The network behaves like a gobbling No-Face because the network is designed to behave as such. All of the new popular social media platforms offer more of the same. What’s the point?

More continue to flock to Substack, as if the last 10 years taught us nothing: Expect enclosure; expect a few big winners; expect advertising, with all the attention-hacking that will demand. Expect, also, that writers will con­tinue to mold their work to fit Sub­stack’s par­tic­ular ecology, rather than “merely” use the tools to pursue their […]

Liz Pelly, writing for Harper’s Magazine, details how Spotify has quietly been swapping music by well-known artists from its playlists with tracks it commissioned from unknown artists: Before the year was out, the music writer David Turner had used analytics data to illustrate how Spotify’s “Ambient Chill” playlist had largely been wiped of well-known artists […]

Will Tallinn, on Netflix’s original productions: High output alone can’t account for Netflix’s garbage quality. In the 1920s and ’30s, studios like Paramount and Warner Bros. put out as many as seventy movies per year. Around its peak in the ’90s, Miramax tried releasing a new film almost every week. The difference between Netflix and […]

Robin Rendle: It bothers me that writers can’t create audiences on their own websites, with their own archives, and their own formats. And they certainly can’t get paid in the process. (Although yes, there are exceptions). This. I love the newsletters I’ve subscribed to — but I love them because of their content, not their […]

The Baffler: Spotify specifically wants to be seen as a mood-boosting platform. In Spotify for Brands blog posts, the company routinely emphasizes how its own platform distinguishes itself from other streams of digital content, particularly because it gives marketers a chance to reach users through a medium that is widely seen as a “positive enhancer”: […]

Individuals are unlikely to make much money by selling their own data, yet the same data in the aggregate can be worth a lot. Gregory Barber from Wired recently tried to put his facebook data on the market and managed to make a grand total of 0.3 cents. Tyler Cowen: The economics here are a […]

Spotify, like Netflix, wants you to stream. That’s the point of a streaming service. To achieve that both platforms do two things: they make sure that the system nudges you into endless streaming (e.g. by auto-playing episodes) and they produce content which streams well. The Baffler argues that there is now a new type of […]

Patricia Marx, The New Yorker: The moment is equivalent, perhaps, to the juncture when fish crawled out of the sea and onto land. At the reception desk of a robot-staffed hotel in Japan, sharp-fanged, hairy-chested dinosaurs wearing bellhop hats and bow ties poise their talons at the keyboard; at a pizza restaurant in Multan, Pakistan, […]

Most of Facebook’s interactions are local interactions, either between members of a community or people we already know in real life. The connections which span continents are estimated to be around 12% and 16% of the total. Ethan Zuckerman thinks that Facebook is being led astray by its grand vision of connecting the world together, […]

The Next Web: Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are probably soon going to dictate what traffic can or cannot arrive at people’s end devices. GOOG-FB-AMZN traffic would be the most common, due to their popularity among internet users. Because of this market demand, ISPs will likely provide cheap plans with access to GOOG-FB-AMZN, while offering more expensive […]

Mike Monteiro racconta la sua relazione con Twitter — un posto inizialmente dove stringere amicizie e incontrare sconosciuti, diventato poi sempre più difficile da gestire e ostile verso i propri utenti: At some point in 2006, or possibly late 2005, Noah Glass walked into our office all excited about something. That in itself isn’t news because Noah was […]

Brad Frost: But lately I’ve noticed the platform feeling increasingly grabby, to the point where they’ve broken the fourth wall with me and now the whole experience is no longer enjoyable. They’ve gotten so brazen in their tactics to keep users engaged (ENGAGED!) I think it’s no longer possible to be a casual Facebook user. […]

Dave Winer su Medium 3.0, la cui differenza principale è l’aver rimpiazzato il like con degli applausi — che uno può applicare infinitamente e ripetutamente allo stesso articolo. Gli (mi) sembrano un po’ agli sgoccioli: We’re in the long tail of the demise of Medium. They’ll try this, and something else, and then another thing, each […]

Quelle volte in cui riesco a ignorare per giorni i social network, lo stream di notizie, twitter, blog, e a sparire brevemente da altri luoghi sociali della rete noto, come Kottke, che dell’assenza non frega nulla a nessuno: Not a single person noticed that I had stopped using social media. (Not enough to tell me anyway.) Perhaps if it had […]

Ben Thompson: This, ultimately, is why yesterday’s keynote was so disappointing. Last year, before Facebook realized it could just leverage its network to squash Snap, Mark Zuckerberg spent most of his presentation laying out a long-term vision for all the areas in which Facebook wanted to innovate. This year couldn’t have been more different: there […]

New York Times: In Mr. Zuckerberg’s telling, there are few boundaries for how this technology would evolve. He said he envisioned a world in which people can eventually point smartphone cameras at a bowl of cereal and have an app create tiny sharks swimming in the bowl of milk. Fra visioni di delfini che nuotano nel […]

Il The Atlantic ha un lungo profilo su Ev Williams, il CEO di Medium (e prima di Twitter, e prima ancora di Blogger). Si parla di open web, e di quello che Williams sta facendo per salvarlo, anche se personalmente non sono del tutto persuaso dal suo discorso (di come e del perché Medium sarebbe […]