Category: Discovery and Curation

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Decentralisation and Neutrality Discovery and Curation Wellness when Always-On

Misinformation and countering it – Part 2

(Part 1 – Who to trust)

Amplifying trusted voices

Online reputation will become increasingly important, even critical. In today’s world, Twitter’s ‘verified’ status should represent whether the person is known to post verified information or not, not whether the person is a known celebrity.

But since that is not the case, and Twitter as of this writing has shown little evidence of such a system, we will need to build this database on our own, first for ourselves, and then share it with our communities.

One idea on Twitter is to create Twitter Lists of people who you trust. We could each create lists, interest or topic wise, for ourselves and make the available as public lists with friends so they too can follow them.

You could extend this to whole websites with shared OPML lists, i.e. lists of RSS feeds of website that you know and trust. Unlike Twitter lists, though, you’d still have to import this OPML file periodically into your RSS reader.

Shutting out misinformation

While we work to amplify the voices of individuals and publications we trust, we must also work to block out those bad actors. One way is with shared block lists, just like publicly available ad-block lists for the web.

Ad-blocking lists are an important part of the web, and they are often run by volunteers – see this article from 2019 on the maintainers of EasyList. The fantastic pi-hole, which is an ad-blocking software you can install that references such lists, is also maintained by a small community, which this BusinessWeek article profiled.

If ad-blocking lists and software were the counter to oppressive and intrusive ads, we need their equivalent for the misinformation and abuse on social media.

What would those look like?

(Part 3 – Misinformation on Twitter, other social media. And an idea)

(Featured image photo credit: Zdeněk Macháček/Unsplash)

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Data Custody Decentralisation and Neutrality Discovery and Curation Making Money Online Products and Design Wellness when Always-On

Misinformation and countering it – Part 1

This excellent long-form article in TIME describes the nature of misinformation that is rife in America:

Most Trump voters I met had clear, well-articulated reasons for supporting him: he had lowered their taxes, appointed antiabortion judges, presided over a soaring stock market. These voters wielded their rationality as a shield: their goals were sound, and the President was achieving them, so didn’t it make sense to ignore the tweets, the controversies and the media frenzy?

But there was a darker strain. For every two people who offered a rational and informed reason for why they were supporting Biden or Trump, there was another–almost always a Trump supporter–who offered an explanation divorced from reality. You could call this persistent style of untethered reasoning “unlogic.” Unlogic is not ignorance or stupidity; it is reason distorted by suspicion and misinformation, an Orwellian state of mind that arranges itself around convenient fictions rather than established facts.

When everyone can come up with his or her facts, the responsible thing is for everyone to also become his or her fact-checker. This is easier said than done. We saw yesterday how spam is a community problem than can only be fixed by the community – misinformation is the same.

Social media is complicit

The cost of spreading misinformation is nothing – social media and messaging services have spent years reducing the friction of sharing.

In comparison, they have spent almost no resources to determine and signal whether information is accurate or not. Recommendation algorithms simply don’t distinguish between what’s accurate and what isn’t. On YouTube, watching one conspiracy video and clicking on ‘Also watch’ recommendations can quickly lead one down a dark path, as the Guardian article describes.

It goes beyond just neglect. Social media companies have historically distinguished themselves from regular news media, arguing that they are merely platforms on which other people express their opinion, and that they can’t be held liable for what is posted by such people. However, they also argue that only they are in a position to create and apply policies regarding hate speech, abuse and misinformation. For example, see this WIRED article on Facebook’s weak efforts to self-regulate.

In short, they’d like to have it all. And so far, they have succeeded.

This imbalance by new media companies means that you and I must pick up the slack. Checking the accuracy of information means verifying the source, and then verifying the source of the source, and so on. It means looking at the bigger picture to judge if comments were taken out of context. It means determining if someone’s opinion was presented as fact. All this takes time. This example of fake national glorification took me several minutes to locate and correct:

And then there’s the social angle. Correcting someone on Whatsapp or a more public channel is almost never rewarding. The person who shared the original piece of misinformation, like anyone, has had their ego hurt and will push back. At best, it makes your real-life relationship awkward. At worst, it exposes you to online abuse. But we will need to power through this.

(Part 2: So who should you trust – and avoid?)

(Featured image photo credit: Markus Spiske/Unsplash)

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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.

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Discovery and Curation Making Money Online Wellness when Always-On

News subscriptions are unlikely to be a sustainable business model

Tim Bray describes why, according to him, news subscriptions are unlikely to be a sustainable business model for most news publishers:

[Publisher management’s] arithmetic didn’t consider their chance of getting me to click on “Subscribe.” In my particular case, that chance is almost exactly Zero. I subscribe to enough things and I am acutely reluctant to give anyone else the ability to make regular withdrawals from my bank account. I don’t think I’m unusual. People may not be financially sophisticated, but they’re smart enough to see through the “initial-price” flim-flam and a lot of us are highly conscious of our own administrative futility and the fact that we might just not get around to unsubscribing. I’ve seen this called “Subscription fatigue” and I think that’s a decent label.

