Dog people have certain personality characteristics – as do dog breeds. CC-licensed photo by Jean Ogden Just Chaos Photography on Flickr.
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A selection of 10 links for you. Feeling rough? I’m@charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
Amazon is the apex predator of our platform era • The New York Times
Cory Doctorow:
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Having first subsidized end-users and then offered favorable terms to business customers, Amazon was able to exploit its digital flexibility to lock both in and raid them for an ever-increasing share of the value they created. This program of redistribution from platform users to shareholders continued until Amazon became a vestigial place, a retail colossus barely hindered by either competition or regulation, where prices go up as quality goes down and the undifferentiated slurry of products from obscure brands is wreathed in inauthentic reviews.
It’s hard to remember that the internet was originally supposed to connect producers and shoppers, artists and audiences, and members of communities with one another without permission or control by third parties. In its early years, Amazon was good to its users. It sold products affordably and shipped them swiftly and reliably. It attended closely to the authenticity of the reviews that appeared on its site and operated an “honest search” that populated results pages with the best matches for each query.
Then Amazon started locking everyone in. Through Prime, it presold customers a year’s worth of shipping. With its digital publishing ventures, it nudged customers toward subscriptions, building a captive base of readers and deploying technology and expansive readings of obscure copyright laws to stop them from moving their books to other platforms. It opened Prime shipping at a low rate to its suppliers, relieving businesses of messy fulfillment logistics.
Meanwhile, its heavy subsidies, made possible by its investors’ appetite for backing an incipient monopoly, made it increasingly difficult for rival retail sites to gain traction, because Amazon’s seemingly bottomless coffers meant that it could sell goods below cost and extinguish any upstart that dared to compete with it.
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Cory has a hell of a way with words. This does slightly avoid the fact that Amazon went through a long, very rocky period during the dot-com bust when it wasn’t clear that it would survive. Prime was indeed clever, but not a slam dunk: pricing it right was not exactly a given. We now see it as a behemoth, but for some time it was more like a moth.
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Some major brands are giving up on Threads as engagement craters • KTLA via Yahoo News
Marc Sternfield:
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Hello, hello. Is there anybody in there?
While Pink Floyd could not have envisioned the internet, let alone social media, when they released Comfortably Numb in 1979, the lyrics might as well apply to Meta’s wannabe “Twitter Killer,” Threads.
After quickly amassing over 100 million users during its initial launch in early July, engagement has bottomed out. Very little has been reported on this topic lately, but the most recent data from Sensor Tower showed an 82% drop in Threads’ active daily users with only eight million accessing the app at the end of July.
This is not to say many major brands and celebrities aren’t still sharing content on Threads. You don’t want to fall behind if or when Meta finally gets it right. Today, however, is painfully clear that posting to Threads is more of an exercise in hope than a realistic expectation of engagement.
For example, the Los Angeles Dodgers have 2.5 million followers on X, formerly Twitter, and 269K on Threads. This amusing tweet showing the team in costumes reached 553,000 users with 6,000 likes and 183 comments. The same post on Threads only received a few dozen likes and seven “replies.”
The playoff-bound Dodgers are fairly active on Threads. The same cannot be said for all major sports teams or even entire leagues, some of which have given up.
As of Monday, the Los Angeles Rams hadn’t posted to Threads in three weeks. The National Football League hasn’t posted anything in six weeks, before the start of the regular season. This is the nation’s most popular sports league, and it has completely abandoned Meta’s new platform. Even with its 1.9 million followers.
Among news publishers, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) stopped posting to Threads 11 weeks ago, not long after the launch. CBS News hasn’t posted in five weeks.
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That.. sounds bad?
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Zelle fraud: I got scammed out of $31,000 and my bank didn’t care • Business Insider
Devin Friedman:
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Gary — I changed his name so I could be as honest about him and his nipples as possible — spends his days working out of his pool warehouse, in an office covered desk-to-credenza in product manuals and spa brochures and invoices produced in gold-, pink-, and white-triplicate. A man trapped in the amber of another era, the type of guy who answers his phone yellllow and says bye now when he hangs up. But at this moment, Gary was not answering his phone at all. And I was desperate to reach him, because my wife and I had paid him a deposit of $31,500 to build us a pool, and he had apparently disappeared off the face of the earth.
“I’m sorry, Gary is not available right now,” said Cheryl when I phoned that morning.
