But killing off links is a strategy. It may be presented as a cost-saving measure, or as a way of reducing the sharing of untrusted links. But it is a strategy, designed to keep people from the open web, the place where they can control how, and whether, someone makes money off of an audience. The web is where we can make sites that don’t abuse data in the ways that Facebook properties do.

In advance of the 2020 election, a guide to fighting viral fake news, disinformation, and simple misunderstandings across Twitter, Facebook, and the web. --- There’s a term called “context collapse” that’s very useful when discussing internet news. Popularized by scholar danah boyd, it describes how the internet “flattens multiple audiences into one” — if you’re browsing Twitter, for example, an offhand comment from your friend sits right alongside a statement from the president of the United States. Internet news suffers from its own variation of context collapse: no matter how far away or long ago a story happened, it can sound like it’s happening right now, in your neighborhood.

We don’t have to lose our digital public spaces to state manipulation. What if future companies designed media to facilitate democracy right from the beginning? Is it possible to create a form of digital communication that promotes consensus-building and civil debate, rather than divisiveness and conspiracy theories? […] Twitter and Facebook executives often say that their services are modeled on a “public square.” But the public square is more like 1970s network television, where one person at a time addresses the masses. On social media, the “square” is more like millions of karaoke boxes running in parallel, where groups of people are singing lyrics that none of the other boxes can hear. And many members of the “public” are actually artificial beings controlled by hidden individuals or organizations. There isn’t a decent real-world analogue for social media, and that makes it difficult for users to understand where public information is coming from, and where their personal information is going. […] The legacy of social media will be a world thirsty for new kinds of public experiences. To rebuild the public sphere, we’ll need to use what we’ve learned from billion-dollar social experiments like Facebook, and marginalized communities like Black Twitter. We’ll have to carve out genuinely private spaces too, curated by people we know and trust.

wikiHow embodies an alternative history of the internet, and an interesting possibility for its future. --- “The web offers us an opportunity to build whatever we want. We’ve chosen, by the way we’ve put the incentives, and the way users behaved, to spend all of our time in four big web properties,” Herrick tells me. “We didn’t have to do that, and we still don’t have to do that. We can build this web of small towns. You can get your information from small providers that have your best interests at heart and aren’t trying to just mine you for data. The web could be a totally different place.”

Preparing for your eventual demise is a gift your loved ones will appreciate even as they mourn your loss — and it will give you peace of mind in the present, too. Most people have thought about setting up a will and doing other estate planning, but you should also arm your family with the most essential information they’ll need in the immediate days and weeks after you’re gone, preferably in one easy-to-access place. Here’s how to set up a digital version of Myrna’s “little black book” for simple and secure information sharing with family members and trusted friends.

Pixel artist supreme.

Just a bunch of cool/interesting/funny/thought-provoking websites from 2000–2019.

The engine of internet culture is chugging along, changed. ​​​​ --- While porn creators belonged to tightly connected subgroups, they were linked to the rest of Tumblr’s network “with a very high number of ties,” and their productions “spread widely across the whole social graph.” In other words, they weren’t quarantined in some illicit corner of the site—they were woven into its basic fabric: The average Tumblr user in the sample followed 51 blogs, two or three of which tended to be specifically pornographic, and another two of which tended to be “bridge” blogs, run by users who were particularly likely to reblog porn. […] Plenty of new, younger fandoms sprung up on Tumblr this year, according to Brennan, but it’s notable how much of what showed up on the year-end list for what has always been the most creative and arguably the most important platform on the web was regurgitated from other sites—or bland continuations of aesthetically unchallenging trends that have been popular for years. (Like the biggest pop star in the world.) Tumblr can still be funny and strange, and there is still no better place on the internet to be a fan of something, explore a social or sexual identity, or reblog a convoluted joke about being young and online.

Jia Tolentino speaks with the mysterious administrator of the Cursed Images Twitter account, and considers what makes the images there so creepy. --- Knowing the stories behind the cursed images does not always make them less creepy. “Cursed image 1783,” showing a woman encased in medical equipment with balloons wreathing her face, is from an Associated Press story about a woman in Memphis who died after a power failure shut off the iron lung she’d lived inside for almost sixty years. “Cursed image 1627,” showing a terrible plasticine figure in a waste-green pool, is from a Daily Beast story about a seventy-year-old man named Robert whose pastime is dressing up as a life-size doll. These images hew to the Freudian description of the uncanny: a sense that something once familiar has become terribly strange. Seeing a flock of flamingos crammed into a dirty public bathroom is uncomfortable, whether you know that the photo was taken at the Miami Zoo during Hurricane Andrew or not.

