Protocols Instead Of Platforms: Rethinking Reddit, Twitter, Moderation And Free Speech | Techdirt

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Reddit logoInteresting article on the rights of companies to moderate posts, following the recent Reddit furore that, in microcosm, raises a bunch of questions about the future of the social net itself. The distinction between freedom of speech and the rights of hosts to do whatever they goddam please – legal constraints permitting – is a fair and obvious one to make.

The author’s suggestion is to decentralize social media systems (specifically Twitter and Reddit though, by extension, others are implicated) by providing standards/protocols that could be implemented by multiple platforms, allowing the development of an ecosystem where different sites operate different moderation policies but, from an end-user perspective, being no more difficult to use than email.

The general idea behind this is older than the Internet. Of course, there already exist many systems that post via proprietary APIs to multiple places, from WordPress plugins to Known, not to mention those ubiquitous ‘share’ buttons found everywhere, such as at the bottom of this page. But, more saliently, email (SMTP), Internet Relay Chat (IRC), Jabber (XMPP), Usenet news (NNTP) are prototypical and hugely successful examples of exactly this kind of thing. In fact, NNTP is so close to Reddit’s pattern in form and intent that I don’t see why it could not be re-used, perhaps augmented to allow smarter ratings (not difficult within the existing standard). Famously, Twitter’s choice of character limit is entirely down to fitting a whole Tweet, including metadata, into a single SMS message, so that is already essentially done. However standards are not often in the interests of companies seeking lock-in and a competitive edge. Most notably, though they very much want to encourage posting in as many ways as possible, they very much want control of the viewing environment, as the gradual removal of RSS from prominent commercial sites like Twitter and Facebook shows in spades. I think that’s where a standard like this would run into difficulties getting off the ground. That and Metcalfe’s Law: people go where people go, and network value grows proportionally to the square of the number of users of a system (or far more than that, if Reed’s Law holds). Only a truly distributed system ubiquitously used system could avoid that problem. Such a thing has been suggested for Reddit and may yet arrive.

As long as we are in thrall to a few large centralized commercial companies and their platforms – the Stacks, as Bruce Sterling calls them – it ain’t going to work. Though an incomplete, buggy and over-complex implementation played a role, proprietary interest is essentially what has virtually killed OpenSocial, despite being a brilliant idea that was much along these lines but more open, and despite having virtually every large Internet company on board, bar one. Sadly, that one was the single most avaricious, amoral, parasitic company on the Web. Almost single-handedly, Facebook managed to virtually destroy the best thing that might have happened to the social web, that could have made it a genuine web rather than a bunch of centralized islands. It’s still out there, under the auspices of the W3C, but it doesn’t seem to be showing much sign of growth or deployment.

Facebook front pageFacebook has even bigger and worser ambitions. It is now, cynically and under the false pretense of opening access to third world countries, after the Internet itself. I hope the company soon crashes and burns as fast as it rose to prominence – this is theoretically possible, because the same cascades that created it can almost as rapidly destroy it, as the once-huge MySpace and Digg discovered to their cost. Sadly, it is run by very smart people that totally get networks and how to exploit them, and that has no ethical qualms to limit its growth (though it does have some ethical principles about some things, such as open source development – its business model is evil, but not all of its practices). It has so far staunchly resisted attack, notwithstanding its drop in popularity in established markets and a long history of truly stunning breaches of trust.

Do boycott Facebook if you can. If you need a reason, other than that you are contributing to the destruction of the open web by using it, remember that it tracks you hundreds of times in a single browsing session and, flaunting all semblance of ethical behaviour, it attempts to track you even if you opt out from allowing that. You are its product. Sadly, with its acquisition of companies like Instagram and Whatsapp, even if we can kill the primary platform, the infection is deep. But, as Reed’s Law shows, though each new user increases its value, every user that leaves Facebook or even that simply ignores it reduces its value by an identically exponential amount. Your vote counts!

