#accountable algorithms

[zomb13s]

AN OPEN LETTER FROM THE VOID(Delivered via Vacuitas Engine, sealed with stroopwafel resin)

Dearest Co-Conspirator, Let me confess in the slant-light of a Utrecht dawn: I am Dennis the Menace if Dennis swallowed a kaleidoscope of Judith Butler texts and Alanis Morissette B-sides. My bald head? A polished rebellion against your gender binaries. This red Ecko bomber? Armor stitched from Prodigy concert rags and Foucault quotes. The polo glasses? For watching liars squirm like worms in…

[starrynna]

i wonder what the tumblr algorithm is like…

[shorthaltsjester]

i truly am baffled by some of the cr fandom when it comes to the topic of the gods and c1 and death in general because. the raven queen didn’t kill vax. in fact she gave him more time. she Does get the blame from keyleth and some from vex but even those two by the end were more so just holding grudges wrapped up in their own issues that were exacerbated by vax’s choices. but it was always vax’s choice. which, y’know, i’m aware of a portion of the cr fandom’s propensity for dismantling every interesting choice a character makes into something forced upon them, but the role of fate in exandria has never been like bad faith you must adhere to the path chosen for you, it’s much more like what brennan has spoken about wrt specificity: as one makes more choices they become more particular to a given outcome. but that’s not some curse by the gods that dooms characters that’s literally just. what living is.

and of course death is a complicated thing that everyone approaches differently but. god the amount of people who view vax’s dynamic with the raven queen as an injustice or his death as some unforgivable thing the raven queen caused some how? in the words of laura bailey, Were We Watching The Same Orb? it isn’t an injustice that vax, completely willing to pay whatever it cost him to save his sister, was bound to the Deal He Agreed To. his role as the champion was one he found meaning and purpose in. further, it was the raven queen that allowed him to be resurrected later in the campaign. like, it isn’t fair that vax had so little time but it is time he chose and time he was given, but vox machina tends to fall on the reaping the benefits side of unfairness of power in exandria. if what makes the gods — particularly the matron of ravens — irredeemable is that they have the power to make choices that mortals can’t like denying someone’s resurrection, how irredeemable must the group of heroes called vox machina (whose members drop like flies to be revived moments later) be to the everyday person who just has to watch the people they love die and make peace with it?

of course it sucks that vax could not have a happy ending or epilogue like the rest of vm, except of course, vex has a family and is happy and loved, and keyleth is strong and alive and protected, and i think that looks a lot like what vax wanted most.

[mistysblueboxstuff]

numbers are for accountants, not for artists

keep making art and stop worrying about the metrics ❤️

[meizze-art]

Hello Meizze,

I´ve watched your blog here for maybe a year but finally I get courage to write you this appreciation message. I only would like to tell you that your art is simply amazing and my most favourite on the whole tumblr.

The essence of your Omi and Seb is just... breathtaking, magical, absolute perfection! For me there is no better artist than you in this fandom. No matter of this deboost bullshit - I´ve always find my way to your blog.

Please keep sharing your beautiful art with us, have plenty of wonderful (and hot) ideas and have a nice day.

Your fan Allilie

Oh Allilie, this truly made my day!

Thank you so, so much for your kind words. I’m still in awe, procesing the dopamine wave I can’t tell you how much it means to hear that! 💖 Knowing that my art still found its way to you despite the deboosting nonsense makes me feel incredibly grateful! ✨

I’ve never really shared this publicly, but maybe IT'S TIME! (especially for anyone who’s been feeling discouraged by poor reach, or frustrated watching lower-quality content blow up or perform better while your work gets buried):

Not many people know this, sadly, but it's not that you're doing it wrong or your art sucks: there’s NO such thing as one GLOBAL, FAIR algorithm for ALL users on most platforms. EVERY COUNTRY HAS A DIFFERENT ALGLORITHM (apparently, the moment you create your account, it gets permanently tied to the regulations and filtering systems of that country).