As best I could tell, there were three women who worked at Royal Palace Pools. Cheryl, Cheryl, and Sheryl. (Could be wrong on that.) The Cheryls didn’t have offices. They stood point at the front of the store, behind the glass cases where the chlorine tablets and pool thermometers are displayed. There was a rumor that one of the Cheryls — Sheryl — was Gary’s wife, but I couldn’t imagine Gary making love, or having breakfast each morning with someone in his home. I believed the likelier scenario was that each night when the Cheryls went home, Gary climbed into an empty Jacuzzi shell with a bag of Funyuns and a worry-worn pad of invoices that served as his transitional object, pulled the thermal cover over himself, and waited in the dark with his eyes open until he could go back to the office. Regardless, if you wanted to get in touch with him, there was going to be at least one Cheryl between you and Gary.
“Do you know where he is?” I said. “This is urgent.”
“Um. And who is this?” said Cheryl.
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A wonderfully told story of getting horrendously ripped off. This is why Americans need WhatsApp. And the Faster Payments Service.
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March 1997: You can kiss your web browser goodbye • WIRED
Kevin Kelly and Gary Wolf, writing back in March 1997:
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As everything gets wired, media of all kinds are moving to the decentralized matrix known as the Net. While the traditional forms—broadcast, print—show few signs of vanishing, the Net is being invaded by new media species. The Web is one. Yet with each additional node, each new T1 line, the media the Internet can support become richer, more complex, more nuanced. The Net has begun offering things you simply can’t browse.
Networked communications need interfaces that hop across nodes, exploiting the unique character of distributed connections. Technology that, say, follows you into the next taxi you ride, gently prodding you to visit the local aquarium, all the while keeping you up-to-date on your favorite basketball team’s game in progress. Another device might chime on your wrist, letting you know that the route home is congested with traffic, and flashing the address of a restaurant where you can eat cut-rate sushi while waiting it out. At home on your computer, the same system will run soothing screensavers underneath regular news flashes, all the while keeping track, in one corner, of press releases from companies whose stocks you own. With frequent commercial messages, of course.
Sure, we’ll always have Web pages. We still have postcards and telegrams, don’t we? But the center of interactive media—increasingly, the center of gravity of all media—is moving to a post-HTML environment, a world way past a Web dominated by the page, beyond streamed audio and video, and fast into a land of push-pull, active objects, virtual space, and ambient broadcasting. You might not want to believe us, but a place where you can kiss your Web browser goodbye.
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Included as an example of how fantastically, confidently wrong one can be when in the grip of misplaced futurism. Found via Dave Karpf’s excellent chapter on WIRED’s startup days. 26 years on, browsers are still doing OK.
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The completely unbelievable story of the “deepfake cheer mom” • Gizmodo
Mack DeGeurin:
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When Bucks County, Pennsylvania District Attorney Matthew Weintraub stepped up to a podium on March 15, 2021, he set in motion a chain reaction of events that would capture the attention of millions and manifest a host of festering anxieties about the dangers of deepfake technology.
Police from Bucks had recently arrested 50-year-old Raffaela Spone, whose 17-year-old daughter was part of a highly competitive local cheer squad called the Victory Vipers All-Stars. Weintraub accused Spone of using artificial intelligence to fabricate salacious images and videos of the other teenagers on the cheerleading team, a sinister ploy to harass the girls, ruin their reputations, and get them kicked off the Vipers. Weintraub recounted those shocking allegations to the room and warned of an impending deepfake crisis that would jeopardize the very nature of truth.
“This tech is now available to anyone with a smartphone,” Weintraub said to a crowded room of reporters. “All one needs to do is download an app, and you’re off to the races.”
But evidence shows Weintraub’s deepfake Cassandra was built on a lie.
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It’s a detailed unravelling of a story that got everyone excited back in 2021. I linked to the story with the comment “Well, I guess it’s really out of the lab now. She doesn’t seem (based on a search) to be any great computer whiz.” Right about the second part, at least.
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The moral case for no longer engaging with Elon Musk’s X • Bloomberg
Dave Lee:
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A man was murdered in my neighbourhood on Monday. Ryan Carson was waiting at a bus stop with his girlfriend just before 4 a.m. when a man stabbed him repeatedly him in the chest. The couple had been at a wedding.
