#media & tech network

[reasonsforhope]

"Is social media designed to reward people for acting badly?

The answer is clearly yes, given that the reward structure on social media platforms relies on popularity, as indicated by the number of responses – likes and comments – a post receives from other users. Black-box algorithms then further amplify the spread of posts that have attracted attention.

Sharing widely read content, by itself, isn’t a problem. But it becomes a problem when attention-getting, controversial content is prioritized by design. Given the design of social media sites, users form habits to automatically share the most engaging information regardless of its accuracy and potential harm. Offensive statements, attacks on out groups and false news are amplified, and misinformation often spreads further and faster than the truth.

We are two social psychologists and a marketing scholar. Our research, presented at the 2023 Nobel Prize Summit, shows that social media actually has the ability to create user habits to share high-quality content. After a few tweaks to the reward structure of social media platforms, users begin to share information that is accurate and fact-based...

Re-targeting rewards

To investigate the effect of a new reward structure, we gave financial rewards to some users for sharing accurate content and not sharing misinformation. These financial rewards simulated the positive social feedback, such as likes, that users typically receive when they share content on platforms. In essence, we created a new reward structure based on accuracy instead of attention.

As on popular social media platforms, participants in our research learned what got rewarded by sharing information and observing the outcome, without being explicitly informed of the rewards beforehand. This means that the intervention did not change the users’ goals, just their online experiences. After the change in reward structure, participants shared significantly more content that was accurate. More remarkably, users continued to share accurate content even after we removed rewards for accuracy in a subsequent round of testing. These results show that users can be given incentives to share accurate information as a matter of habit.

A different group of users received rewards for sharing misinformation and for not sharing accurate content. Surprisingly, their sharing most resembled that of users who shared news as they normally would, without any financial reward. The striking similarity between these groups reveals that social media platforms encourage users to share attention-getting content that engages others at the expense of accuracy and safety...

Doing right and doing well

Our approach, using the existing rewards on social media to create incentives for accuracy, tackles misinformation spread without significantly disrupting the sites’ business model. This has the additional advantage of altering rewards instead of introducing content restrictions, which are often controversial and costly in financial and human terms.

Implementing our proposed reward system for news sharing carries minimal costs and can be easily integrated into existing platforms. The key idea is to provide users with rewards in the form of social recognition when they share accurate news content. This can be achieved by introducing response buttons to indicate trust and accuracy. By incorporating social recognition for accurate content, algorithms that amplify popular content can leverage crowdsourcing to identify and amplify truthful information.

Both sides of the political aisle now agree that social media has challenges, and our data pinpoints the root of the problem: the design of social media platforms."

And here's the video of one of the scientsts presenting this research at the Nobel Prize Summit!

-Article via The Conversation, August 1, 2023. Video via the Nobel Prize's official Youtube channel, Nobel Prize, posted May 31, 2023.

[nando161mando]

The censorship is only going to get worse

[disease]

a relatively concise explanation for any of those confused about decentralized social platforms. [ie: Mastodon, diaspora*, Friendica, Pixelfed, PeerTube, Lemmy, Bluesky, etc.]

[seasidesprout]

The moxy show

🐶📺🪳|🐶📺🪳|🐶📺🪳

[jensorensen]

Pick Your Social Network

Help keep this work sustainable by joining the Sorensen Subscription Service! Also on Patreon.

[theinsaneapp]

Twitter Source Code Leaked Online And Posted On This GitHub Repo By This User

Read In Detail: Twitter Source Code Leaked Online And Posted On This GitHub Repo By This User

[garthnadermemestash]

🔴🟠🟡🟢🔵🟣

[sideshow-tornado]

My first screen name was Mvrk16, which stood for Maverick (as in the call sign from Top Gun) and 16 the jersey number of Joe Montana. I was thirteen years old when I chose it so give me a break. I later changed it to Jonster82, which is also quite embarrassing as it was a nickname given to me by first “love” and my birth year. I know I used a few others over the years, but just like abandoned tumblr handles there are probably too many and not memorable enough.

[dandelionsprout42]

How to find your Apple TV's IPv6 address(es)

Since Apple TV's network settings don't list IPv6 info, it's time to get creative, though it won't be the hardest tech guide out there. Typically it has 2 IPv6 addresses: 1 public, and 1 private (The latter of which is used within the home's router network).