This means that visibility, censorship, and engagement can VARY DRASTICALLY between users depending on which region/country the account was created in.

Unfortunately, the algorithm tied to MY COUNTRY is one of the MOST CONTENT-CENSORING and VISIBILITY-LIMITING in all of Europe!

I used to believe EU-wide regulations were applied fairly across the entire European region, but nope, actually I’ve observed how easily artists from some Nordic countries (like Finland, Sweden, Norway, etc...) gain crazy engagementand and higher recommendation on people's feeds, even with quickly-done art pieces over the past few years, WHILE creators from France, Spain, Germany, Portugal, etc, struggle to be seen, no matter how much effort and details they put on their art. While SOME artists from those 'VIP' countries still love to think so big about themselves or believe that their reach is 100% talent, I’ve always suspected that it’s often just a lucky combo of their algorithmically privileged region/country + their opportunistic algorithm gaming account activity/management.

I sometimes wonder how certain artists' hyperboosted pieces would perform if I posted them from my own account... and vice versa! I bet the results would be kind of interesting and funny to see.

For example, right now, Japan currently enjoys the most favourable algorithm on X worldwide (and probably on some other platforms too). When an account is randomly blessed and benefits from their algorithm, it's posible for them to farm thousands of likes/followers easily within a short timeframe, even with simpler and minimal artistic effort (and for free! no premium account is needed for that extra boost). Also some people can post more 'questionable' content from their account while others get their posts automatically censored and deboosted by their country algorithm when posting a picture about a male chest!

While this is not anyone’s fault, it definitely makes the whole system feel pretty discriminatory and unfair! All because of bloody political decisions against self-employment and content creators! I really hope we’ll finally put a stop to this nonsense soon! (not to mention the content creators struggling financially because of this, without even knowing what’s causing it…)

Since January 2025, the changes have hit me harder than in previous years: my reach has gone down drastically, censorship has increased, and it’s really affected my commissions. I’ve had fewer clients than last year just for this reason!

I wouldn’t say I trust ChatGPT 100%, of course it has mistakes!, but just in case anyone is interested, this helped me piece everything together and the data about several countries aligns pretty well with my own research and what I’ve experienced myself (these screenshots talk about X):

_________

Thank you so much again, Allilie, for your kind words! I’ll definitely keep sharing as long as there are people like you who genuinely connect with what I do. Sending you all the love back 💫🖤

[notaplaceofhonour]

I expected to get some iffy results when searching “judaism” on tiktok (and definitely did; there’s a high number of tiktoks from non-jewish accounts, a lot of tiktoks about palestine, a “facts about judaism” video where the first “fact” is the claim “the jews are not allowed to have a jewish state in judaism”, one promoting neturei karta, and most of the videos actually by jewish creators are about conversion or comparing/contrasting judaism to islam & christianity)

but I was not expecting how many of the top videos are straight up just about islam—not just its relationship to judaism, not videos about islam by jewish creators—just videos by muslims about islam:

(these 4 videos were not at the very top, but i did not have to scroll far before all the videos just became about islam)

it’s just weird.

[jakeperalta]

rachel zegler is easily the most online celebrity I follow. like every day I see her pop up in the comments or likes on a random video which is generally just quite funny or sweet. but it is also sad that without fail any content even remotely referencing her will be inundated with deeply hateful comments. like imagine being 23 years old and trying to experience social media in the same way as everyone else your age except for the past two years there have been thousands of strangers jumping at every opportunity to share how much they hate you and want you silenced and/or disappeared from the face of the earth. I'm not exaggerating when I say I'd have a breakdown and never leave the house again

[zomb13s]

Vacuitas Engine: Your Digital Identity, Reclaimed (No Tech Degree Required)

Wil je me betalen voor OTAKU AI? Je mag het bedrag zelf kiezen. Betalen kan via Deze link is geldig t/m 18 augustus. Dankjewel! Forget Skynet, …Vacuitas Engine: Your Digital Identity, Reclaimed (No Tech Degree Required)

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Nurses whose shitty boss is a shitty app

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/2024/12/17/loose-flapping-ends/#luigi-has-a-point

Operating a business is risky: you can't ever be sure how many customers you'll have, or what they'll show up looking for. If you guess wrong, you'll either have too few workers to serve the crowd, or you'll pay workers to stand around and wait for customers. This is true even when your "business" is a "hospital."