Address of the bookmark: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150717/11191531671/protocols-instead-platforms-rethinking-reddit-twitter-moderation-free-speech.shtml

Super-private social network launched to take on Facebook with support of Anonymous

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The first question that emerges for a free, encrypted, ad-free, unsurveilled, intentionally private, celebrating anonymity, social networking site and mobile app like this is ‘How does it make enough money to support itself’? The answer appears to be a freemium model – you pay to use the API more than a basic amount, for storage, and a premium service. I am a little concerned that the terms and conditions seem to give the site owners free access and perpetual rights to use any public content. I don’t see why a creative commons licence could not have been applied, especially given the claimed open nature of the thing. None the less, this is a good step in the right direction, though I have to wonder whether it is really sustainable. A lot depends on its open source software: if content and identity can be distributed further and not limited to this one site, this could be a really interesting alternative to other systems based on a similar business model like WordPress and Known.

The software on which it runs is allegedly open source and available via https://www.minds.org/#/ – unfortunately, though, almost all of it, apart from a mobile client, is disappointingly listed as ‘coming soon’. Definitely one to watch, assuming the server software is to be open-sourced. It will be interesting to compare it with Elgg – the site itself seems slicker than most Elgg installations but .

Address of the bookmark: http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/superprivate-social-network-launched-to-take-on-facebook-with-support-of-anonymous-10325307.html

Open access: beyond the journal

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Interesting and thoughtful argument from Savage Minds mainly comparing the access models of two well-known anthropology journals, one of which has gone open and seems to be doing fine, the other of which is in dire straits and that almost certainly needs to open up, but for which it may be too late. I like two quotes in particular. The first is from the American Anthropologist’s editorial, explaining the difficulties they are in:

“If you think that making money by giving away content is a bad idea, you should see what happens when the AAA tries to make money selling it. To put it kindly, our reader-pays model has never worked very well. Getting over our misconceptions about open access requires getting over misconceptions of the success of our existing publishing program. The choice we are facing is not that of an unworkable ideal versus a working system. It is the choice between a future system which may work and an existing system which we know does not.”

The second is from the author of the article:

“Collabra, Open Library of the Humanities, Knowledge Unlatched, and SciELO — blur the distinction between journal, platform, and community the same way Duke Ellington blurred the boundary between composer, performer, and conductor.”

I like that notion of blurring and believe that this is definitely the way to go. We are greatly in need of new models for the sharing, review, and discussion of academic works because the old ones make no sense any more. They are expensive, untimely, exclusionary and altogether over-populous. There have been many attempts to build dedicated platforms for that kind of thing over they years (one of my favourites being the early open peer-reviewing tools of JIME in the late 1990s, now a much more conventional journal, to its loss). But perhaps one of the most intriguing approaches of all comes not from academic presses but from the world of student newspapers. This article reports on a student newspaper shifting entirely into the (commercial but free) social media of Medium and Twitter, getting rid of the notion of a published newspaper altogether but still retaining some kind of coherent identity. I don’t love the notion of using these proprietary platforms one bit, though it makes a lot of sense for cash-strapped journalists trying to reach and interact with a broad readership, especially of students. Even so, there might be more manageable and more open, persistent ways (eg. syndicating from a platform like WordPress or Known). But I do like the purity of this approach and the general idea is liberating.

It might be too radical an idea for academia to embrace at the moment but I see no reason at all that a reliable curatorial team, with some of the benefits of editorial control, posting exclusively to social media, might not entirely replace the formal journal, for both process and product. It already happens to an extent, including through blogs (I have cited many), though it would still be a brave academic that chose to cite only from social media sources, at least for most papers and research reports. But what if those sources had the credibility of a journal editorial team behind them and were recognized in similar ways, with the added benefit of the innate peer review social media enables?  We could go further than that and use a web of trust to assert validity and authority of posts – again, that already occurs to some extent and there are venerable protocols and standards that could be re-used or further developed for that, from open badges to PGP, from trackbacks to WebMention. We are reaching the point where subtle distinctions between social media posts are fully realizable – they are not all one uniform stream of equally reliable content – where identity can be fairly reliably asserted, and where such an ‘unjournal’ could be entirely distributed, much like a Connectivist MOOC. Maybe more so: there is no reason there should even be a ‘base’ site to aggregate it all, as long as trust and identity were well established. It might even be unnecessary to have a name, though a hashtag would probably be worth using.