————————————————

Public IPv6 address

Download https://apps.apple.com/app/icurlhttp-appletv/id1153384808 (iCurlHTTP AppleTV)

2) Open that app. 3) In its "Browser" settings in the lower left, change from "User" to "iPhone". This is required. 4) In its address field in the upper left, write "https://ip.me". Then press the remote's OK button. 5) If it works, a row will show up a slight bit down in the text results that say "<p class="ip-address">" followed by your Apple TV's public IP.

————————————————

Private IPv6 address (i.e. within your router's LAN)

Download https://apps.apple.com/us/app/vlc-media-player/id650377962 (VLC for Apple TV)

2) Open that app. 3) Go to "Remote Playback" → Click "Turn On Remote Playback" if it hasn't already been turned on. 4) The app will show a URL that it tells users to open on a non-"Apple TV device". It will usually be "http://(The Apple TV's network name in lowercase with dashes).local" Ensure that the VLC app remains on that screen throughout the entire rest of the guide. 5) On a Windows, macOS, or Linux device (Android won't work), open any sort of command line (PowerShell, Cygwin, Windows Terminal, Command Prompt, Mac Terminal, Bash, ZSH, anything you can think of like those). It is not needed to run as administrator, though nothing bad happens if you do.

6) Type "ping (the URL from step 4 but without the http:// part)", then press Enter.

7) If it works, the result will show "Pinging (URL) [(The private IP address)] with 32 bytes of data:" 8) That IP (Remove the last "%(2 numbers)" part first) can then be pasted into a browser, "http://[(The IP)]". The square brackets are required. 9) If the browser loads a "Drop files" window, then the IP works correctly.

[cigarbands]

Business Redevi

Redevi provides wireless connectivity solutions for enterprises across various sectors, including healthcare, education, government, and industrial IoT. Their services include designing, building, and managing wireless networks with technology and vendor-agnostic approaches. Solutions offered encompass DAS, WiFi/MESH, public safety, and private LTE networks. Redevi focuses on reducing the complexity, time, and costs involved in network management while offering flexible pricing models and lifecycle management. They partner with leading technology providers to deliver customized solutions to their clients.

For more information, visit Redevi.io.

[techartspodcast]

#sponsor sermonshots.com

[delcat177]

Question, because I'm curious too and the timeline here sparked me. Are we seeing a decline in rebogging, or are we seeing a saturation effect?

Ten years ago, Tumblr was getting along okay, but it was A Weird Site For Weirdos. It still is, mind, but it was genuinely niche back then, it didn't even super know what it was.

Little pond, many fish.

Now it's a Weird Site for Regular People, but by law of internet physics, *the pond grows*.

It's the same as Youtube. The bigger a platform gets, the harder you're competing in a more and more saturated market. Tumblr isn't dying--it's doing better than ever. That's the problem.

I uh don't have a solution sorry

this new reblog chart feature is FASCINATING and it is also highlighting how much people on this website fail gifmakers and other content creators. you NEED to start reblogging gifsets and art if you want this site to continue functioning and being a place content creators WANT to be on. look at this

there are almost NO reblog chains!! the majority of reblogs are directly from me, and then it just. ends. the like to reblog ratio is almost 1:4.

this is why posts die. this is why artists have left, this is why gifmakers are giving up. this is killing tumblr.

reblogging is the ENTIRE POINT of this website, and you can't just like something and move on and expect gif/editmakers and artists to continue putting in the effort to make content FOR YOU.

REBLOG. POSTS.

[nando161mando]

Everybody should celebrate the arrest because every day, we find out something funnier than the previous day.

https://www.wired.com/story/telegram-ceo-pavel-durov-arrest/

Man, I can't wait for Saturday when we find out that only he has the password to the Windows Server computer that's handling all of Telegram's traffic and after the weekly reboot, they're now unable log back in.

