NotableLinks
"While young Taiwanese users discuss everything from relationships to celebrity gossip on Threads, the app has gradually become a gathering space for progressives, who favor independence from China to defend the island’s democracy." Threads has an official stance of not promoting political use. This is an example,
NotableLinks
On answering programming questions: "We found that 52 percent of ChatGPT answers contain misinformation, 77 percent of the answers are more verbose than human answers, and 78 percent of the answers suffer from different degrees of inconsistency to human answers." To be fair, I do expect AI answers
NotableLinks
Nos is running a "journalism accelerator", which onboards independent journalists and publications onto Nostr with guaranteed promotion and 1:1 help. Nostr is a different kind of open network, in the sense that it's decentralized rather than federated. Famously, Jack Dorsey defected there from Bluesky, in
NotableLinks
"At least two digital media companies are exploring the fediverse as a way to take more control over their referral traffic and onsite audience engagement." The Verge and 404 Media will both support ActivityPub (a protocol, not a "plugin", as the article calls it) and plug
NotableLinks
"It’s simply too early to get into bed with the companies that trained their models on professional content without permission and have no compelling case for how they will help build the news business." This piece ends on the most important point: nobody is coming to save
If I was a nefarious software company, here’s how I might be thinking: AI functionality tends to require that data is sent to a centralized service for processing. This is often data that is not being shared online in any other way that is easily available for analysis: existential
I’m enamored with Matt Webb’s unoffice hours: a way to chat with him about anything, without needing to email him first, for 30 minutes. As Matt says: I loved those open conversations over coffee in the Before Times. There’s an ostensible reason to connect, so you talk
Without serious intervention, newsrooms are going to disappear. Changes to social media and the advent of generative AI threaten their businesses and the impact of their work. They need to own their online presences outright and build direct relationships with their communities—and they need to do it now. Social
NotableLinks
"It’s a good time to be ProPublica. And it’s a good thing that we have ProPublica." Hey, that's where I work! The article continues: "Spreading its journalistic wealth has long been core to its mission. The latest iteration of that is the 50
NotableLinks
"The various decentralized social media systems that have been growing over the past few years offer a very different potential approach: one in which you get to build the experience you want, rather than the one a giant company wants." There's a chicken and egg problem
NotableLinks
"The free version of Apple News is one of the biggest news platforms in the world. It’s the most widely used news application in the United States, the U.K., Canada, and Australia, and boasted over 125 million monthly users in 2020." And publications are becoming dependent
NotableLinks
"I want the IndieWeb to be a viable alternative to social media, gradually widening the audience beyond tech-savvy folks by making the tools easier to use and more reliable." This is what we were trying for with Known: something that felt social but was fully under the user&