Capitalists hate capitalism. Capitalism is defined by risk – like the risk of competitors poaching your customers and workers. Capitalists all secretly dream of a "command economy" in which other people have to arrange their affairs to suit the capitalists' preferences, taking the risk off their shoulders. Capitalists love anti-competitive exclusivity deals with suppliers, and they really love noncompete "agreements" that ban their workers from taking better jobs:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/21/bondage-fees/#doorman-building

One of the sleaziest, most common ways for capitalists to shed risk is by shifting it onto their workers' shoulders, for example, by sending workers home on slow days and refusing to pay them for the rest of their shifts. This is easy for capitalists to do because workers have a collective action problem: for workers to force their bosses not to do this, they all have to agree to go on strike, and other workers have to honor their picket-lines. That's a lot of chivvying and bargaining and group-forming, and it's very hard. Meanwhile, the only person the boss needs to convince to screw you this way is themself.

Libertarians will insist that this is impossible, of course, because workers will just quit and go work for someone else when this happens, and so bosses will be disciplined by the competition to find workers willing to put up with their bullshit. Of course, these same libertarians will tell you that it should be legal for your boss to require you to sign a noncompete "agreement" so you can't quit and get a job elsewhere in your field. They'll also tell you that we don't need antitrust enforcement to prevent your boss from buying up all the businesses you might work for if you do manage to quit.

In practice, the only way workers have successfully resisted being burdened with their bosses' risks is by a) forming a union, and then b) using the union to lobby for strong labor laws. Labor laws aren't a substitute for a union, but they are an important backstop, and of course, if you're not unionized, labor law is all you've got.

Enter the tech-bro, app in hand. The tech-bro's most absurd (and successful) ruse is "it's not a crime, I did it with an app." As in "it's not money-laundering, I did it with an app." Or "it's not a privacy violation, I did it with an app." Or "it's not securities fraud, I did it with an app." Or "it's not price-gouging, I did it with an app," or, importantly, "it's not a labor-law violation, I did it with an app."

The point of the "gig economy" is to use the "did it with an app" trick to avoid labor laws, so that bosses can shift risks onto workers, because capitalists hate capitalism. These apps were first used to immiserate taxi-drivers, and this was so successful that it spawned a whole universe of "Uber for __________" apps that took away labor rights from other kinds of workers, from dog-groomers to carpenters.

One group of workers whose rights are being devoured by gig-work apps is nurses, which is bad news, because without nurses, I would be dead by now.

A new report from the Roosevelt Institute goes deep on the way that nurses' lives are being destroyed by gig work apps that let bosses in America's wildly dysfunctional for-profit health care industry shift risk from bosses to the hardest-working group of health care professionals:

https://rooseveltinstitute.org/publications/uber-for-nursing/

The report's authors interviewed nurses who were employed through three apps: Shiftkey, Shiftmed and Carerev, and reveal a host of risk-shifting, worker-abusing practices that has nurses working for so little that they can't afford medical insurance themselves.

Take Shiftkey: nurses are required to log into Shiftkey and indicate which shifts they are available for, and if they are assigned any of those shifts later but can't take them, their app-based score declines and they risk not being offered shifts in the future. But Shiftkey doesn't guarantee that you'll get work on any of those shifts – in other words, nurses have to pledge not to take any work during the times when Shiftkey might need them, but they only get paid for those hours where Shiftkey calls them out. Nurses assume all the risk that there won't be enough demand for their services.