[sszk]

Threads一周年

Metaが運営するSNSであるThreadsが昨日7月3日に一周年を迎えたとのことです。昨年のこの時期は今のような頻度でブログを更新していなかったので記事にしていませんでしたが、私も一応開始当初から使っているので一周年ということになります。 Instagramのアカウントと結びついているので、Instagramのユーザーは簡単に使い始めることができるということ��あって、1億7500万ものMAU(月間アクティブユーザー)がいるということでTwitterの後継としては最有力というのは間違いないでしょう。Xもまだ日本人は結構使っているようですが、いわゆるインプレゾンビがはびこっているということもあり、世界的にはだいぶ使えないものになってしまっているのではないでしょうか。 Threadsでは一周年を記念して特別なアプリアイコンを毎日1個ずつ合計5個使えるようにしていますが、それが使えるのも12日…

[mostlysignssomeportents]

“If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing”

20 years ago, I got in a (friendly) public spat with Chris Anderson, who was then the editor in chief of Wired. I'd publicly noted my disappointment with glowing Wired reviews of DRM-encumbered digital devices, prompting Anderson to call me unrealistic for expecting the magazine to condemn gadgets for their DRM:

https://longtail.typepad.com/the_long_tail/2004/12/is_drm_evil.html

I replied in public, telling him that he'd misunderstood. This wasn't an issue of ideological purity – it was about good reviewing practice. Wired was telling readers to buy a product because it had features x, y and z, but at any time in the future, without warning, without recourse, the vendor could switch off any of those features:

https://memex.craphound.com/2004/12/29/cory-responds-to-wired-editor-on-drm/

I proposed that all Wired endorsements for DRM-encumbered products should come with this disclaimer:

WARNING: THIS DEVICE’S FEATURES ARE SUBJECT TO REVOCATION WITHOUT NOTICE, ACCORDING TO TERMS SET OUT IN SECRET NEGOTIATIONS. YOUR INVESTMENT IS CONTINGENT ON THE GOODWILL OF THE WORLD’S MOST PARANOID, TECHNOPHOBIC ENTERTAINMENT EXECS. THIS DEVICE AND DEVICES LIKE IT ARE TYPICALLY USED TO CHARGE YOU FOR THINGS YOU USED TO GET FOR FREE — BE SURE TO FACTOR IN THE PRICE OF BUYING ALL YOUR MEDIA OVER AND OVER AGAIN. AT NO TIME IN HISTORY HAS ANY ENTERTAINMENT COMPANY GOTTEN A SWEET DEAL LIKE THIS FROM THE ELECTRONICS PEOPLE, BUT THIS TIME THEY’RE GETTING A TOTAL WALK. HERE, PUT THIS IN YOUR MOUTH, IT’LL MUFFLE YOUR WHIMPERS.

Wired didn't take me up on this suggestion.

But I was right. The ability to change features, prices, and availability of things you've already paid for is a powerful temptation to corporations. Inkjet printers were always a sleazy business, but once these printers got directly connected to the internet, companies like HP started pushing out "security updates" that modified your printer to make it reject the third-party ink you'd paid for:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer

Now, this scam wouldn't work if you could just put things back the way they were before the "update," which is where the DRM comes in. A thicket of IP laws make reverse-engineering DRM-encumbered products into a felony. Combine always-on network access with indiscriminate criminalization of user modification, and the enshittification will follow, as surely as night follows day.

This is the root of all the right to repair shenanigans. Sure, companies withhold access to diagnostic codes and parts, but codes can be extracted and parts can be cloned. The real teeth in blocking repair comes from the law, not the tech. The company that makes McDonald's wildly unreliable McFlurry machines makes a fortune charging franchisees to fix these eternally broken appliances. When a third party threatened this racket by reverse-engineering the DRM that blocked independent repair, they got buried in legal threats:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/20/euthanize-rentier-enablers/#cold-war

Everybody loves this racket. In Poland, a team of security researchers at the OhMyHack conference just presented their teardown of the anti-repair features in NEWAG Impuls locomotives. NEWAG boobytrapped their trains to try and detect if they've been independently serviced, and to respond to any unauthorized repairs by bricking themselves:

https://mamot.fr/@q3k@hackerspace.pl/111528162905209453

Poland is part of the EU, meaning that they are required to uphold the provisions of the 2001 EU Copyright Directive, including Article 6, which bans this kind of reverse-engineering. The researchers are planning to present their work again at the Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg this month – Germany is also a party to the EUCD. The threat to researchers from presenting this work is real – but so is the threat to conferences that host them:

https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/researchers-face-legal-threats-over-sdmi-hack/

20 years ago, Chris Anderson told me that it was unrealistic to expect tech companies to refuse demands for DRM from the entertainment companies whose media they hoped to play. My argument – then and now – was that any tech company that sells you a gadget that can have its features revoked is defrauding you. You're paying for x, y and z – and if they are contractually required to remove x and y on demand, they are selling you something that you can't rely on, without making that clear to you.

