Overview: Content Creation & Marketing

One of my favourite writers (offline and online) on his personal content strategy, first taking aim at the "tawdry and mercenary" version of "“why writers should blog”... the story goes, “and build a brand ... to promote your work.” Virtually every sentence that contains the word “brand” is bullshit, and that one is no exception."Takins notes is g…

Interesting piece on the reverse side of the network effect: the more people leave, the faster the remainder leave. So what will make people leave?Gen Z want privacy, hate bullying/speech, don’t like ads and think "Facebook is for moms and grandparents""Millennials Are Ready to Ditch... too old to bicker with strangers... [and] still remember thos…

This article absolutely nails why I can't stand LinkedIn anymore, describing the site as completely performative, and the "LinkedIn newsfeed ... as a vast wasteland... almost entirely filled with marketing gurus, salespeople talking sales, and recruiters and “career coaches” offering the same job search tips over and over".Why? Because "the combin…

Although this looks like someone looking for problems because of the apparent near-future success of "solutionism", some good points here: we need "an institution that will know what ... regulations to suspend (eg libraries and IPR) ... to fully leverage the potential inherent in digital technologies for the public good."Recent success on privacy …

Common complaints about social media platforms "sound contradictory. They’re:accelerators for extremism that simultaneously uphold suffocating consensuswastes of attention and should play a smaller role in people’s lives; however, they also need to be improved, refined and purged of bad actors, advanced surveillance machines ... routinely serve …

"social and psychological forces that make people prone to sharing and believing misinformation ... are on the rise" - not so much created by bad actors, but exploited by them. Why?“cognitive and memory limitations, directional motivations to defend or support some group identity or existing belief, and messages from other people and political eli…

"Almost unbelievably, scepticism is highest among healthcare workers."Examines both the specific mistakes and the general antivaxxer European setting undermining the vaccination campaign.Specific mistakes: "by publicly trashing [AstraZeneca], the commission undermined trust in the vaccines... compounded by confusion over the vaccine’s efficacy... …

early adopters are not innovators, but are "willing to experiment... [but] they're not guinea pigs" make them feel they're getting something special, earlythey "are willing to work with your minimum viable product if it solves their problem" Give them something to test. But their reputation is on the line, so prove you're cutting-edge, innovative …

Andreessen Horowitz on sales channels, because "products often fail because the company chose the wrong route to market... A properly designed sales channel is a function of the product that you have built and the target... you wish to pursue."Presented as a function: the channel (c) is derived by a function (f) - distribution design - which proc…

One of a great series of Reimagining the Internet podcasts. Guest: the Planetary.Social founder, discussing:the early days of Twitter: "Twitter's innovation ... happened all at the edges... users created everything... inline images and short links and retweets and the app, actual at and hashtags... the company... cultivated this garden where innov…

Content moderation "will always end up frustrating very large segments of the population and will always fail to accurately represent the "proper" level of moderation of anyone".any moderation will upset the moderated no moderation will upset those who don't like spam, harassment, etcpushing moderation to the users puts the burden on them*moderati…

An innovative writing toolkit will further extend the productivity tools offered to MyHub editors.

Reach outside your own site with federation via ActivityPub. WriteFreely lets anyone on Mastodon, Pleroma, or any ActivityPub-enabled service follow your blog, bookmark your posts, and share them with their followers. See how it works.

After pointing out that mainstream - ie centralised - social platforms cannot moderate effectively due to scale, then introduces fediverse/activitypub-based platforms. Will they face same moderation problems as the mainstream if/when they grow?Takes Gab's unsuccessful move into fediverse as an example: "Almost immediately, Gab was met by a dedicat…

Given the myriad problems posed by social media platforms - content moderation, disinformation, censorship, privacy, anti-trust - this article "proposes an entirely different approach... that enables more free speech, while minimizing ... trolling, hateful speech, and large-scale disinformation efforts... also might help users ... regain control o…

"adversarial interoperability... create a new product or service that plugs into the existing ones without the permission of the companies that make them... once the driver of tech’s dynamic marketplace" now stifled by legal means by Big Tech, which "climbed the adversarial ladder and then pulled it up behind them".EFF sees restoring adversarial …

"corporate-run social media implies a structure [and]... content limits the users have no say in, which favor harmful [content] ... while inhibiting freedom of expression. ... the next platform has the same problems ... “I’ll just build my own platform” leads to ... “alt-tech” platforms ... to host right-wing extremist content... So what does “dec…

Didn't know: "Prominent conservative donor Rebekah Mercer is among the company’s financial backers"Interesting point: one of the main reasons many are on FB/Twitter is to troll other people - will it be harder to get people to come back to an app where everyone agrees with them?

Overview of efforts to put data back into the hands of people. "platforms’ business models depend on network effects and scale to keep users engaged and to sell more advertising... a culture of virality that... poisons public discourse." Moreover, their data dominance is stifling competition & innovation. " So trustbusters are on the warpath... An…

Fleeting Note (FN): the creation of Fediverse-based alternatives might suddenly become an urgency.

the Election Integrity Partnership and Disinfo Defense League ... two initiatives among hundreds ... reflect two mutually reinforcing sides of the same ecosystem... people devoting their livelihoods to combatting online misinformation and disinformation... These are their stories...EIP is uniquely close to the platforms, using Jira to communicate …

Several of the president’s tweets overlaid with disclaimers ... invoking Twitter's Civic Integrity Policy, which prevents users from manipulating elections. Trump’s tweets also effectively throttled by preventing other users from amplifying them. Facebook’s measures were less accusatory, attaching an informational label.Neither stopped Trump using…

"A serendipity engine on the Twitter sidebar".A "second brain" provides easy access to all the resources you've ever Liked or ideas you've ever Thought. @ExGenesis' Threadhelper brings a subset of this (just Tweets) right into the twitter UX - it looks brilliant.Check out the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voCpNvldCjk&feature=emb_logo

Today's social platforms' business models are not inevitable, but because we see them as such we constrain "the solution space we consider for combatting mis-/disinformation, polarization, and promotion of extremism... we need to consider what technologies [and] digital media to have a productive role in democratic societies".Hence this essay, whi…

"Our digital public sphere has been failing ... [but] History offers a proven template for how to build healthier public spaces."Filter Bubble author Pariser hearkens back to Walt Whitman's creation of NY's Green Park, when "New York City had no public parks ...only walled commercial pleasure gardens for those who could afford". He saw American de…

Facebook threatens with legal action NY academics seeking to study Facebook's political ad targeting because their Ad Observer is a "scraping tool". The project collects data unavailable on Facebook's political ad archive: targeting data, geography, political contest, etc.., which they say now violates their rules established in the wake of Cambri…

Another analysis - with a lot of useful links - of the way social platforms managed the NYPost story, and what it tells us "about the status of social media companies’ reform efforts, and [how]... they are still failing to safeguard the democratic process?"First some facts:The NYPost article's "sourcing was so dubious that at least two reporters a…

The platforms started doing what people concerned about disinformation have been asking for, and immediately came under fire from people concerned about censorship.When The New York Post published a story supposedly incriminating Hunter Biden "YouTube largely did nothing, Facebook deprioritized the Post story (slowing spread until 3rd party factch…

Facebook's 2017 newsfeed algorithm tweak intentionally reduced traffic to left-leaning outlets " to avoid adding fuel to critics’ argument that the platform has an anti-conservative bias"... and overcorrected."Mother Jones saw a roughly $400,000 drop in the site’s annual revenue"

There are two possible reasons why we are not talking as much about foreign interference. Both could be true. Only one is good news.