I wonder what the APA format for such a thing might be?

Address of the bookmark: http://savageminds.org/2015/05/27/open-access-what-cultural-anthropology-gets-right-and-american-anthropologist-gets-wrong/

Automated Collaborative Filtering and Semantic Transports – draft 0.72

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I had to look up this article by the late Sasha Chislenko for a paper I was reviewing today, and I am delighted that it is still available at its original URL, though Chislenko himself died in 2000. I’ve bookmarked the page on systems dating back to 1997 but I don’t think I’ve ever done so on this site, so here it is, still open to the world. Chislenko was writing in public way before it was fashionable and, I think, probably before the first blogs – this is still and, sadly, will always be a work in progress.

This particular page was one of a handful of articles that deeply influenced my early research and set me on a course I’m still pursuing to this day. Back in 1997, as I started my PhD, I had conceived of and started to build a web-based tagging and bookmark sharing system to gather learner-generated recommendations of resources and people so that the crowd could teach itself. It seemed like a common sense idea but I was not aware of anything else like it (this was long before del.icio.us and Slashdot was just a babe in arms), so I was looking for related work and then I found this. It depressed me a little that my idea was not quite as novel as I had hoped, but this article knocked me for six then and it continues to impress me now. It’s still great reading, though many of the suggestions and hopes/fears expressed in it are so commonplace that we seldom give them a second thought any more.

This, along with a special issue of ACM Communications released the same year, was my first introduction to collaborative filtering, the technology that would soon sit behind Amazon and, later, everything from Google Search to Netflix and eBay. It gave a name to what I was doing and to the system I was building, which was consequently christened ‘CoFIND’  (Collaborative Filter in N-Dimensions). 

Chislenko was a visionary who foresaw many of the developments over the past couple of decades and, as importantly, understood many of their potential consequences.  More of his work is available at http://www.lucifer.com/~sasha/articles/ – just a small sample of his astonishing range, most of it incomplete notes and random ideas, but packed with inspiration and surprisingly accurate prediction. He died far too young.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.lucifer.com/~sasha/articles/ACF.html

BOOK: Teaching Crowds: Learning and Social Media

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About the Book

Within the rapidly expanding field of educational technology, learners and educators must confront a seemingly overwhelming selection of tools designed to deliver and facilitate both online and blended learning. Many of these tools assume that learning is configured and delivered in closed contexts, through learning management systems (LMS). However, while traditional “classroom” learning is by no means obsolete, networked learning is in the ascendant. A foundational method in online and blended education, as well as the most common means of informal and self-directed learning, networked learning is rapidly becoming the dominant mode of teaching as well as learning.

In Teaching Crowds, Dron and Anderson introduce a new model for understanding and exploiting the pedagogical potential of Web-based technologies, one that rests on connections — on networks and collectives — rather than on separations. Recognizing that online learning both demands and affords new models of teaching and learning, the authors show how learners can engage with social media platforms to create an unbounded field of emergent connections. These connections empower learners, allowing them to draw from one another’s expertise to formulate and fulfill their own educational goals. In an increasingly networked world, developing such skills will, they argue, better prepare students to become self-directed, lifelong learners.

 

Address of the bookmark: http://www.aupress.ca/index.php/books/120235

Transactional distance and new media literacies

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Moore’s theory of transactional distance describes the communications and psychological gulf between learner and teacher in a distance education setting. The theory was formulated in a correspondence era of distance learning and matured in an era where discussion forums and virtual learning environments reduced transactional distance in a closed-group setting that enabled interactions akin to those in a traditional classroom. In recent years the growth of social networking and social interest sites has led to social forms that fit less easily in these traditional formal models of teaching and learning. When the “teacher” is distributed through the network or is an anonymous agent in a set or is an emergent actor formed by collective intelligence, transactional distance becomes a more complex variable. Evolved social literacies are mutated by new social forms and require us to establish new or modified ways of thinking about learning and teaching. In this missive we explore the notion of transactional distance and the kinds of social literacy that are required for or that emerge from network, set, and collective modes of social engagement. We discuss issues such as preferential attachment, confirmation bias, and trust and describe social literacies needed to cope with them.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/IJLM_a_00104#.VEwtAYcfTEI