But it's worse than that. When a tech company designs a device for remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrades, they invite both external and internal parties to demand those downgrades. Like Pavel Chekov says, a phaser on the bridge in Act I is going to go off by Act III. Selling a product that can be remotely, irreversibly, nonconsensually downgraded inevitably results in the worst person at the product-planning meeting proposing to do so. The fact that there are no penalties for doing so makes it impossible for the better people in that meeting to win the ensuing argument, leading to the moral injury of seeing a product you care about reduced to a pile of shit:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/25/moral-injury/#enshittification

But even if everyone at that table is a swell egg who wouldn't dream of enshittifying the product, the existence of a remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrade feature makes the product vulnerable to external actors who will demand that it be used. Back in 2022, Adobe informed its customers that it had lost its deal to include Pantone colors in Photoshop, Illustrator and other "software as a service" packages. As a result, users would now have to start paying a monthly fee to see their own, completed images. Fail to pay the fee and all the Pantone-coded pixels in your artwork would just show up as black:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/28/fade-to-black/#trust-the-process

Adobe blamed this on Pantone, and there was lots of speculation about what had happened. Had Pantone jacked up its price to Adobe, so Adobe passed the price on to its users in the hopes of embarrassing Pantone? Who knows? Who can know? That's the point: you invested in Photoshop, you spent money and time creating images with it, but you have no way to know whether or how you'll be able to access those images in the future. Those terms can change at any time, and if you don't like it, you can go fuck yourself.

These companies are all run by CEOs who got their MBAs at Darth Vader University, where the first lesson is "I have altered the deal, pray I don't alter it further." Adobe chose to design its software so it would be vulnerable to this kind of demand, and then its customers paid for that choice. Sure, Pantone are dicks, but this is Adobe's fault. They stuck a KICK ME sign to your back, and Pantone obliged.

This keeps happening and it's gonna keep happening. Last week, Playstation owners who'd bought (or "bought") Warner TV shows got messages telling them that Warner had walked away from its deal to sell videos through the Playstation store, and so all the videos they'd paid for were going to be deleted forever. They wouldn't even get refunds (to be clear, refunds would also be bullshit – when I was a bookseller, I didn't get to break into your house and steal the books I'd sold you, not even if I left some cash on your kitchen table).

Sure, Warner is an unbelievably shitty company run by the single most guillotineable executive in all of Southern California, the loathsome David Zaslav, who oversaw the merger of Warner with Discovery. Zaslav is the creep who figured out that he could make more money cancelling completed movies and TV shows and taking a tax writeoff than he stood to make by releasing them:

https://aftermath.site/there-is-no-piracy-without-ownership

Imagine putting years of your life into making a program – showing up on set at 5AM and leaving your kids to get their own breakfast, performing stunts that could maim or kill you, working 16-hour days during the acute phase of the covid pandemic and driving home in the night, only to have this absolute turd of a man delete the program before anyone could see it, forever, to get a minor tax advantage. Talk about moral injury!

But without Sony's complicity in designing a remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrade feature into the Playstation, Zaslav's war on art and creative workers would be limited to material that hadn't been released yet. Thanks to Sony's awful choices, David Zaslav can break into your house, steal your movies – and he doesn't even have to leave a twenty on your kitchen table.

The point here – the point I made 20 years ago to Chris Anderson – is that this is the foreseeable, inevitable result of designing devices for remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrades. Anyone who was paying attention should have figured that out in the GW Bush administration. Anyone who does this today? Absolute flaming garbage.

Sure, Zaslav deserves to be staked out over an anthill and slathered in high-fructose corn syrup. But save the next anthill for the Sony exec who shipped a product that would let Zaslav come into your home and rob you. That piece of shit knew what they were doing and they did it anyway. Fuck them. Sideways. With a brick.

Meanwhile, the studios keep making the case for stealing movies rather than paying for them. As Tyler James Hill wrote: "If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing":

https://bsky.app/profile/tylerjameshill.bsky.social/post/3kflw2lvam42n

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/08/playstationed/#tyler-james-hill

Image: Alan Levine (modified) https://pxhere.com/en/photo/218986

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/