Category: Discovery and Curation

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Discovery and Curation Wellness when Always-On

Reddit Rehab

Back in June and July, I spent a month away from Reddit and Twitter, visiting the site only in a strictly time-boxed twenty minutes at the end of the day. During that isolation,

I realised how much the endless rapid scroll-and-read tired my brain out. I was starting each working day with a depleted brain, right after I had refreshed it overnight. Starting my day with my small list of websites and my RSS instead of scrolling through Twitter and Reddit makes for a much clearer rest of the day

– Reflections on the 30 day Twitter-Reddit isolation, July 2020

Another good thing that emerged from that period is my daily practice of 20 minutes of solitude, which I do while sipping my cold brew in the morning. Solitude

… means not simply being alone, but being alone with your thoughts. So watching TV or Netflix, reading a book or articles, listening to music or a podcast, even if alone, do not count as solitude – your mind is still receiving, as the author says, “input from other minds”.

– Solitude, July 2020

This has worked out well for me, and it is now something I look forward to.

However, I’ve slid back into reading unhealthy amounts of Reddit. This chart, from iOS’ Screen Time, shows numbers I am not proud of:

That’s 2 hours 21 minutes every day during the last two weeks of October.

There is much to like about Reddit. I have been deliberate about the subreddits I am on, avoiding negativity and divisiveness. Because the network is anonymous, there’s no envy or fomo on someone else’s achievements – just plain happiness for them.

But not only it is a large time suck, it’s also not time that I spend deliberately. I am not even aware of my opening my Reddit apps, and coming out of a Reddit scroll binge feels not unlike awakening from a deep nap. Hours have passed by without you being aware of them. This is not how I’d like to live, as we just saw:

Slowing down time itself by living deliberately

So I’m checking myself into Reddit Rehab, again. From 6th November to 5th December I’m going to time-box my Reddit usage to twenty minutes at the end of the day. I’m hoping that along with my practice of solitude and of greater deliberation, I’ll be able to use Reddit more consciously.

Let’s see how this goes. I’ll report during and at the end of the isolation.

(Featured image: Frangipani reflected in my morning cold brew)

Categories
Decentralisation and Neutrality Discovery and Curation

The cusp of something exhilarating and terrifying

The musician David Bowie was remarkably prescient in a 1999 interview about what the Internet would do to society:

… I think that we, at the time until at least the min (19)70s, really felt that we were still living under… the guise of a single and absolute created society where there were known truths and known lies and there was no kind of duplicity or pluralism about the things that we believed in.

That started to break down rapidly in the 70s and the idea of a duality in the way that we live. There are always two, three, four, five sides to each question. The singularity disappeared and that, I believe, has produced such a medium as the Internet which absolutely establishes and shows us that we are living in total fragmentation.

I don’t think we’ve even seen the tip of the iceberg. I think the potential of what the Internet is going to do to society, both good and bad, is unimaginable. I think we’re actually on the cusp of something exhilarating and terrifying!

… It’s an alien lifeform!

I’m talking about the actual context and the state of content is going to be so different to anything we can really envisage at the moment, where the interplay between the user and the provider will be so in simpatico, it’s going to crush our ideas of what mediums are all about.

Except “the interplay between the user and the provider will be so in simpatico”, he was right about several things: the magnitude and imminence of change, the fragmentation of opinion and of truth and the emergence of new forms of content, entirely new mediums.

The 16 minute interview with BBC Newsnight’s Jeremy Paxman is on YouTube. The quote above starts at 9 minutes 10 seconds in:

Categories
Discovery and Curation The Next Computer Wellness when Always-On

Slowing down time itself by living deliberately

Some perspective on how why 2020 feels both like it’s been momentous and that it’s whizzed past:

It’s not entirely an illusion. Without the usual work mixers, festive holiday celebrations, far-flung vacations or casual dinners that typically mark and divide the calendar, the brain has a harder time processing and cataloging memories, psychologists say, and the stress of the year itself can shift how our brains experience time… Sheer monotony has the ability to warp time and tangle our memories, psychologists say, with quarantines and lockdowns robbing us of the “boundary events” that normally divide the days, like chapters in a book.

I think it’s more important than ever to practice deliberation in our lives. To live deliberately, according to the writer and thinker Thoreau,

… to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms

Neat.

In more prosaic terms, in my interpretation,

Living deliberately is making an active choice in how to spend one’s time – and, over weeks, months and years –  one’s life.

Each of us has some leeway in the everydays of our life, even if not in immediately in the broad strokes. We can make choices to pursue what is dear to us, or to invest in ourselves, or to become part of something larger than us, or any combination of these.

We can choose to restart an interest of ours. Re-engage with communities and groups we’ve fallen out of touch with. Start a new hobby we’ve always liked but didn’t know if it’d stick. Pursue our physical and mental well-being. Join a local cause. Whatever it looks like for each of us. And do it for no reason than because we can.