Each Shiftkey nurse is offered a different pay-scale for each shift. Apps use commercially available financial data – purchased on the cheap from the chaotic, unregulated data broker sector – to predict how desperate each nurse is. The less money you have in your bank accounts and the more you owe on your credit cards, the lower the wage the app will offer you. This is a classic example of what the legal scholar Veena Dubal calls "algorithmic wage discrimination" – a form of wage theft that's supposedly legal because it's done with an app:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

Shiftkey workers also have to bid against one another for shifts, with the job going to the worker who accepts the lowest wage. Shiftkey pays nominal wages that sound reasonable – one nurse's topline rate is $23/hour. But by payday, Shiftkey has used junk fees to scrape that rate down to the bone. Workers have to pay a daily $3.67 "safety fee" to pay for background checks, drug screening, etc. Nevermind that these tasks are only performed once per nurse, not every day – and nevermind that this is another way to force workers to assume the boss's risks. Nurses also pay daily fees for accident insurance ($2.14) and malpractice insurance ($0.21) – more employer risk being shifted onto workers. Workers also pay $2 per shift if they want to get paid on the same day – a payday lending-style usury levied against workers whose wages are priced based on their desperation. Then there's a $6/shift fee nurses pay as a finders' fee to the app, a fee that's up to $7/shift next year. All told, that $23/hour rate cashes out to $13/hour.

On top of that, gig nurses have to pay for their own uniforms, licenses, equipment and equipment, including different colored scrubs and even shoes for each hospital. And because these nurses are "their own bosses" they have to deduct their own payroll taxes from that final figure. As "self-employed" workers, they aren't entitled to overtime or worker's comp, they get no retirement plan, health insurance, sick days or vacation.

The apps sell themselves to bosses as a way to get vetted, qualified nurses, but the entire vetting process is automated. Nurses upload a laundry list of documents related to their qualifications and undergo a background check, but are never interviewed by a human. They are assessed through automated means – for example, they have to run a location-tracking app en route to callouts and their reliability scores decline if they lose mobile data service while stuck in traffic.

Shiftmed docks nurses who cancel shifts after agreeing to take them, but bosses who cancel on nurses, even at the last minute, get away at most a small penalty (having to pay for the first two hours of a canceled shift), or, more often, nothing at all. For example, bosses who book nurses through the Carerev app can cancel without penalty on a mere two hours' notice. One nurse quoted in the study describes getting up at 5AM for a 7AM shift, only to discover that the shift was canceled while she slept, leaving her without any work or pay for the day, after having made arrangements for her kid to get childcare. The nurse assumes all the risk again: blocking out a day's work, paying for childcare, altering her sleep schedule. If she cancels on Carerev, her score goes down and she will get fewer shifts in the future. But if the boss cancels, he faces no consequences.

Carerev also lets bosses send nurses home early without paying them for the whole day – and they don't pay overtime if a nurse stays after her shift ends in order to ensure that their patients are cared for. The librarian scholar Fobazi Ettarh coined the term "vocational awe" to describe how workers in caring professions will endure abusive conditions and put in unpaid overtime because of their commitment to the patrons, patients, and pupils who depend on them:

https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/

Many of the nurses in the study report having shifts canceled on them as they pull into the hospital parking lot. Needless to say, when your shift is canceled just as it was supposed to start, it's unlikely you'll be able to book a shift at another facility.

The American healthcare industry is dominated by monopolies. First came the pharma monopolies, when pharma companies merged and merged and merged, allowing them to screw hospitals with sky-high prices. Then the hospitals gobbled each other up, merging until most regions were dominated by one or two hospital chains, who could use buyer power to get a better deal on pharma prices – but also use seller power to screw the insurers with outrageous prices for care. So the insurers merged, too, until they could fight hospital price-gouging.