Jia Tolentino writes on the uptick in uncanny or unpleasant things being described on Twitter, Reddit, and other social-media platforms as having “cursed energy,” a phrase that has come to signify anxiety and malaise. --- These are quite obviously cursed times: Donald Trump is somehow still the President; more than a quarter of the birds in North America have disappeared since 1970; and children keep having to take to the streets to plead with our lawmakers to protect their lives. But it is hard—given the sheer extent of what is crumbling around us, and also the natural limits of our individual scopes of vision—to take in the fullness of contemporary cursedness all at once. It’s easier, perhaps, to see dread in individual objects: an eBay listing for a Sonic costume photographed on a child-size mannequin; a drawing of Mickey Mouse with a flesh-colored skull, holding a black, ear-shaped cap; a photo of a brick of ramen being cooked in Mountain Dew.

This page, compiled by @fimoculous, aggregates all of the lists related to 2010s decade.

The problem is that Facebook doesn’t offer free speech; it offers free amplification. No one would much care about anything you posted to Facebook, no matter how false or hateful, if people had to navigate to your particular page to read your rantings, as in the very early days of the site. But what people actually read on Facebook is what’s in their News Feed … and its contents, in turn, are determined not by giving everyone an equal voice, and not by a strict chronological timeline. What you read on Facebook is determined entirely by Facebook’s algorithm, which elides much — censors much, if you wrongly think the News Feed is free speech — and amplifies little. What is amplified? Two forms of content. For native content, the algorithm optimizes for engagement. This in turn means people spend more time on Facebook, and therefore more time in the company of that other form of content which is amplified: paid advertising.

As some of the pro-user-centric arguments hint, which option you prefer is partly a decision about cultural values, not economic cost. When you buy an album, no matter how many times you play it, you are making a conscious choice that it’s worth your hard-earned cash. With the existing streaming model, your money is not a direct investment—it is at the mercy of collective listening habits. Whether we want a system that rewards the conscious choices of individuals—versus, say, algorithms piping in modern-day muzak 24/7—is a question about more than dollars and (fractions of) cents.

It might not sound like much, but text-string searches represent the lowest impediment to the free flow of information. To be able to search a whole giant corpus at will for the needle of your desire in the Brobdingnagian cultural haystack means that your personal interests needn’t take a back seat to corporate imperatives of any kind. Full, absolute text searches should be the goal for all searchable databases. […] American business practice in our time consists not only in offering an attractive product, but also in throwing as many spanners as possible into the works of your competitors. The goal is not to become one among many, but to crush all alternatives. This may explain why, in the first dot-com boom that began in the mid-1990s and ended in April of 2001, so much money went to the acquisition and eventual strangling of so many promising mom-and-pop online startups. These businesses must not be allowed to grow, or they must be acquired, in order that markets might be captured by those who’d attracted the most power in the form of capital—not through any particular excellence of product, or of management. With the results that you see all around you. In the opinion of this former bookseller, Amazon represents a threat to the commons; a threat to libraries; a threat to independent publishing; a threat to an informed, intelligent public.

(Except when it is.) --- Being upfront about the humans who operate behind a curtain of artificial intelligence would mean looking less ingenious, less innovative, less omniscient. But users deserve to be in the know and able to make informed decisions about what devices to allow in their homes and on their persons

I still believe that there are new forms of connectivity we could forge that aren’t Facebook and aren’t Twitter and that could maybe — maybe — let us see outside of our own filter bubbles. Perhaps we could find or create new kinds of avenues for organizing, or platforms for debate (for those who are level-headed enough to do so). The role of the internet, and of reimagining how we use the internet to talk, is as crucial as ever. But it’s a thorny path. It wasn’t until now that I fully grasped the dangerous varieties of connectivity (like rapid sharing of fake news) and understood there are people who cannot be connected with in the way we would like (the Rooshes of the world). Maybe that just means I’ve grown up. I know less about “how to internet” than I did before. All I can say now is that doing it right will require a great deal of imagination, caution, and fortitude.

Share buttons and prompts to “read more” treat readers like idiots who don’t know how to do basic tasks; meanwhile, a huge amount of faith is put in technology, which fails constantly. Embedded social media posts don’t load properly, videos expire, and the pre-populated tweet mangles the text. If there are high-res photos, they are often too large to display on a standard laptop screen, so one first looks at a face and much later scrolls to see a body. Should the poor reader decide to navigate the site’s categories via the drop-down menu, they must maneuver the mouse like a tight-rope walker, lest the proper choice vanish before they can click on it.

Zazzle baby apparel, but modeled by adults.

The shift to an organized industry also has political implications—and not just because journalists are becoming more active through their union work. In the larger scheme of things, unionized media workers are starting to see the world and themselves in a new light. Journalism, like other creative-but-poor industries, is predicated on the idea that its practitioners are just lucky to be doing what they love; they’ve long been conditioned to believe that there’s something inherently prestigious, even noble, about this type of white-collar work. But as media jobs become more precarious, undermined by the same monopoly forces affecting workers in other parts of the economy, media workers are increasingly seeing themselves as workers first. This is what Marxist-minded leftists have long termed class consciousness, and that consciousness is spreading, within legacy and digital media brands alike. [...] To reclaim the foundations of a free press in America, media workers need to get serious about dismantling tech monopolies and implementing policies that would reverse our new Gilded Age. It seems to be no coincidence that countries that operate the freest press regimes, such as Norway, Sweden, and Finland, also have comparatively low income-inequality. The Jonah Perettis of the world think that they can solve the media crisis in isolation, without acknowledging that they are integral to and have benefited from the system that gave rise to this crisis in the first place. [...] What’s more, union activism can help bridge the yawning power dynamic that now separates tech monopolies from the flailing media sector. Tech companies will have to feel threatened if they’re going to implement reforms and meet media companies more than halfway—and the companies themselves clearly pose no threat at all. The way the media business works now is that Facebook and Google and Apple News reap the bulk of the profits produced by the labor of journalists—either by leapfrogging the ownership structure entirely or enlisting short-sighted owners, who mostly compete with one another, to give away their content for a pittance.