We do this by examining how we spend our average day, which in 2020 looks like all other days. And being honest with ourselves about which things we do by default. Which things we do inefficiently. Which things we would be better off trading for something fresh.

We also do this by actively using the technology in our lives in addition to its passive consumption. We can be deliberate even with consumption-only tools: finding shows and/or documentaries on Netflix about an interest of ours, instead of merely accepting its recommendation about what to watch next. Or creating a new Reddit account with fewer but more carefully chosen subreddits and using that for a few weeks.

Being deliberate means we spend most hours actively making a decision about how to spend them, instead of letting habits and circumstance dictate this. Consequently,

Fewer hours just slip by. Days begin to look different. Milestones emerge. Memories form. A narrative forms about how we spent October or November. Time crystallises, no longer disappearing through a sieve.

This is not to diminish the very real constraints each of us face, whether they are problems with money, health, relationships, opportunities, quality of life. The principle is simply to recognise and act on whatever agency we have in our lives, however large or small it may be.

2020 is the epitome of the adage the days are long but the years are short. By spending each day deliberately, we can lengthen some of those years.

(Featured image photo credit: Ryan James Christopher/Unsplash)

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Data Custody Decentralisation and Neutrality Discovery and Curation

More on how youtube-dl – taken down by Github and the American music industry – actually aids journalism

I wrote earlier about the code of the youtube-dl project being taken down by the Microsoft-owned code-hosting website Github, in response to a notice by the American music industry’s RIAA.

Youtube-dl, Censorship and the Internet we want

This is a travesty, and it should have gotten much more coverage in general news channels across the world.

In that blog post I wrote about, and linked to, a few instances of how journalists use the youtube-dl tool. Later, I came across this article that has more detail on this use-case. An example:

Numerous reporters told Freedom of the Press Foundation that they rely on youtube-dl when reporting on extremist or controversial content. Øyvind Bye Skille, a journalist who has used youtube-dl at the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation and as a fact checker with Faktisk.no, said, “I have also used it to secure a good quality copy of video content from Youtube, Twitter, etc., in case the content gets taken down when we start reporting on it.” Skille pointed to a specific instance of videos connected to the terrorist murder of a Norwegian woman in Morocco. “Downloading the content does not necessarily mean we will re-publish it, but it is often important to secure it for documentation and further internal investigations.”

Central to all of these examples is the fact that journalists can process a local copy in ways that the video hosting platform does not offer. It’s possible to download a high-quality video and audio file from YouTube [1], but the quality at which YouTube streams that same file in your browser depends on the quality of the internet connection, your actual device.

There is a perfectly good reason for YouTube streaming a lower-quality version: you want your viewing experience to be as lag-free as possible. But seeking to remove tools like youtube-dl take away choice in the matter.

Similarly, as the article describes, journalists use downloaded files of protests or events for further video or audio analysis. They may use it to compare video frames, voices and so on. These are not features that YouTube provides – once again, justified.

The appeal of YouTube is its audience, which is why people post videos there in the first place. So YouTube optimises for ease of use and discovery [2] not for analysis. Once again, seeking the destruction of youtube-dl, and presumably others like it, means removing all other capabilities than just passive viewing.

The USA recording industry’s massive overreach to safeguard its narrow – and narrowing domain, and Microsoft/Github’s capitulation, has great implications for access to information world-wide.

[1] Remember that YouTube is only one of the video hosting and streaming sites that the unfortunately-named youtube-dl supports.

[2] There are other issues there with YouTube’s recommendation algorithms often promoting misinformation and indirectly inciting violence, but that is another topic for another day.

Categories
Decentralisation and Neutrality Discovery and Curation Making Money Online

How pay-to-play news websites gain legitimacy

This article talks about the phenomenon of paid right-wing news:

Clients pay for certain “news” to be produced—and then it is, published on a normal-looking local news site, alongside countless innocuous stories produced by machines as camouflage.

But what’s more important is why these sites gain a veneer of legitimacy. They

 [take] advantage of how profit-chasing has blown up the entire concept of “media literacy.” When your local paper’s website is as larded up with spammy-looking ad crud as an illegal Monday Night Football stream, these spare sites cannot possibly look any less “real.” And as newspapers die and people get more and more of their news from social media, fewer people recognize which news “brands” are supposed to be “trustworthy.”

The alternative to running ad-heavy websites is to charge for access. While many well-known publications have done so – NYT, WSJ, Bloomberg, FT, even WIRED – the paywall does mean fewer people end up reading articles on these sites. This puts them at a disadvantage to these pseudo-news websites, which rely neither exclusively on advertisements or paywall, but on their patrons whose views they publish as news. This breaking of the business-editorial wall is not luxury a serious publication can afford.