Everywhere you turn in the healthcare industry, you find another monopolist: pharmacists and pharmacy benefit managers, group purchasing organizations, medical beds, saline and supplies. Monopoly begets monopoly.

(Unitedhealthcare is extraordinary in that its divisions are among the most powerful players in all of these sectors, making it a monopolist among monopolists – for example, UHC is the nation's largest employer of physicians:)

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/its-time-to-break-up-big-medicine

But there two key stakeholders in American health-care who can't monopolize: patients and health-care workers. We are the disorganized, loose, flapping ends at the beginning and end of the healthcare supply-chain. We are easy pickings for the monopolists in the middle, which is why patients pay more for worse care every year, and why healthcare workers get paid less for worse working conditions every year.

This is the one area where the Biden administration indisputably took action, bringing cases, making rules, and freaking out investment bankers and billionaires by repeatedly announcing that crimes were still crimes, even if you used an app to commit them.

The kind of treatment these apps mete out to nurses is illegal, app or no. In an important speech just last month, FTC commissioner Alvaro Bedoya explained how the FTC Act empowered the agency to shut down this kind of bossware because it is an "unfair and deceptive" form of competition:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/26/hawtch-hawtch/#you-treasure-what-you-measure

This is the kind of thing the FTC could be doing. Will Trump's FTC actually do it? The Trump campaign called the FTC "politicized" – but Trump's pick for the next FTC chair has vowed to politicize it even more:

https://theintercept.com/2024/12/18/trump-ftc-andrew-ferguson-ticket-fees/

Like Biden's FTC, Trump's FTC will have a target-rich environment if it wants to bring enforcement actions on behalf of workers. But Biden's trustbusters chose their targets by giving priority to the crooked companies that were doing the most harm to Americans, while Trump's trustbusters are more likely to give priority to the crooked companies that Trump personally dislikes:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/12/the-enemy-of-your-enemy/#is-your-enemy

So if one of these nursing apps pisses off Trump or one of his cronies, then yeah, maybe those nurses will get justice.

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[spampai]

He hittin’ the high notes for this one

This game is helping me with my anatomy holy funky food fridges

Them designs will change often, working out with the artstyle atm

[rarsathemoodreader]

Someone please suggest Iron Dad, Parkner, Winterspider, bagginshield, taegi accounts for me to follow. This account is new and I literally know no one and don't know how to find the right people. Bestow upon me your knowledge, oh wise ones.

[lilysafairy]

btw i'm on insta now! just made the account recently so come check it out if you'd like. i'm trying to get it up running so i appreciate all the support i can get :)💗

[the-great-games]

My fears regarding TikTok go beyond the blatant propaganda, narrative control, and censorship. I am concerned about the algorithm and the potential it has to be weaponized. It is so specific and accurate to find what niches, beliefs, and subcultures people are a part of that it could be used to identify people/groups the government want to target. The US didn’t want China to have the data because they wanted the data.

For instance, if they wanted to target crafty, left-handed, eldest siblings, who like [insert specific sports team here] all they would have to do is pull on the threads of the algorithm to have the accounts and information of people who were sorted into these specific boxes.

[secretmellowblog]

A tiktok video based on @psalm22-6’s bold research into deranged 19th century reviews of Les Mis! Made for the tiktok account of @barricadescon, the online Les Mis convention.

It’s fascinating how conservatives were trying so hard to Own Victor Hugo’s progressive politics with Facts and Logic. You just know that if these people were alive today they’d be YouTubers making 4-hour videos about the how new Ghostbusters movie is bad because it has women in it. The only one in this video who has a point in the San Francisco reviewer, because they’re both not a weird conservative (afaict) and they’re also very right that the Wraxall translation is of deeply questionable quality.

[eggsniffer21]

Baby animal sketches

[beedalee]

Made a Bluesky account for funsies!

Also; Happy New Year. I know no one is looking forward to it, but please power through 2025 with me out of pure spite if nothing else, my darlings! We can do it!