Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
McDonald did an internal investigation and concluded that “Strange” had hit the algorithmic jackpot not because of Galaxie 500’s unique musical style, but because the song was more similar to songs by other bands than Galaxie 500’s other tracks. In many cases, if “Strange” played, the listener was unlikely to hit the Skip or Stop button, and so the
... See moreKyle Chayka • Filterworld
My old belief was that storing all these links in a souped-up database would lead me to magically generate new insights about the topics I write about. After several years of banging my head into a wall, I realized that to generate new insights from these links I would need a new approach.
That led me to Zettelkasten, a technique for creating webs o... See more
That led me to Zettelkasten, a technique for creating webs o... See more
Casey Newton • Three apps that made me more productive this year
Slashdot thus employed a fluid system of mutual endorsement rather than a Debian-style electoral republic, but it similarly showed that an open, dynamic system of user empowerment could manage the content on a large platform in ways that generally satisfied its users.
Nathan Schneider • Governable Spaces: Democratic Design for Online Life
Networks have also had a contentious relationship with developers, who brought in millions of early users. Developers built alternate clients, invented UI paradigms, and even launched billion-dollar gaming companies. But as they grew, the networks realized that they didn’t need developers anymore. Most users were locked in and wouldn’t leave becaus... See more
Varun Srinivasan • Sufficient Decentralization for Social Networks
Highlighting the consequences of an automatic society running amok, the late philosopher of technology Bernard Stiegler suggested that successive ages of technological proletarianization since the 19th century have resulted in human losses first in the knowledge of how to make and do (savoir-faire), followed by the knowledge of how to live (savoir-... See more
Ziyaad Bhorat • The Right To Be Free From Automation | NOEMA
In general, will Substack replicate the patterns of marginalization found across the media industry, or will it help people locked out of the dominant media sphere to flourish? To a large extent, the answer depends on whether or not Substack’s founders believe they’re in the publishing business. When we spoke, they were adamant that Substack is a p... See more
cjr.org • The Substackerati
there are decades of research on how knowledge workers in a decentralized network become “optimally distinct.”
Joey DeBruin • Communities Aren’t Buckets -- They’re Clouds
Algorithm-friendly design need not be user-hostile. It simply takes a different approach as to how to best serve the user’s interests. Pagination may insert some level of friction to the user, but in doing so, it may provide the algorithm with cleaner signal that safeguards the quality of the feed in the long run.
Eugene Wei • Seeing Like an Algorithm — Remains of the Day
Discord's moderation bot, named CarlBot, does a pretty good job of automatically deleting problematic messaging and alerting the mods.