This comment on a Reddit thread says exactly this:

Wapo, New York times, NY Daily news, business insider, wired on and on and on, all these places used to be free and now I’m left with the freaking horrible terrible NY post.

See also: Our series on 21st Century Media, what it will look like, and its challenges

(Featured image photo credit: Md. Mahdi/Unsplash)

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Audience as Capital Discovery and Curation Making Money Online Writing

Writing for shorter attention spans

From an interview with Anand Samwal, the publisher of the excellent business newsletter CB Insights, which I have subscribed to for years now:

“As attention spans have shrunk, short, conversational, and highly visual research is more respectful of the reader’s time and that is the type of research we aim to provide,”

“I’d characterise our research as being of ‘higher nutritional value’, which means fewer words and more insights vs being full of ‘empty calories,’

This explains the fun and rather cheeky tone of its newsletter.  It also explains the focus on bite-sized commentary and shareable infographics,

Credit for these numbers [640,000 subscribers] go also to the carefully crafted, irreverent headlines.  “Bye-bye,” “no more startup drama pls,” and “this might anger you,” are a few examples of these headlines – the kinds that leave subscribers curious and wanting to click through.

(Featured image photo credit: CB Insights website)

Categories
Data Custody Decentralisation and Neutrality Discovery and Curation Privacy and Anonymity The Dark Forest of the Internet The Next Computer

Youtube-dl, Censorship and the Internet we want

I woke on the 24th to news that Github, the source code hosting service had taken down the youtube-dl project repository along with many forks of the code maintained by other people. This was in response to a DMCA infringement notice filed by the music industry group RIAA.

In response to this distressing news, I wrote a Twitter thread, which I’ll reproduce here:

The youtube-dl project is no longer available on Github. A crying shame. youtube-dl is used not just to pirate – it’s also to archive videos of protests & rights violations before they’re taken down – depiction of violence is a violation of YT’s TOS! 1/

It’s to archive videos of public events, which may have nothing to do with music. Even when they do have to do with music, as this artist says, youtube-dl was why he had a copy of his *own* performance: 2/

https://twitter.com/oudplayer93/status/1319796635577339906?s=20

I use the tool occasionally to create a copy of rare versions of 50-year-old+ Hindi film songs that perhaps a few dozen people are interested in anymore, and which you won’t find on iTunes or any store. But they’ll be lost to the world if that YT account ever goes offline. 3/

youtube-dl will likely be down until the creators find an alternative repository, which will likely also be an RIAA target, very likely pushing it onto the Tor network, which’ll definitely get it labelled in the mainstream press as a piracy enabler – that‘ll be the narrative. 4/

More than anything, Github’ acquiescence sets a very worrying precedent. As this tweet says, cURL (& wget) are widely used open-source projects to download a wide variety of content. You could make the same case to shut these projects’ hosting down. 5/

This should be a loud wake-up call for the @mozilla Foundation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation , the Free Software Foundation – on their watch, a Microsoft business unit became the world’s most popular code hosting service, including for critical Internet projects 6/

The FSF had plans for its own code hosting service in Feb but it doesn’t look like they’ve reached a decision, much less begun execution. Sadly, paid, full-time teams will almost always execute *faster* than volunteer teams like in the FOSS world. 7/ https://libreplanet.org/wiki/FSF_2020

Censorship-resistance needs to be a top-level criterion for evaluation, for anyone who is building anything of value for the Internet. A strictly free (or open source) code hosting platform is of no use if it or its projects can be taken down just like with youtube-dl. 8/

This should be an equally strident wake-up call for other projects – such as @The_Pi_Hole, which I have written about so often, and which are hosted on github. If the RIAA has gotten its way, the much larger online advertising industry could very easily act next. 9/

There are so many other projects that survive publicly ONLY because they either fly under the radar or have not yet been targeted. Two that immediately come to mind are the Calibre project and its (independent) Kindle De-DRM plugin. 10/

End note: I had written about how you could create a censorship-resistant site on the Internet. I’d written this as a lightweight thought experiment. Today I see it in a more serious, a more urgent light. 11/11 (ends).

Another thought that struck me after the thread is that a USA-centric industry association filed a notice under USA law to a USA-based company, Github/Microsoft, and knocked offline a project that

  • had contributors from all over the world
  • was forked by people all over the world
  • made a tool that was used by people from across the world
  • to download videos and knowledge created and posted by people from around the world

We think of the Internet as a shared resource. Practically, it is subject to the laws of just a few countries, especially the USA, and a few massive companies, also mostly registered in, and subject to the laws of, the USA. This is not a criticism of the country – such centralisation of authority and control in the hands of any one or few countries is detrimental to the future of the Internet as we know it.

I will probably have more to say about this, but this is it for this post.

