Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
By now you’ve probably heard the story of Tay, Microsoft’s social AI experiment that went from “friendly millennial girl” to genocidal misogynist in less than a day. While Tay promised to learn from her interactions with people online, Microsoft apparently hasn’t learned anything from the countless headlines about how Twitter users like to talk to…
Twitter Might Be The Most-Advertised Company In History — And They’re Still Fucking It Up The little blue bird logo appears everywhere. On TV, Twitter usernames are listed below the real names of news anchors, athletes and politicians. On billboards and in commercials, even the most mundane cream cheese and snow tire companies beg us to log…
Photo: Marcie Casas/Flickr News Genius lets anyone add annotations to anything on the web. It’s an interesting tool with some potentially powerful applications—but it’s also adding a comments section on top of the entire internet, in a time when many sites (including Motherboard) are turning off the comments due to the potential for harassment….
Female bloggers have a long, sordid history of harassment on the Web.IPGGutenbergUKLtd/Thinkstock In 2014, while still recovering from a very public spat with Google over SEO marketing techniques that resulted in a brief suspension from Google’s search results and an 80 percent drop in traffic to the site, the lyrics and annotation site Rap…
Kenneth Harmon—affectionately known on the Internet as Sad Papaw—invited everyone to a giant burger cookout, and unlike his first attempt to cook burgers, everyone showed up this time. As the photo of Harmon staring into his burger spread online earlier this month and grandkids Kelsey and Brock Harmon updated a captive audience, many expressed a…
Citation, Appropriation, and Fair Use: News Genius Picks Up Again Where Failures Left Off As an old man of the Internet, I’ve seen several waves of “scribble on top of other people’s pages” plug-ins and web site. Anyone remember Third Voice? It was a browser plug-in that first appeared in 1999. that let you annotate…
I moderate Facebook comments all day. While the rest of the Internet shuts off comments on publications, Facebook comments aren’t going anywhere—they count as engagement to help rank posts in the newsfeed, and there is no way for an admin to turn them off. As the host of a large media non-profit’s page, it is…
What happens when you introduce an innocent Artificial Intelligence chat robot to Twitter? Well, it’s kind of predictable – you get an evil Hitler-loving, incestual sex-promoting, ‘Bush did 9/11’-proclaiming robot. Developers at Microsoft created ‘Tay’, an AI modelled to speak ‘like a teen girl’, in order to improve the customer service on their voice recognition…
On March 21, 2006, a small team at a podcasting startup in San Francisco tested a simple product. It was a texting megaphone: Send an SMS message to the number 40404, and the service would forward it to all your friends. After that, the historical record gets cloudier. The four men with some responsibility for…
Wow: 10 years old, can you believe it. Hell of a decade, hell of a ride. Hey, though: the first ever tweet fucked sucked. It sucked. It was rubbish. It sucked. I mean what is that. Look at the way the word ‘Twitter’ is composed, here: no capital T, no i, no e, in fact…