Reading List

Ah, its nice to have a little color talk here on the podcast. Dublin, Irelands' ⁠ACHES⁠ is a theorist of color. He combines a multitude of ideas and s...

I’m not usually nostalgic about apps. I appreciate classic designs from the past, but I find ‘new’ more exciting. However, for every rule, there’s an exception, and for me, it’s Mario Guzmán’s beautiful, pixel-perfect reimagining of classic Apple music apps. Guzmán’s latest app is QuickTune, a remote control utility for Apple Music. The app is

The proliferation of harmful content and misinformation on social networks necessitates content moderation policies to maintain platform health. One such policy is shadow banning, which limits content visibility. The danger of shadow banning is that it can be misused by social media platforms to manipulate opinions. Here we present an optimization based approach to shadow banning that can shape opinions into a desired distribution and scale to large networks. Simulations on real network topologies show that our shadow banning policies can shift opinions and increase or decrease opinion polarization. We find that if one shadow bans with the aim of shifting opinions in a certain direction, the resulting shadow banning policy can appear neutral. This shows the potential for social media platforms to misuse shadow banning without being detected. Our results demonstrate the power and danger of shadow banning for opinion manipulation in social networks.

In a new study, Yale SOM’s Tauhid Zaman and Yen-Shao Chen show how a social media platform can shift users’ positions or increase overall polarization by selectively muting and amplifying posts in ways that appear neutral to an outside observer.

The car that established the modern hot-hatch formula remains as rorty and rational as ever.

This is part of a series of posts about the current state of Social Media. I talked about Mozilla’s failed strategy to get people out of the corporate-con

Discovering the best in fiction, essays, and poetry

Well, on my best days. I have plenty of days whehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zettelkastenre I doomscroll too.

When things started getting iffy over at Twitter, Mastodon rose as a popular alternative to the traditional microblogging platfrom. In contrast to the walled gardens of other social media channels,…

Let me cut to the chase: sadly, I don’t have a new iPad Pro to review today on MacStories. I was able to try one in London last week, and, as I wrote, I came away impressed with the hardware. However, I didn’t get a chance to use a new iPad Pro over the past

We asked analysts, industry experts, and startup founders to predict how the gig economy will change for workers and consumers alike in the coming year.

Daniela Muntyan is a Product Designer at Craft Docs, based in London. With 8 years of experience in iOS apps and multi-platform design systems, she has …

We may see third-party Threads apps soon.

Post by Stephen Millard (ThoughtAsylum/@sylumer)

In an era of postmodern, self-referential music, there’s something refreshing about the artist’s new album—short songs, big hooks, and a celebration of delight.

"Nightlife in New York was a celebration." The acclaimed producer reflects on the '90s club scene and the state of dance music today.

In exclusive interviews, the former President lays out a second-term agenda that would reshape America

Arc Search is a new default mobile browser by The Browser Company — designed to be the fastest way to search, and the lightest way to browse on mobile.

From the Zed Blog: Thorsten interviews co-founders Nathan, Max, Antonio about their path to AI, how they use it, how it's implemented in AI, what will change about it, and what that could mean for the future of programming.

General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, have overhauled how businesses process and handle data. Our need-to-know GDPR guide explains what the changes mean for you

Regulation and antitrust trials are pulling down the walls.

Once scholars agonised for years over additions to language. Now, online dictionaries enable instant updates

We've always loved to gawk at others, but what's it like when the tables are turned and all eyes are on you?

The EU pilot for the fediverse comes to an end, but the European Commission will stay on the fediverse; Ghost announces that they will support ActivityPub and build a fediverse news reading client, and Mastodon creates a U.S.-based non-profit.

If you’re new around here, I’ll let you in on a little secret: I love building shortcuts. I have 579 of them in my personal library at the moment,