Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Image: YTMND, Jim Cooke In its heyday, You’re The Man Now Dog (YTMND) rode the cresting wave of early mainstream online communities, alongside its brethren like 4chan, Something Awful, and Newgrounds. The site allowed anyone to pair a gif (animated or not) with looping sound, to be voted on and shared by other users. At…
Claim: Neil deGrasse Tyson addressed gender inequality on Twitter by tearing apart a joke about women in science. false Example: [Collected via Twitter, August 2016] Origin:On 24 August, 2016, a Twitter account called “SciencePorn” (which mostly publishes interesting and amusing stories about science) posted the following joke: First woman on the Moon: “Houston, we…
Facebook’s ability to figure out who you know in real life can sometimes be unnerving. The “People You May Know” list can be uncanny, leading many users to ask, “How do they know I know that person!?” Well, it’s possible that you actually told Facebook yourself. If at some point in the past you uploaded…
Illustration by Angelica Alzona Greetings. You may know me as @byyourlogic, previously @swarthyvillain. If you’re on MMA Twitter, Politics Twitter, Saudi Twitter, Gnostic Twitter, Foodie Twitter, or Nipslip Twitter, you’ve probably seen me pop up. Twitter has been a big part of my life, and is more or less responsible for every red cent I’ve…
Image: Shutterstock The New Yorker’s social media editor Saira Khan went ballistic in a lengthy Twitter rant about her experience as a Facebook curator. Her tirade comes just three days after Facebook fired all human curators from its trending news operation. Khan described “the most absurd” things she saw during her time working as a…
Image: AP Facebook unceremoniously fired at least 15 editors from its trending news team on Friday, as Quartz first reported. The decision to eliminate humans came three months after Gizmodo’s reporting revealed the inner workings of the trending news group, including allegations from former curators that their colleagues suppressed conservative news. Now, as Quartz reported,…
A new version of Google+ is rolling out to users starting today, and just like every version before it, you probably won’t use it. Google project manager Danielle Buckley announced the news on her Google+ page today. In the post, she said the redesigned G+ includes three major updates, most of which make it easier…
Some online publishers and developers were surprised in recent weeks when Facebook seemingly cut off access to information they use to help gauge the performance of content across the social network. Data wasn’t being received from Facebook’s “Graph API” feature, which publishers use to help understand how links to articles are being distributed and engaged…
Mere hours after Facebook announced that its Trending section would become more algorithmically controlled, users noticed that the social network was surfacing a fake news story about Fox News host Megyn Kelly. Megyn Kelly is trending on Facebook for an article that has no basis in reality. pic.twitter.com/31f4ERnzHI — Kyle Blaine (@kyletblaine) August 29, 2016…
This was, for most news organizations, a boon. The flood of visitors aligned with two core goals of most media companies: to reach people and to make money. But as Facebook’s growth continued, its influence was intensified by broader trends in internet use, primarily the use of smartphones, on which Facebook became more deeply enmeshed…