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

Misinformation and countering it – Part 5

(Part 4 – A thought experiment on the role of DNS providers and Web browsers in tacking the spread of misinformation)

We’re in a situation today where Google’s Chrome internet browser has a two-thirds market share overall. And probably even more on mobile, given that it is the default browser shipped on almost every Android phone:

Google also operates a public DNS at 8.8.8.8.

Finally, Google operates its core search engine, which is the home page for every Chrome browser and used daily by nearly every person connected to the Internet (except by those in China).

This puts Google in a uniquely powerful position to tackle misinformation on the Internet. It could build those misinformation blocklists into the browser itself. It could make them part of its public DNS resolution. It could build them into into search results, warning people before they even clicked on the search result to a navigate to the website.

Unfortunately, it has little incentive to do so. Google’s business is built on advertising. If it blocks misinformation but not intrusive advertising, it is hypocritical. If it blocks intrusive advertising but not its own ads, it is even worse hypocrisy (even though it has begun to block some of the worst offender).

Finally, Google’s positioning of neutrality on the Internet is an asset in its efforts to avoid being labelled and prosecuted as a monopolist. It cannot afford accusations of actively and flagrantly censoring web search results, as necessary and healthy for the Internet as it may be.

To conclude

Over this series, we’ve seen how harmful to a society misinformation can be, how, just like spam, it’s cheap to create and propagate but hard to research and refute.

We’ve seen how it is not in social media’s interests to tackle misinformation, how it’s a community problem and incumbent on us to solve. To that, we have explored possible ways and existing/past services to counter misinformation – on the web, Twitter and other social media. Not all of them exist or are even simple, but they are all opportunities.

Finally, this post was a thought experiment about bending the Internet’s neutrality to make it a safer place. We saw how Google is in the most powerful position to identify and hamper misinformation, but how doing so would threaten it both commercially and politically.

It doesn’t make for hopeful reading. But it’s becoming even clearer to me that the solution to misinformation – just like the solution to spam – is bottom-up and community-led, not top-down. We have grown accustomed to a steady stream of free-to-use services and apps from large tech companies. As a consequence we look to them to solve our problems. We, especially the readers of this site and similar ones, must recognise that tech companies benefit by enabling our addictive behaviours, not by encouraging thoughtful and responsible ones.

The solutions are in our hands – not theirs.

(ends)

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

Misinformation and countering it – Part 4

(Part 3 – Tackling misinformation on Twitter and other social media)

Thought experiment – the responsibility of DNS providers and web browsers

One idea we should at least have a conversation about is the role and responsibility of DNS providers with regard to misinformation.

Could public DNS providers – like OpenDNS, Cloudflare, Quad9, even Google – take a stance to actively block misinformation?

Cloudflare today protects websites against malicious users, such as its anti-DDOS service:

One could argue that it should also protect users against malicious websites or at least malicious content.

And some of them already do so: Cloudflare claims its 1.1.1.1 public DNS does not sell data to advertisers. It is reportedly faster, and its paid WARP VPN service that runs atop 1.1.1.1 encrypts traffic from your devices while also routing it over the fastest available paths to the sites you visit – after all, Cloudflare is also a content delivery network. Ergo, Cloudflare already has a number of individual-centric security-focused products.

So one could imagine a situation where Cloudflare creates/maintains a list of sites and URLs that are known for spreading misinformation, or are known to contain incorrect/false data. Or syncs with a crowdsourced list of such lists, much like the public ad-block lists we saw earlier.

When you click/tap a link that leads you to one of these websites or URLs, Cloudflare could first show you a page warning you about misinformation. If you still want to visit it, you can. This’ll go a long way towards staying safe and informed.

The advantage of this approach is that it’s baked into the internet itself. While yes, the Internet was designed to be neutral, it’s expanded to well beyond its user based fifty years ago – the scientific, academic and military community. Neutrality is a key tenet of the Internet, but when it begins causing harm, it needs to be revisited.

Either way, you’d still have to set Cloudflare as your DNS provider. A vanishingly small percentage of people change their DNS settings. Even if Cloudflare – or any of the other public DNS providers – actually implemented this sort of misinformation warning system, only those that were vigilant about it in the first place would care to use it.

For this block-list approach to be useful, you’d need to bake it into something on people’s computers and phones. That’s the web browser.

Ever since most browsers began supporting extensions, they have had the ability to block ads – there are excellent, actively maintained ad-blocking extensions that don’t sell your data – like Privacy Badger by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and uBlock Origin. These and similar extensions can be extended via blocklists to block – or warn of – misinformation. Browsers today also warn you of websites that may be suspicious, or do not secure traffic:

But just like with DNS, the number of people who install ad blocking extensions is tiny, and are biased towards those who are aware of the dangers of the Internet to begin with.

However, there is one company – Google – that is in a position to solve this for most of the Internet.

(Part 5 – What could Google do?)

Categories
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)