A video of the attack, obtained initially by the New York Post, was soon seized upon by one of X’s newest “stars” — one of those users who has thrived under the new Elon Musk regime at the former Twitter. His feed (which I will not publicise) is a stream of incendiary incidents from around the world, posted several times a day to an audience that is approaching a million followers.
I don’t follow this account, but X’s algorithm makes absolutely sure that I see what it has to say. A senseless murder is apparently a content opportunity not to be missed. The user’s post on Tuesday contained all the ingredients for success: It was timely. It was shocking. It was an innocent 32-year-old man dying on the streets of New York City. It was a chance, duly taken, to write an inflammatory comment on Carson’s work in public policy, as though it had somehow led to this moment, as though he had it coming.
As I rode the subway home to Bedford-Stuyvesant, I watched as the video clocked 1 million views, then 2 million. Up up up. Disgusting replies flooded in by the thousands: That’s what you get for supporting woke policies; should have carried a gun; looks planned. By the time I got home, I had deleted the app from my phone.
I will have to continue to follow X, of course, because it’s part of my job. But it’s time to step back as an engaged user, one who for the past decade has posted several times a day and scrolled countless times more. My eyeballs are no longer for sale to Musk and whatever grotesque content he wants to serve up in front of them.
…One thing the prior Twitter management didn’t do is actively make things worse. When Musk introduced creator payments in July, he splashed rocket fuel over the darkest elements of the platform. These kinds of posts always existed, in no small number, but are now the despicable main event. There’s money to be made. X’s new incentive structure has turned the site into a hive of so-called engagement farming — posts designed with the sole intent to elicit literally any kind of response: laughter, sadness, fear. Or the best one: hate. Hate is what truly juices the numbers.
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Certainly some people have completely abandoned Twitter/X on this basis. Lee and so many journalists simply can’t. Maybe an adblocker for the website. I could offer a phrase for what Musk is doing, of course.
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Elon Musk removes news headlines from displaying on X, formerly Twitter • The Washington Post
Leo Sands:
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X, the site formerly known as Twitter, has removed automatically generated headlines from links to external websites, including news articles, the latest change introduced by owner Elon Musk as he seeks to remold the social media company and reduce traffic to other sites.
Under the new format, posts linking to third-party news stories or websites automatically load those articles’ lead images in preview tiles along with their web domains — but with no headlines, depriving readers of key context from the publishers about their articles, according to a review by The Washington Post on Thursday. The change also appeared to affect shared links to non-news websites, although it did not affect paid advertisements, which still loaded with headlines, The Post’s review found.
X did not immediately respond to a request for comment early Thursday.
The change comes amid a wider push by X to discourage users from clicking on external links, including links leading to news sites. “Our algorithm tries to optimize time spent on X, so links don’t get as much attention, because there is less time spent if people click away,” Musk said in a tweet Tuesday.
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The idea of Twitter (latterly X) as a nexus for the world’s news is ebbing away so fast that it’s gobsmacking. Remember, it’s less than a year since Musk took control. In that time, he’s destroyed much of the goodwill (literally and figuratively) and utility that the site used to have.
And if links on the platform don’t drive traffic, sites will focus on posting links on platforms that do drive traffic. The echo chamber will narrow and tighten.
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Clickworkers in Brazil are turning on each other – Rest of World
Laís Martins and Gabriel Daros:
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“We don’t give support to beginners,” is the first automated message one receives on joining a popular Telegram group for microworkers in Brazil. Microwork is a form of gig work consisting of simple tasks that can be completed online in a short time. Available on platforms like Appen, Amazon Mechanical Turk, and UHRS, the tasks range from typing out an entire spreadsheet to reviewing social media content moderation decisions. More recently, a popular microwork gig involves tagging objects in images to train artificial intelligence.
The hours may be long but pay is adequate, Sônia Coêlho, a Brazilian microworker, told Rest of World, so long as novice “turkers” — as microworkers are informally known — are kept at bay. Turkers like Coêlho blame newcomers for triggering a drop in rates paid by microwork platforms. The community is bracing for a flood of new jobs that they believe are inevitable given the rise of AI, and experienced turkers have been trying to keep those future opportunities to themselves.
Microworkers are spread across the world (Coêlho is from the remote city of Foz do Iguaçu, on the triple border dividing Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay), so they typically communicate, gossip, and share tips and grievances in online spaces. On social media platforms like Facebook, there are dozens of public groups for Brazilian turkers. On Telegram and WhatsApp, microworkers constantly create new private groups based on geographical location, microwork platform, or type of project.
