#algorithmic social media

[greenjudy]

algorithmic social media is a tour bus in hell and you are getting carsick

These vehicles are designed to elicit bad feelings in us because those feelings drive our engagement. They are hard to turn off, hard to ignore. We feel compelled to jump in or morbidly driven to keep clicking on ahead.

This is wholly for the profit of the shareholders of the vehicles.

It does us absolutely zero good. Worse than that, it's poisoning us.

[the-geeky-fangirl]

heartstopper isn't cringe it's just sincere and you guys are weak as fuck

[var-username]

Hey so not to be dramatic but has anyone else come back to this site and rediscovered the joys the internet has? Like, I've been active recently but today because of the reddit protests, I couldn't do my mindless scrolling there. Because of that, today I've been really digging in here and there's so much??? stuff??? and it's all beautiful and funny!

Anything I've seen before feels nostalgic instead of bots reposting for internet points, and whenever I finish the stuff on my dash I just find a new blog and suddenly I'm in a whole new world! I've had this blog since August of 2014, and over those 9 years I've forgotten that the internet can be good!

So thank you all for keeping the old internet alive and well in places like this hellsite, and here's to watching it lap other social media platforms by doing absolutely nothing

[prokopetz]

Setting the ethical dimension of topic-based censorship on social media aside for the moment, the practical problem with "Tumblr shouldn't allow posts about X" is that there is no possible world in which every Tumblr post about X is going to be reviewed by a human moderator, so we're necessarily talking about automated content filtering, and there isn't an automated content filter in existence which can reliably distinguish between "posts advocating X", "posts criticising X", and "posts which mention X in the course of discussing some related topic". In practice, a blanket algorithmic ban on, for example, the Harry Potter franchise would result in transphobia-critical posts getting hit with automated takedowns because they happened to mention J K Rowling, which I'm pretty sure is not the intention here.

[vanhelsingapologist]

Publishing has always been a fucking nightmare, but now it’s a layer of hell. It’s not enough that writers be good at what they do. Writers have to maintain an active social media presence and cultivate a following. Be available.

They have to be conventionally attractive enough to look good enough to see on a screen, aesthetically pleasing, kind, funny, up-to-date on trends, socially aware but not so controversial that they turn off a brand from California from slapping their discount code on a video promoting a book.

They have to do all of this with no media training, with little help from the companies that are supposed to be doing this for them.

Of course, a lot of this isn't possible for say, the 40-something mother of two who teaches English at a school and writes on the side. She’s boxed out of an already complex industry that already has enough walls.

On some level, I think authors have always marketed themselves a little, but we’ve reached such a crazy point where we’re demanding the author become the influencer. Accessibility in publishing has narrowed from an inch to a sliver. And that inch was hard enough to get in as is.

[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.

[warakami-vaporwave]

TikTok84

[nights-at-crystarium]

As a twitter/tumblr user since 2010-2011, I believe I have sufficient grounds to say that currently we as a community are living through the scariest, shittiest time yet. This post isn’t trying to fearmonger, no I’m not leaving tumblr until it literally keels over, but I suggest that we don’t put all our eggs in one basket.

If twitter/tumblr stay usable, great! In the worse scenario, you’d have kept posting on a new platform and stayed ahead of the curve.

This post shares my personal experience with three potential “new”* fandom places, and is aimed to help fellow content creators. I’m an artist fully depending on internet to survive, my reasoning may not apply to you if you’re a hobbyist. Do your own research, it’s always healthy. * Pillowfort and mastodon have been around for 5+ years, bluesky is ~2 years old.

Discovering new people to follow kinda sucks on all three platforms, twitter and tumblr are eons ahead, but, given the recent chaos and uncertainty, I’m willing to be patient, keep posting on those, and feel safer than I would’ve otherwise been. More baskets good, one basket bad.

All three have poor visual customization, don’t expect custom tumblr themes.

