likely similarly funded venture-backed tech companies in healthcare have similar conflicts and pressure.

(Part 3 – How I’d approached a simple mental-health chat service)

Categories
The Dark Forest of the Internet The Next Computer Wellness when Always-On

Mental health tech cannot be like regular tech – Part 1

Earlier in August, the NYT published a longform investigation into the data and marketing practices of the mental health therapy provider Talkspace. It hit home for me.

So many of the NYT’s discoveries dismayed, even horrified me. I have sought mental health therapy myself several years ago, and about three years ago contemplated working on a different approach for a text-based service for people with anxiety and mild depression. We will talk about the specifics some time later. However, I thought in detail about, and spoke to mental health professionals about the technology, the ethics, the right audience, among other such issues. The way I thought about all of these was so very different from Talkspace.

The first is the way the service is marketed to potential customers and to therapists:

Talkspace is advertised to users as unlimited, “24/7” messaging therapy. “Your therapist will see your messages and respond to you throughout the day,” the company says. Therapists get a different pitch: “Set your business hours, and check in on your clients daily, five days per week.”’

This immediately reminded me of the worst of Groupon, which pitched to users that they’d never have to pay full price for anything again, while pitching to businesses that a single one-time mass discount would convert to loyal users willing to pay, well, full-price.

But Talkspace went beyond, adding this:

Talkspace introduced a new feature: a button that users could press after sending a message that required the therapist to respond within a certain time frame. If the therapists don’t respond in time, their pay can be docked.

Some therapists on the platform were alarmed, in part because the function required them to work on demand, rather than on their own schedule. More significantly, they asked: Is it harmful to give clients with anxiety and boundary issues a button to press for immediate gratification?

First, this reminded me of the worst of Uber. I have been told my more than one driver that they could only turn down a limited number of rider assignments a day, and had to be online at least a certain number of hours a day. After the rollout of the feature where drivers are assigned their next ride towards the end of the ongoing one, those drivers said they couldn’t even take time out to visit the restroom, leave alone lunch and snack breaks, because they also had to reach the next pickup in the time that the Uber app had estimated for the waiting rider.

Troubling as this is, these constraints are worse in the context of mental health because they introduce added anxiety for both the therapist and the patient, the former needing to be equanimous and the latter already suffering from some anxiety/depression.

(Part 2 – more about conflicts)