Intro / Preface / Extra Words
Theme: Social Media and Thinking and Stuff
Here's the next edition of our thematic exploration of stuff we read on the Internet. It's quite long, so if you see the "view entire message" link at the bottom of whatever you use to read email, you're going to have to click that to see the entire thing. And in case you didn't know, you can read this issue and all previous issues in their entirety on our website.
Oops...
Last issue had a link to a website which worked the day before we published but has not worked since for unknown reasons. Please find attached a replacement link (to Wikipedia this time which seems to work fairly consistently) as well as an actual painting if you feel too aggrieved by our previous errors to ever so trustingly just click another Caspar David Friedrich link ever again in your life. -C&B
Veedeeohs
The Emotes of Twitch
As a middle aged man who played games a lot prior to middle age I find Twitch the perfect way to see the content of all the new games that come out by watching other people stream their gameplay in real time without having the commitment of hours and dollars required to actually play them myself. What's mystifying as a middle aged man watching gaming streams is all the emotes flying by in the side chat bar at a million miles an hour. If you know what "poggers" means then keep scrolling; otherwise I think maybe this article is helpful? This whole rabbit hole is extremely confusing to me. -B
I love technology (and science)
Net Neutrality 3 years later
In one of the first issues of this newsletter that was co-authored by yours truly, Calvin and I went head to head on Net Neutrality. To recap, one of the first things the incoming Trump administration did as part of their general elimination of bureaucratic red tape was to eliminate the restrictions on ISP's and their ability to play any role in the content and website part of the internet (this is a vast oversimplification but works for this purpose).
For some reason the blue tribe on the internet and the mainstream media (but I repeat myself), including almost all of big tech co's (FB, Twitter, Reddit, etc) decided this was the worst thing that had ever happened. Ajit Pai (the chairman of the FCC) was painted as a huge villain (people said he had a punchable face...) and doomsday scenarios (the end of the internet as we know it) were sure to come pass... not only would it be bad but it would be worse than anyone could ever imagine. But all was for naught and the removal of the regulations took place.
Fast forward three years and the internet has not died. The average bandwidth of the average American has almost tripled. No-one is charging you a per-diem access charge to visit wikipedia.com. If anything, the power of the social media giants has increased not decreased (as they had feared, which is a whole separate problem; but I digress).
As a cynical libertarian who is both opposed to almost all governmental regulation and extremely skeptical of whatever the mob consensus is on the internet I was extremely sure this is where we would end up. And I'd like to include this link to a twitter thread of someone making fun of all the news media outlets' bad takes on the Net Neutrality debate, 3 years later. You can call it a victory lap... I'm ok with that framing. -B
YouTube will experiment with ways to prevent dislike button 'mobs'
Hot take alert. Showing the amount of times an action has been taken in your product's UI is going to influence whether or not the user is more likely to take one action over another. Actions that a user takes to show that they like or dislike something, or that they engaged with something, should at most be used to fuel the recommendation algorithms for that individual user and not as social proof that something is "good" or "bad". -C
People who post selfies are seen as less likable and less successful, WSU study finds
In the highly competitive fantasy football league that Brian and I participate in, there is a "punishment" for finishing the season in last place. Each year we have a meeting where part of the agenda is suggesting new punishment options; one year, I submitted that the loser had to post a bathroom selfie weekly during the entire offseason. As I recall, no suggestion has ever been so quickly and utterly rejected. That has something to do with this study, maybe. -C
_______ is not real life
No more going viral: why not apply social distancing to social media?
To do this (limit the max number of people that can see a post) would be really going against the grain of the business model. But man, wouldn't it cool things down just a bit for just a second so we can all catch our gosh darned breaths. -B
The hidden benefit to avoiding online shaming
Now my social media feed is full of people scolding others who have the audacity to try to salvage a shred of joy and pleasure from their lives. The lens seems largely political: as if anyone experiencing pleasure or expressing joy while Trump is president is tacitly endorsing Trump. The communally encouraged state of being is dread and misery and rage. People who eat at restaurants, people who let their kids play on playgrounds, people who walk around the lake without a mask — all condemnable, contemptible. Selfish. How dare they?
I worry that in the absence of the real, nourishing pleasure of togetherness, we’re increasingly turning to the more toxic, shallow pleasure of judgement and moral superiority.
YES. And maybe our need to share everything we do on the internet or we don't feel like it really happened is the real problem. There's something freeing about just being where you are and not trying to frame where you are for the 'gram. -B
This column / email / newsletter / post or whatever-things-are-now basically summarized a lot of the feelings I've had lately that have been a long time marinating. In some ways I prefer the much smaller social circle, the preciousness of hanging out with friends, and the delightful nothing moments that I previously took for granted. But there are still lots of things I miss about the way things were before. One of my BFFs sent me a picture of us at a Grizzlies game a few hours ago. I want stuff like that back, but there have been some great realizations about relationships and my own behavior that I've had this year that are worth holding onto. - C
Confirmation Bias Journalism
So the main link above is a definition (most of you can probably safely ignore). Below are two examples I've clumsily picked to try to show you this from the left and from the right equally. I'm interested to know if one or the other rubs you as worse than the other. It might mean something about our own inner biases.
*-Brian
Brian just tell us what it means I'm too lazy to click three links. -C
Further Reading
Who Really Runs The Drudge Report?
Fascinating. -Brian
A next-level rabbit hole of reporting. And highlights the fact that misinformation and copyright infringement isn't just a social media problem (at least in the section detailing the almost-funny relationship with the site's ad broker and a random Armenian website). -C
Why do companies with unbounded resources still have terrible moderation?
What if part of the solution didn't mean building and automating the entire process, but instead left it to people who actually have the right context for moderating their online experience of your product? Also, this is either in direct conflict with my hot take about YouTube's like/dislike buttons or is reinforcing that hot take. I can't tell at the moment. -C
The Welding Shut of the American Mind
Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Antonin Scalia were extremely good friends. I love that. Give me more of that. -Brian
How Trigger Warnings Are Hurting Mental Health on Campus
From 2015 comes the groundbreaking Atlantic article and associated book publication from Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. If you ever want to go down a cerebral youtube rabbit hole I cannot reccomend more strongly the Haidt hole. Greg is involved with a free speech group called FIRE and Jonathan started the Heterodox Academy. Their critique of modern dialogue comes from a classical liberal perspective and is excellent. "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself" is more true in 2020 than we could possibly have imagined in 2015. -Brian
Further Listening
Chillhop Radio - jazzy & lofi hip hop beats 🐾
As a ballerina once told me, this is just a chill raccoon walking it out. -B
This should be on your television in the background daily. -C