Over time, the camaraderie across these forums has given way to competition and hostility.
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Inevitable, really: there’s only a limited space for this, and more people joining inevitably will drive the price down.
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Competitive, warm and conservative: what exactly makes someone a dog person? • The Guardian
Zoe Williams:
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Trait studies are typically divided into the “Ocean” big five: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. But Coren, instead, used the interpersonal circumplex model , devised by his colleague Jerry Wiggins: extroversion, dominance, trust and warmth. It made sense practically; the Ocean evaluation is 48 questions minimum, whereas Coren wanted to get people while they were at dog shows or out walking, and the circumplex profile can be established in eight.
Coren expected dog people to be more extroverted, friendly and affiliative: “Dog people, they walk into the house, the first thing they do is say ‘where are you, Lassie? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.’ Cat people, they walk in, if they happen to trip over the cat, they said ‘hello’ to the cat. So those results I expected.” But he didn’t necessarily expect there to be a difference in terms of warmth: “Once a person’s sitting there with a cat on their lap, I thought that was adequate affection: but dog people seem to have a much stronger bond overall.”
This bond is rather unflinchingly measured in the amount people would be prepared to spend to save their dog’s life, and Dr Deven Carlson, an associate professor of political science at the University of Oklahoma established the statistical value of a dog at $10,000 (approx £8,000) – what people would be prepared to pay for a hypothetical vaccine in the event of an epidemic. “The interesting thing,” Coren says, “is the people who have both dogs and cats act more like dog lovers. In a mixed household, their response, their protectiveness, for their dogs and their cats are pretty much the same. They’re willing to spend a hell of a lot more on saving the cat than in a cat-only household.”
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Escape from the rabbit hole: the conspiracy theorist who abandoned his dangerous beliefs • The Guardian
Amelia Gentleman:
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In 2003, [Brent] Lee was 24, a musician working behind the till in a garage in Peterborough, when he downloaded a series of videos from the internet that offered alternative perspectives on 9/11 and suggested the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers in New York in September 2001 was self-inflicted by the US government, as a way of justifying military action in Afghanistan and Iraq. His starting point was a strong anti-war stance and a healthy scepticism about politicians’ motivations, but from there he came to believe that a network of secret societies and cults was running the world.
It is hard to summarise precisely why he made that step – and harder still to fathom his later preoccupation with paedophiles and ritual murders. He attempts to explain when we meet on a weekday afternoon in an empty Bristol wine bar (idle waiters keep glancing over, startled by fragments of conversations about satanic lizards), but I have to email him a few days later to ask him to try to explain again.
His answer remains confusing, but begins with George W Bush and Democrat John Kerry’s membership, when at Yale University, of the Skull and Bones club, a secretive student society that conducts bizarrely morbid rituals. This led him to believe that there were evil politicians interested in satanic rituals. “Once you’ve been swayed by these arguments, it’s easy to just keep going down the rabbit hole, finding more dots to connect,” he says. “Once you have such a skewed view of the world, you can be convinced of other stuff.”
The tone of his podcast is disconcertingly upbeat, chatty and jokey with other ex-truthers who join as guests. “If I’m laughing at conspiracy theorists, it’s because I’m laughing at myself,” he says. “It is funny – that you’re adults who believe in Santa Claus or something equally ridiculous.”
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The difficulty in the modern world is that we’re asked to believe lots of things we can’t verify (matter is made up of teeny-tiny things, vaccines rely on the use of microscopic body structures) and for some people, why not make the unbelievable things just a bit bigger? Fascinating look at how you get sucked in.
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified
The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 
Where were all these people who are now beating their chests about the immorality of the site formally known as Twitter, during the YEARS and YEARS of modern bloodsport? Longstanding daily practice was to take some usually hapless person having a bad day, or just filmed in a negative way, and subject them to a howling mob of hatred – sometimes getting them fired or worse. But apparently that wasn’t so immoral as to preclude being a part of the site then. I could never accept the gimmick in the Shirley Jackson story “The Lottery” was reasonable until Twitter. It makes one understand how Romans could go to the Colosseum for the entertainment of watching gladiators kill each other. But let the Colosseum be owned by Elonius Muskius – oh, the humanity, how can moral people be present in such an evil place. And not even for the bloodsport, his major complaint is the venerable media practice of “If it bleeds, it leads”!