By expanding the definition of what constitutes personal data—and by extension, what constitutes a breach of personal data—and applying a standardized notification requirement to the entire EU, the GDPR appears to have generated a much larger data set of reported incidents and thereby significantly widened our window into what types of breaches are occurring. The vast majority of companies are still not being fined for failing to protect their customers’ data, and the vast majority of fines are still too small to register with the companies that are being penalized. (Arguably, even 50 million euros is a fairly trivial sum to Google, which brought in $136.8 billion in revenue in 2018. For comparison, 50 million euros is equivalent to roughly $57 million, or 0.04 percent of Google’s 2018 revenue.)

This document exists to lay out some general principles of running a small social network site that have worked for me. These principles are related to community building more than they are related to specific technologies.

What began as an attempt at a simpler life quickly became a life-style brand.

For a brief moment, Tumblr played host to a tight-knit, but open-minded, community of music lovers who were thinking and writing deeply about music and its place in the world. --- In some ways, we were naïve. When Music Tumblr was humming, few people stopped to think that what we were really doing was providing free content to a large company that was trying to figure out how to turn that content into money. Just about everyone I can think of from the Music Tumblr days is now on Twitter, and just about all of them seem miserable there. You go to Twitter expecting the worst, and it rarely disappoints. As crazy as it sounds now, for a short while, in this time and place, social media seemed like a good idea. But there's always hope.

Once upon a time, my Tumblr Dashboard was full of writing about music.

What I miss about my "90s internet" wasn't it specifically, with its slow data links, tiny JPEGs, buffering RealPlayer, or the tag. It did not have the tiniest fraction of the wonderful content the internet has today. What I miss is that I could "go on the internet" and be in a creative corner of the human experience. Today if you "go on the internet", that means you pulled your phone out of your pocket, dismissed some notification spam and start reading click-bait shared by people you have met on social media. Today you have to choke your way through the money-making miasma to find the joy. I wish the internet of creative people and their works had a front page and a search engine. Something that made finding the blog about the search for planet 9 easy to find, and the New Yorker article on it hard to find. [...] What is not clear to me yet is how those tools should work. How do we build a search engine that penalizes media outlets and promotes blogs and podcasts? How do we distinguish between a research paper or an article written by someone about their daily life aboard ISS on nasa.gov from their useless press releases?

This is from a freelancer writer, not a web developer, but most of the principles still apply. • DO: Wake up early • DO: Cultivate multiple interests so you are widely hirable • DO: Build a good network of friends doing the same thing as you • DO: Read the comments and grow a thick skin (I don't know about this one…) • DO: Respect your editor • DO: Stand up for yourself; the people who hire you are not right by default • DO: Ask for your money • DO: Buy business cards • DO: Be positive and supportive • DON'T: Push yourself to do too much or something you're not ready for • DON'T: Read the comments (enough to build confidence, then never again) • DON'T: Pitch stories to your friends who are editors, it'll make it weird • DON'T: Be jealous

Basically: • Be reliable • Communicate when things are going wrong • Be ‘a generalist who specializes’ • Don’t diversify—you can't handle that much work at once • Build a network from home: talk yourself up, have a website, use LinkedIn • Don’t be afraid to ask for a lot of money and negotiate down from there • Save *at least* six months of reserve funds • Take breaks and leave the house • Create projects that are rewarding and challenging to teach yourself things and stay motivated

Hope is elusive, but it will return eventually. What I’m afraid of, this December, are the conditions that allow hope to take hold. I’m worried that the “worst year ever” feeling is half a condition of the Internet, of the way we experience the news as delivered through social media. Everything feels too intimate, too aggressive; the interfaces that were intended to cheerfully connect us to the world have instead spawned fear and alienation. I’m worried that this sense of relentless emotional bombardment will escalate no matter what’s in the news.

What we hear from companies like T and F and Y is that monitoring communication at this scale, preventing that harm, is an unprecedented technical challenge. That’s correct. However… no one asked for communication at this scale! To be clear, it’s a challenge these companies designed for themselves; a challenge they enlarged through relentless, ingenious growth; a challenge they now invoke as if it’s some longstanding problem in fundamental physics. [...] Social media platforms should run small, and slow, and cool to the touch.

A cultural critic and multimedia savant breaks up with his radio show after 30 years.