This list starts with the least popular, but most human and easy to join, and what I personally trust the most. All three allow nsfw if labeled properly.

✦ Pillowfort is a barebones tumblr. Intuitive, cozy, but currently very, very small. Be patient with its clunkiness or lack of some features, it’s made by an AO3-like team. I’d personally love if the fandom crowd managed to redirect its attention to it instead of the sus bluesky.

Joining: is free, invite-only, but the waitlist is nearly instant.

Lurk around on their official tumblr: @/pillowfort-social

✦ Mastodon, for me personally, is impossible to explain directly. I’ll use several comparisons.

- Discord but all servers can interact. You’re still on a server curated by some human(s) that might tell you what you can and can’t post, BUT, if you don’t like that server’s policy, you can move to a new one while keeping your followers. - Email, users A and B may be registered on different domains, still they can talk. It’s a weird comparison, but fediverse (please I’m not explaining THAT but it’s a good thing) in general looks like another email story: unlike big sites that come and go, it might stand the test of time. - Someone compared mastodon’s structure to xiv’s dc and servers, if you look at its domain names that way, it might be easier to understand.

Depending on user, mastodon may feel gatekeepy/snowflakey. I haven’t spent enough time on there to form a proper opinion yet, but a warning’s due.

An actually good and hopeful thing about mastodon AND tumblr: the two might start interacting in future. Ever lamented that your fav asian artists don’t use tumblr? If they use misskey, or any other place on the fediverse, it might be possible to follow them directly from tumblr in future, and vice versa.

Joining: is free, however some servers close for new members sometimes, and have human moderators reviewing your request.

✦ Bluesky is a twitter without Musk: today’s average internet user reads this, drops everything and already looks to register there. It’s still sus, but people flock to it like crazy. Most likely to become the next big fandom place in my eyes, even if I’m not happy about that.

I personally have no good feelings about bluesky. Same as twitter, which I hated even before the 2018 tumblr exodus, yet the crowd decided to make it The New Fandom Place, and, grudgingly, I had to give up and also join them in 2022. During the year I haven’t stopped despising twitter, yet, I can’t deny that it helped me survive. I estimate half of my patrons, and, hell, even tumblr audience, comes from twitter. So, if bluesky ends up being the next hot shit, I’ll have to keep up because internet pays for my living.

Joining: is free but hell, invite-only, the waitlist is a lie, your best chance to join is a direct invite.

This’s all I’ve got to say for now. If you have a correction or an addition, replies/reblogs are welcome!

Screenshots of the current interfaces under the cut, you may spy on my profiles o/

Pillowfort

Mastodon.art

Bluesky

[tennessoui]

so i've been thinking about this premise for so long but it wasn't working for obikin (which of course i took as a challenge) and i think i finally got it where i want it so

au where 35 yo obi-wan is a music sensation across the world but he's recently divorced and going on tour again after releasing a very cutting, personal, and well-received album

and 19 yo anakin joins his tour with his very small band of two other people (ahsoka, padmé) to be his opening act - they have a small but loyal following, a pretty big social media presence, and there are even people who ship anakin and padmé which you know means these are die-hard fans

anakin has definitely looked up to obi-wan and his music for a good portion of his life and he's like. beyond excited that he's going to tour with The Obi-Wan Kenobi - this is big, not just for his music career but also for himself and the little boy he was listening to obi-wan's music for the first time!!

i'm just imagining like....obi-wan and anakin meeting after a few days of rehearsal for opening night, and it's not the most auspicious start because obi-wan's going through like 20 different emotions at any given moment (he's on tour, he's divorced, he's tired, he loves the music, he can't be the person he was in his twenties when he was first on tour but that's a whole different matter, he has all the media training and charismatic instinct to cover up these less than savory emotions with flirtatious empty words) and anakin is just like. sorta starstruck sorta shy sorta eager sorta awkward so:

"i'm uh, i'm a singer it's nice to meet you. hi yeah. hello. i'm on tour. as well. with you. actually." "ah no, are you one of my backing vocal artists? we can't have that - you're much too gorgeous and my ego is much too dependent on the audience focusing on me." "um 😳"

so it's a relationship that begins with a lot of flirting and being flustered and progresses through moments of vulnerability and honest emotion which turns into mutual affection which turns into anakin's celebrity crush becoming very real....meanwhile obi-wan googled anakin and the opening band after the first show/introduction and finds all the stuff about him and padmé being together and that's. that's fine. young love. how sweet. any sort of disappointment obi-wan feels is because he's recently divorced and bitter about it and he's going to have to spend at least half his tour watching the lovebirds snuggling up together.

and even when all the misunderstandings about relationship statuses have been addressed and the pretense has fallen away to leave just attraction, both have to think about their careers - it's all well and good for obi-wan to date someone sixteen years his junior, post divorce, but that's an image he's never wanted to deal with or be associated with. and this is the biggest shot of anakin's career - his best chance to make it in the music industry. in the words of his bandmate, is he really, honestly thinking about risking it for a chance to sleep with The Obi-Wan Kenobi?

but what his bandmate doesn't seem to really understand is that for anakin, obi-wan hasn't been The Obi-Wan Kenobi in a long time. he's just been obi-wan. and that makes a world of difference.

[artist-issues]

yes I'm a Christian writer. Yes I'm a Christian artist. Yes I'm a Christian whatever--I'm so tired of people being like "I'm not a Christian ___, I'm actually a ______ who is Christian" what?!? No! Say the "Christian" part of my identification louder, it's the only part that matters.

I have been crucified with Christ, therefore it is no longer I who live! No longer I who put pen to paper! No longer I who type! No longer I who thinks and plans and practices and works and communicates--it's Christ who lives in me! He must increase! I must decrease!

If you're a Christian, knock that bogus worldly self-centered crap about "no I'm not part of the 'Christian genre' so I'm not a 'Christian whatever,' because I want to be taken seriously," off. Knock it off, shut up, get out of here with that.

Who cares if you're taken seriously? Who are you doing this for? For others? For Christ? Or just for you and your own credit and your own status? Get away from me with that. Ugh.

Anything you do in your life is supposed to be for Christ. You died. You said He was in charge of you from now on--You said He was the sum total of your identity, from now on. Did you mean it? Or did you mean, "everything except my special interests and career?" Of course not.

Anything you do in your life is supposed to be for Christ. That includes your art, your music, your hobby, your writing, your job. You should be so fortunate, so favored, to be called a "Christian" anything. You're not identifying with the "Christian genre," you're identifying with Christ. The word Christian doesn't mean "little Skillet" or "little Frank Peretti" or "little Dallas Jenkins." The word Christian means "little Christ."

You should be so fortunate to be called "Christian" anything, like the disciples were beside themselves with joy to be called "Christian" prisoners and "Christian" slaves. Because they got to be associated with Christ.

Get out of here. Honestly.

[kihteyu]

If you write fanfiction please just say “kill” and “die.” Everytime I read the word “unalive” it does irreparable damage to my brain

[skiddykid]

free handed this patch last week with fabric paint and a scrap of old tshirt :^)

[cosmosnout]

More of the Nb fire emblem protagonists since I got asked about them. (Didn’t have the energy to Draw Kris sorry💔)

[bearzas-art]

I’m being told I need to post MOAR (you know who you are 👁️👁️) so here’s this :D

[prokopetz]

I was tagging that last post and Tumblr's tag suggester tried to correct "#we know the devil" to "#west korea". Either my knowledge of geopolitics is even worse than I thought, or the algorithm is trying to draw me into political discourse from parallel universes.

[shivering-isles-cryptid]

Why am I getting love spells on my feed? I’m aromantic?

It’s like using a magnet to draw in plastic, we don’t do that here