“But wait,” says Mr Manager, “you already subscribe to five publications, so you’ve proved you have a propensity to subscribe! You’re exactly my target market!” Wrong. It’s exactly because I’ve done some subscribing that I’m just not gonna do any more.

In the blog post he also briefly refers to the fact that subscriptions are a thing because no one has cracked pay-per-view via micropayment. He goes on to argue that even if someone had, management would still prefer driving people to subscribe:

“Why on earth would I invest in selling individual articles when a click on the “Subscribe” button gets me a hundred times the revenue?”

It’s the opportunity cost of locking in future recurring revenue.

As we had described in our series on 21st Century Media, micropayments is one of those things that everyone recognises is an opportunity but where solution is always just beyond the horizon.

The first entity that really cracks this problem is going to be very valuable indeed. Being able to collect micropayments at scale means that news publishers can free themselves of advertising. If publishers charge comparatively more per view/read via micropayments than they make via ads, it’ll also significantly reduce the pressure to make articles, headlines, content, design towards clickbait.

Last but not least, because readers are conscious that they’re paying per article, it makes them less likely to mindlessly browse through low-value articles online and think about what they consider valuable.

(Featured image photo credits: Bank Phrom/Unsplash)

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Data Custody Decentralisation and Neutrality Discovery and Curation Making Money Online Privacy and Anonymity Products and Design The Next Computer

Nationalism, capitalism and the Indian App Store

A Swadeshi App Store. It may well happen.

It began with the temporary removal of the Paytm app from Google’s Android Play Store. And snowballed with Google’s announcement that it would enforce its existing policy of a 30% commission on the in-app sale of all digital goods (with some exceptions). We discussed this a couple of weeks ago.

Soon after, the founders of some of India’s best-known tech companies put out statements not just condemning Google’s policy but also its intent, calling it a new Lagaan, after the tax that the British occupation of the 19th and 20th centuries levied on Indian peasants.

Vivek Wadhwa, a Distinguished Fellow at Harvard Law School’s Labor and Worklife Program, lauded the banding of Indian entrepreneurs and likened Silicon Valley giants’ hold on India to the rising days of East India Company, which pillaged India. “Modern day tech companies pose a similar risk,” he told TechCrunch.

And they called for a local, all-Indian app store, piggybacking on the new term Atmanirbhar, one that the current government has coined to promote local manufacturing and services.

“This is the problem of India’s app ecosystem. So many founders have reached out to us… if we believe this country can build digital business, we must know that it is at somebody else’s hand to bless that business and not this country’s rules and regulations.”

Inevitably, as is the case in India, at least some heads turned to the government for help:

Even though Google said it will allow developers to sell their services through other app stores, or websites, the industry doesn’t see this as an option either. Naidu suggested that unless the government chooses to intervene, there may be no other solution. According to tech policy analyst Prasanto K. Roy, the government’s Mobile Seva Appstore has over a thousand apps and 85 million downloads, yet it is unknown among Indian users.

To which the government, of course, responded with a why nothttps://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/internet/centre-open-to-launching-an-indian-app-store/articleshow/78438620.cms:

Weighing in on the issue, union minister for electronics and IT Ravi Shankar Prasad said in a post on Twitter that he is happy to receive notable suggestions from Indian app developers on how to encourage the ecosystem. “Encouraging Indian app developers is vital to create an #AatmanirbharBharat app ecosystem,” he tweeted on Thursday.

The Indian government “is not averse to the idea” of launching its own app store, officials said. The existing digital store for government apps, developed by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC), hosts a slew of applications such as e-governance app Umang, health app Aarogya Setu and storage app DigiLocker.

Paytm has since created and advertised heavily what it calls a mini-app-store, but is in reality a catalog of shortcuts to 3rd party web apps. Google has postponed the implementation of its policy to 2022.

In this tale, everyone’s actions and responses have been predictable. Google’s been tone-deaf and has immediately switched to appeasement. Tech company founders have been cynically opportunistic. They have been happy with Google’s (and Apple’s) stores for distribution, even advertising heavily on them, until the moment it worked against them and they switched immediately to victim mode, some even raising the spectre of neocolonialism. Though they’re among the most visible figures of India’s capitalists, they’ve quickly appealed to the government for a solution favourable to them, further pushing the nationalist angle. And of course the Indian government, regardless of its political learnings, is happy to intervene and get into the business of running business.

(Featured image photo credit: Mika Baumeister/Unsplash)

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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)

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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)

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Audience as Capital Discovery and Curation Making Money Online Wellness when Always-On

What’s something that’s easy for me to do but hard for others?

This newsletter, available on the web, about building ‘personal moats’:

The post as a whole is a great read. Here are three standout pieces, in addition to the title, which came from the post:

1 . If you were magically given 10,000 hours to be amazing at something, what would it be? The more clarity you have on this response, the better off you’ll be.