Political Polarization & Media Habits | Pew Research Center's Journalism Project

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The Pew Research Center is responsible for some of the most fascinating and well-conducted research about America and Americans today. In this study, they looked at the relationships between political learnings (conservative vs liberal) and media. It is packed with fascinating details: a lot of the media have picked up on the rather limited range of news channels consumed by those with strong conservative leanings, the polarized trust of many news outlets, and so on. This is not surprising because anything that makes claims about you or your competitors will likely excite interest. But what most fascinates me is the way that social media (Facebook in particular, the generality and ubiquity of which tends to make it a more popular source for news than most other social media, at least in general) contribute to the polarizing effect. Notably, Conservatives tend to see fewer dissenting voices among their feeds. This is not surprising because, though self-reportedly more likely to come across dissenting views,  liberals show a greater tendency to defriend people who express conservative views. The self-organizing network effect caused by this double whammy makes for some dangerous filter bubbles, especially if the main alternative sources of news for American conservatives then appear to be Fox News and Rush Limbaugh.

The trust spectrum is interesting, especially at the extremes. Buzzfeed is trusted by no one, while the Wall Street Journal is trusted by all four of its remaining subscribers. I’d say that it is mighty useful to have a news source that you absolutely do not trust: there’s nothing better to hone your critical faculties. It is most dangerous to trust any media source because it dulls sensibility to stuff and nonsense. At least when you expect limited reliability you are aware of alternative perspectives and the possibility that you are hearing lies, filtered truths and biases.

One of the benefits of old fashioned newspapers, even those with notable biases, is that serendipity always played a role when reading them. Now, with the best of intentions, we get more of the news we explicitly want. When we visit pages, we tend to get recommendations for more of the same (the Landing is ‘guilty’ of this too – we offer recommended content that may be similar whenever you view a page). This is great if you are a learner investigating a topic, not so great if you are hoping to get a well-rounded view of the world. I’m pleased that some people are taking heed of these problems and, rather than reinforcing filter bubbles, they are deliberately bursting them. The Random App (Apple only, sadly) is a good example of a concerted approach to this, mixing random stuff with things that we explicitly express an interest in. We need more of this. It is possible to restore a bit of sane diversity manually: for instance, I get a lot of my news via Pulse, which I have configured with well over 100 feeds, some of which are chosen because they match my interests and leanings, but a lot of which are chosen precisely because they don’t. Crowds are brilliant to learn from if and only if they are sufficiently diverse. 

 

Address of the bookmark: http://www.journalism.org/2014/10/21/political-polarization-media-habits/

Dining with an overweight person makes you eat more

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It looks like one mechanism for the already observed spread of obesity through social networks may be extremely simple: people tend to eat more when dining with people who are fatter. Thanks to an ingeniously simple experimental design, this paper shows that it’s not due to any difference in the fatter people’s behaviour. It’s solely due to their size. Interesting.

The study deliberately used eating companions for the study, making this a clear network effect in which people are influenced by those with whom they share a reciprocal connection. I’d be intrigued to discover whether it would make any difference if the fatter people (wearing body prostheses) were simply strangers sitting in the same restaurant, not eating together. I’d hypothesise that the effect would still show up, probably more weakly, but that it might be proportional to the number of people who appeared to be obese. In fact, I am guessing it would probably be more complex than that: for instance, that we might be more influenced by those that we thought were more like us or that we took more of a shine to. If so, this would be more of a set than a network effect. It would be not unlike flocking behaviour in birds: until quite recently it was thought that birds flocked due to a simple network effect that spread from neighbour to neighbour but, as it turns out, they are simply counting the birds nearby that are behaving in a particular way, and going with the majority. Memes may work the same way.

This is about as far from intentional communication as it can get – it’s not even a behaviour that is being copied here but some imagined and possibly inaccurate belief about someone’s past behaviour – and yet the effects may be quite profound and, spread through a society, might have massive large scale effects that spread over into many different aspects of many people’s lives, affecting everything from population health to the economy. It’s one of the reasons that schools and universities are a good idea, quite apart from, and independently of, any intentional teaching that might or might not be having an effect. When you see people around you behaving in a particular way, you are more likely to behave similarly. If it seems normal to be actively learning, there’s a much greater chance that you will do so too. Behaviours (even imagined ones) are highly infectious.

