Subconscious – Gordon Brander / on Substack: “While analyzing a global history databank spanning 10,000 years, Shin, et al found a disconcerting pattern. Civilizations scale until they are overwhelmed by the information environment they create. This is The Information Scaling Threshold. Throughout the Holocene, societies developed additional layers of administration and more information-rich instruments for… Continue Reading
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Category Archives: Social Media
The Age of Social Media Is Ending
The Atlantic: “It’s over. Facebook is in decline, Twitter in chaos. Mark Zuckerberg’s empire has lost hundreds of billions of dollars in value and laid off 11,000 people, with its ad business in peril and its metaverse fantasy in irons. Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has caused advertisers to pull spending and power users to… Continue Reading
Ditching Twitter? How to get started with Mastodon
ZDNet: “Now that Twitter is under new (and controversial) management, a decentralized open-source alternative has seen surprising growth. Here’s how the Fediverse works and how you can get started…It’s difficult for most consumers to wrap their minds around the concept of the Fediverse, which has a lot of technical jargon and wonkiness associated with it.… Continue Reading
How to know if breathwork is right for you
Mashable: “Breathwork tutorials are popular on social media, but experts say beginners should be cautious. Breathwork seems like one of those self-help techniques that you could easily learn on social media. After all, there are countless tutorials on YouTube and TikTok, along with numerous testimonials on Reddit. And anyway, could it really be that difficult… Continue Reading
Gmail will no longer allow users to revert back to its old design
TechCrunch: “Google announced [November 8, 2022] that it’s making the new Gmail interface the standard experience for users. The company first released the new interface earlier this year but allowed users to revert back to the original view. Starting this month, users will no longer have the option to go back to the old interface.… Continue Reading
How to avoid falling for and spreading misinformation online
Washington Post: “Anyone with an internet connection can watch breaking news unfold in real time, or at least some version of it. Across social media, posts can fly up faster than most fact-checkers and moderators can handle, and they’re often an unpredictable mix of true, fake, out of context and even propaganda. This kind of… Continue Reading
Mastadon – Democratizing Social Media
“Mastodon’s popularity is soaring, and it’s all due to the chaotic actions of one man. As people explore what else is on offer for social media, Mastodon has emerged as a viable open-source alternative, with no ads. Reuters has an explainer, as does CNN, New York Times, and the Guardian.” [via Metafilter] NOTE: Follow beSpacific… Continue Reading
Here’s how a Twitter engineer says it will break in the coming weeks
MIT Technology Review: “…A massive tech platform like Twitter is built upon very many interdependent parts. “The larger catastrophic failures are a little more titillating, but the biggest risk is the smaller things starting to degrade,” says Ben Krueger, a site reliability engineer who has more than two decades of experience in the tech industry.… Continue Reading
Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, November 5, 2022
Via LLRX – Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, November 5, 2022: “Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex… Continue Reading
How to Leave Dying Social Media Platforms (without ditching your friends)
Cory Doctorow: “Online, a lot of us have been unhappy with our social media platforms for a long time, but we hang in there, year after year, scandal after scandal, because as much as we hate the platform, we love the people who use the platform. We don’t leave because we don’t want to lose… Continue Reading
Fed Up With Political Text Messages?
The New York Times – “In this polarized climate, hundreds of Americans told us they agree on one thing: Campaigns must stop spamming voters’ phones with unwanted political texts…The campaign messages not only capture some voters’ deep frustrations with unwanted political texts. They also document how political texting is becoming a go-to method for spreading… Continue Reading
Facebook’s Going Back to Only Using Algorithms to Curate News
Gizmodo: “If at first the algorithms don’t succeed at stopping disinformation, just simply add humans. But if the algorithms grow too burdensome, then simply go back to the algorithm. So round and round the social media carousel we go. Meta, which owns Facebook, confirmed that the human-curated “Top Stories” section in the news tab will… Continue Reading