2. … it’s easy to lie to yourself & say that you’re a generalist when in reality you’ve tried a bunch of things and you’ve flaked out when things got hard and then tried something else. You want to be at least great at one thing, and then apply that lens or skill to other categories.

3. We talk a lot about “passive income,” but not as much about “passive social capital” or “passive knowledge gaining” — that’s what you gain if you build an asset that grows over time without intensive constant effort to sustain i

One of the five megatrends we explore on this site is that of Audience as Capital.

The benefits of having a large humber of people who have consciously decided to listen to what you have to say have so far been limited to people with political power, or who ran large economic or social institutions. Today it is available to everyone – perhaps the Internet’s greatest dividend.

Having something of value to offer people, a personal moat, is a prerequisite to amassing this following, which is a prerequisite for building audience capital.

Featured image: Lake Palace, Lake Pichola, Udaipur, taken in 2011

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Decentralisation and Neutrality Discovery and Curation Making Money Online

Play Store and Fair Play

Google has recently begun enforcing its policy about using Google Play’s in-app billing for apps that sell virtual goods. The problem is the 30% cut that Google, like Apple, charges on such transactions.

This Economic Times article has reactions from some app makers in India, including references to new-age colonialism via a foreign player imposing lagaan.

In my view, Google’s policies on which goods need to use in-app billing and which don’t is pretty clear. It’s also not different from Apple’s App Store policies, which have always been enforced strictly. It only applies to digital goods (with some exceptions even there), so statements like this don’t hold water:

“How can a company survive after paying 30% Google tax and Apple tax… Most businesses don’t have such margins. If enforced, this will spell an end to the startup dreams of a lot of Indian entrepreneurs.”

But there are new restrictions on communicating the existence of alternative payment methods, similar to Apple’s. I think these are onerous:

Apps other than those described in 2(b) may not lead users to a payment method other than Google Play’s billing system. This prohibition includes, but is not limited to, leading users to other payment methods via:

  • An app’s listing in Google Play;
  • In-app promotions related to purchasable content;
  • In-app webviews, buttons, links, messaging, advertisements or other calls to action; and
  • In-app user interface flows, including account creation or sign-up flows, that lead users from an app to a payment method other than Google Play’s billing system as part of those flows.

Because Apple enforces this policy, you can see the difference in Netflix’s signup instructions on iOS and Android. Once Google’s new policy comes into effect, I expect these to look similar:

What if the Play Store billing was completely optional in India, but a much better experience than any other method? The opportunity cost is low: an estimate of Google’s Play Store revenue in India for this year so far is USD 50 million. Its global 2nd quarter revenue was over USD 38 billion. The India business is a drop in terms of revenue, but led to 17 billion downloads.

In other words, the question Google should discuss is when app makers start designing workarounds for your policy, do you start plugging loopholes, putting you at odds with app makers, or so you change your policy, perhaps radically, so app makers welcome it?

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Audience as Capital Data Custody Discovery and Curation Making Money Online Privacy and Anonymity Real-World Crypto

On legal cover for independent journalists, censorship and self-hosting

I just discovered this – “legal support for Substack writers”

Important writing holds the powerful to account – and quite often, that’s an arrangement that the powerful would rather not support. In some cases, antagonists use threats of legal action in an attempt to stop the work that makes them uncomfortable. Recently, for instance, a high-powered lawyer representing a politician threatened a Substack writer for his coverage of the lawmaker’s questionable business ties. The threats disappeared when the writer, backed by our support program’s lawyers, stood his ground. At Substack, we want to make it crystal clear that anyone who uses such intimidation tactics will also have to reckon with us. We will use our financial and legal resources to vigorously oppose any bad-faith efforts to dissuade Substack writers from doing their work. 

Substack will make the ultimate choice on who is accepted into the [Defender] program and which cases to support. Once a case has been taken on by the program’s lawyers, Substack, at our discretion, will cover fees up to $1 million (in exceptional cases, we may cover even more). 

This is a bold, brave move by the company, and I would definitely rather this program exist than not. There are several major journalists (one, two, three are just highlights) moving to Substack, and they will need this sort of institutional cover to form 21st Century Media.

However, it puts Substack in the position of determining what opinions and positions should be defended and what not. Specifically, it puts Substack’s founders in that position. While the scale is very different today, the situation is little different from the Facebook leader being ultimately in the position of what is censored and what is promoted on the service and what isn’t.

In fact in Facebook’s case, we are taking about censorship of content. The Substack legal support program is not just about censorship but about the personal, potentially physical freedom of the writer – that is what writers are choosing to outsource, for lack of an alternative.

End-note: independent of legal protection, journalists should also invest time and effort in figuring out how to be uncensorable. We examined it a few months ago: Part 1, Part 2. If you publish on your own site and encourage your readers to read you over the open web, or subscribe to your writing via RSS, and pay you in cryptocurrency, you become a lot more difficult to shut down. You can of course continue to publish that content over Substack, and share it on Twitter and engage wit your followers there. Ultimately the truly censorship-resistance platform is the one you host.