Month: October 2020

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Decentralisation and Neutrality Discovery and Curation Privacy and Anonymity Wellness when Always-On

Misinformation and countering it – Part 3

(Part 2 – Who should you trust – and avoid?)

Twitter

The excellent Block Together was a great idea – to share block lists between people on Twitter. As this Jan 2019 article described, you could discover block lists, add them to your account and pre-emptively block tens of thousands of accounts right away.

Earlier in 2020, though, its only developer declared that they were no longer able to develop it, and eventually shuttered the service.

Twitter itself has also made it harder to export and import block lists. Its own 2015 blog post described how one could create and share block lists to improve one’s experience. You can see from their own screenshot how straightforward it was:

Not only could you import and export easily, Twitter intended for you to share block lists with/from your friends and followers. No longer.

In 2020, that functionality is no longer available. Twitter states that

… block list, a feature for people to export and import a CSV file of blocked account lists through twitter.com, is no longer available. However, you can still view and export a list of the accounts you have blocked through Your Twitter Data, found under your account settings.

– How to manage your block list

Yes – it actually removed the bulk blocking feature – one that’s more important now than ever before. Exporting your block lists is now cumbersome because it’s part of your overall Twitter data export. For me, this export took about a day to be available. Creating public block lists, while possible, is harder than just five years ago.

The Twitter API still allows for blocking users, so one could create a Twitter app for the purpose of importing a publicly available block list into one’s account.

Other social media

While the concept of block lists is less applicable to Linkedin and Whatsapp, as we had seen in our article on spam, we should report misinformation in the same way we do unsolicicted mesages.

Web and email

Medium and Substack are two of the most popular publishing platforms as of 2020. Medium has the ability for readers to report articles. Substack doesn’t seem to have any such support.

However, like we’ve discussed before, discovering great newsletters is still an unsolved problem – and therefore an opportunity.

Whoever builds a search and recommendation engine for newsletters should include in their algorithm a warning flag for those that spread misinformation or hate.

(Part 4 – how can web browsers and DNS providers help?)

(Featured image photo credit: Umberto/Unsplash)

Categories
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)

Categories
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)

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
Wellness when Always-On

Nature fulfils intrinsic psychological needs – study

The connection between nature and human well-being may be deeper than previously thought. According to a study of over 700 respondents, nature fulfils basic psychological needs intrinsic to humans.

Much research has examined the way individuals form attachments with the physical spaces they inhabit. However, the way people form bonds with natural landscapes remains somewhat of a mystery. Study authors Adam C. Landon and his team speculated that it may have something to do with the fulfillment of psychological needs [autonomy, competence, relatedness].

[R]espondents were told to think of a wilderness area that is special to them and were asked questions designed to assess their place attachment to that area.

Results showed that a landscape’s ability to fulfill psychological needs predicted respondents’ place attachment to the natural area in question. When taken together, the three needs explained “approximately half of the variance in each dimension of place attachment.”

“The importance that people attribute to a physical space is in part a result of that space supporting their psychological needs for feeling connected to other people, experiencing feelings of competence, and autonomy in their behavioral choices,” Landon told PsyPost.

I can see why creating a home garden and then spending time in it is so rewarding, especially if you create and maintain it with your spouse or family – or, on a larger scale, with your community. It’s a direct validation of one’s autonomy, relatedness and competence.

Our alternate online realities get richer and richer, but it’s going to take many centuries of evolution, if not much longer, before any aspect of the Internet can replace the connection humans have with nature. As we live in the Always-On, a big part of our wellness depends on something decidedly offline.

(Featured image photo credit: Isaac Quesada/Unsplash)

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Audience as Capital Wellness when Always-On

The possible end of the Trump phenomenon

CNN wonders if Trump’s mastery of the attention economy may be waning:

I am far, far from the first person to say this, but perhaps Trump has just become… boring? On Tuesday night, for instance, he did “his usual lie-shtick about how he just saw CNN’s camera light go off right after he insulted CNN,” Daniel Dale wrote. “CNN doesn’t broadcast these rallies live, doesn’t turn off its cameras when he insults CNN, and doesn’t use any visible camera light when recording at rallies.” Yet Trump has been repeating this lie for years! It’s boring.

Quinta Jurecic advanced this argument in The Atlantic two weeks ago. Jurecic said “Trump is boring in the way that the seventh season of a reality-television show is boring: A lot is happening, but there’s nothing to say about it.”

“Trump is pretending it’s 2016 again,” Ryan Lizza wrote Tuesday night, and he’s “lost the populist message that won him an unlikely victory.”

Trump became the world’s most popular influencer by creating a strong identification with a certain section of the US population who felt, rightly or wrongly, that they were becoming irrelevant. His great strength has been recognising that this segment of the population lives vicariously through him, just like any other influencer on, say, Instagram.

Because disenfranchisement is what he tapped into, his successes became their successes. His flouting of convention became their thumbing of noses at an establishment that didn’t value them.

As it became apparent that this behaviour worked, other members of his political party aped his disregard for rules and scruples, even if they couldn’t match his persona. This has made him more politically powerful, making his base feel further empowered – a textbook positive feedback loop.

It’s the most powerful example of the Megatrend Audience as Capital.

For a while now I’ve been wondering what happens when this segment feels empowered enough, when it feels that it, finally, controls the national narrative.

It’s likely that they will see diminishing returns on the attention they pay to Trump. Given how fickle attention is and how saturated media is, it’s very likely this segment will simply move on to something else.In fact, it’s likely that it will cease to be a segment – what brought them together has finished serving its purpose.

And yes, something else will almost inevitably fill the national attention vacuum left by this. But it need not be a singular divisive political figure. It is very probable that this current phenomenon may end, and not with a bang but with nary a whisper.

(Featured image photo credit: History in HD/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 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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Uncategorized

“You don’t succeed because you have no weaknesses”

Tim Ferriss, on his podcast episode “Tribe of Mentors — Naval Ravikant, Susan Cain, and Yuval Noah Harari (#442)“

[Your heroes] are all walking flaws who have maximised one or two strengths. Humans are imperfect creatures. You don’t succeed because you have no weaknesses, you succeed because you find your unique strengths and focus on developing habits around them.

(Featured image photo credit: Eberhard Grossgasteiger/Unsplash)