Address of the bookmark: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/seriouslyscience/2014/09/22/dining-overweight-person-makes-others-eat/

Teaching Crowds: Learning and Social Media

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The free PDF preview of the new book by me and Terry Anderson is now available from the AU Press website. It is a complete and unabridged version of the paper book. It’s excellent value!

The book is about both how to teach crowds and how crowds can teach us, particularly at a distance and especially with the aid of social software.

For the sake of your health we do not recommend trying to read the whole thing in PDF format unless you have a very big and high resolution tablet or e-reader, or are unusually comfortable reading from a computer screen, but the PDF file is not a bad way to get a flavour of the thing, skip-read it, and/or to find or copy passages within it. You can also download individual chapters and sections if you wish. 

The paper and epub versions should be available for sale at the end of September, 2014, at a very reasonable price. 

Address of the bookmark: http://www.aupress.ca/index.php/books/120235

Three glimpses of a fascinating future

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I’d normally post these three links as separate bookmarks but each, which have popped up in the last few days, share a common theme that is worth noting:

http://singularityhub.com/2014/09/04/experimental-rat-brain-fighter-pilot-may-yield-insights-into-how-the-brain-works/

In this, a neural network made out of the brain cells of a rat is trained to fly a flight simulator.

http://news.sky.com/story/1329954/world-first-as-message-sent-from-brain-to-brain

In this, signals are transmitted directly from one brain to another, using non-invasive technologies (well – if you can call a large cap covered in sensors and cables ‘non-invasive’!)

http://singularityhub.com/2014/09/03/neuromodulation-2-0-new-developments-in-brain-implants-super-soldiers-and-the-treatment-of-chronic-disease/

This reports on a DARPA neuromodulation/neuroaugmentation project to embed tiny electronic devices in brains to (amongst other things) cure brain diseases and conditions, augment brain function and interface with the outside world (including, presumably, other brains). This article contains an awesome paragraph:

“What makes all of this so much more interesting is the fact that, unlike all the other systems of the body, which tend to reject implants, the nervous system is incorporative—meaning it’s almost custom-designed to handle these technologies. In other words, the nervous system is like your desktop computer— as long as you have the right cables, you can hook up just about any peripheral device you want.”

I’m both hugely excited and deeply nervous about these developments and others like them. This is serious brain hacking. Artificial intelligence is nothing like as interesting as augmented intelligence and these experiments show different ways this is beginning to happen. It’s a glimpse into an awe-inspiring future where such things gain sophistication and ubiquity. The potential for brain cracking, manipulation, neuro-digital divides, identity breakdown, privacy intrusion, large-scale population monitoring and control, spying, mass-insanity and so on is huge and scary, as is the potential for things to go horribly wrong in so many new and extraordinary ways. But I would be one of the first to sign up for things like augmenting my feeble brain with the knowledge of billions (and maybe giving some of my knowledge back in return), getting to see the world through someone else’s eyes or even just being able to communicate instantly, silently and unambiguously with loved ones wherever they might be. This is transhumanity writ large, a cyborg future where anything might happen. Smartphones, televisions, the web, social media, all the visible trappings of our information and communication technologies that we know now, might very suddenly become amusing antiques, laughably quaint, redundant and irrelevant. A world wide web of humans and machines (biological and otherwise), making global consciousness (of a kind, at least) a reality. It is hard but fascinating to imagine what the future of learning and knowledge might be in the kind of super-connected scenario that this implies. At the very least, it would disrupt our educational systems beyond anything that has ever come before! From the huge to the trivial, everything would change. What would networked humans (not metaphorically, not through symbolic intermediaries, but literally, in real time) be like? What would it be like to be part of that network? In what new ways would we know one another, how would are attitudes to one another change? Where would our identities begin and end? What would happen if we connected our pets? What would be the effects of a large solar flare that wiped out electronic devices and communication once we had grown used to it all? Everything blurs, everything connects. So very, very cool. So very, very frightening.