…we don’t always think about what it takes to do a thing truly from scratch

A man tries to make a chicken sandwich from scratch: It costs $1500 and takes him 6 months.
by u/JussVibes in nextfuckinglevel

…so…not that it isn’t a big deal

Last week, the text-based social media platform reported a record 100 million sign-ups in just five days, but according to data from Sensor Tower and Similarweb, the service has seen some dropoff in growth and engagement.

“The Threads launch really did ‘break the internet,’ or at least the Sensor Tower models,” Anthony Bartolacci, managing director at Sensor Tower, a marketing intelligence firm, told CNBC. “In the 10-plus years Sensor Tower has been estimating app installs, the first 72 hours of Threads was truly in a class by itself.”

But, he added, Sensor Tower data suggests a significant pullback in user engagement since Threads’ launch: On Tuesday and Wednesday, the platform’s number of daily active users were down about 20% from Saturday, and the time spent for user was down 50%, from 20 minutes to 10 minutes.

“These early returns signal that despite the hoopla during its launch, it will still be an uphill climb for Threads to carve out space in most users’ social network routine,” Bartolacci said. “The backing of Meta and the integration with Instagram likely gives Threads a much higher flood than other services, but it will need a more compelling value proposition than simply ‘Twitter, but without Elon Musk.’”

Data from Similarweb, a digital data and analytics company, showed similar trends. Threads saw a dropoff of more than 25% in daily active users between its July 7 peak and Monday for Threads users on Android phones worldwide. The company is not yet finished calibrating its model with iOS data.

Similarweb data also suggested that usage time dropped by more than half, with the average amount of time U.S. users spent on the app dropping from about 20 minutes on July 6 to just over 8 minutes on July 10.
[…]
“Politics and hard news are inevitably going to show up on Threads — they have on Instagram as well to some extent — but we’re not going to do anything to encourage those verticals,” [Adam Mosseri, head of both Instagram and Threads at Meta] Mosseri wrote on Threads.

“Meta only needs 1 in 4 Instagram users to use Threads monthly for it to be as big as Twitter,” Jasmine Enberg, principal analyst at Insider Intelligence, said in a statement.

“Some of the engagement Threads has enjoyed seems to have been siphoned straight from Twitter,” Similarweb’s Carr told CNBC. “In the first couple of days of peak Threads activity, last Thursday and Friday, Twitter web traffic was down about 5% from the same days of the previous week. These are admittedly very early indicators, but they do show Threads has the potential to steal significant usage away from Twitter, particularly as the Threads app team starts to fill in missing features like hashtags and topical search.”

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/meta-threads-engagement-dropped-red-hot-debut-tracking-firms-say

…& not that it doesn’t still have a chance of working

You don’t say
by u/von_d_von in EnoughMuskSpam

…but

Watch Out for the Fake Tom Cruise [NYT]

…in a choice between devils you know

‘Elon Musk Is Doing for Zuckerberg What Trump Did for George W. Bush’ [NYT][transcript]

…it’s kind of a coin-toss?

Eighteen months after Facebook banned communities and users connected with the “Boogaloo” anti-government movement, the group’s extremist ideas were back and flourishing on the social media platform, new research found.

The paper, from George Washington University and Jigsaw, a unit inside Google that explores threats to open societies — including hate and toxicity, violent extremism and censorship — found that after Facebook’s June 2020 ban of the Boogaloo militia movement, the content “boomeranged,” first declining and then bouncing back to nearly its original volume.

“What this study says is, you can’t play whack-a-mole once and walk away,” said Beth Goldberg, Jigsaw’s head of research and development. “You need sustained content moderation — adaptive, sophisticated, content moderation, because these groups are adaptive and sophisticated.”

The research, which is currently under peer review, comes at a moment when many tech companies, including Facebook, are slashing their trust and safety departments, and content moderation efforts are being vilified and abandoned.
[…]
The researchers’ analysis used an algorithm that identified content from right-wing extremist movements, including Boogaloo, QAnon, white nationalists, and patriot and militia groups. The data used to train the algorithm included 12 million posts and comments from nearly 1,500 communities across eight online platforms, including Facebook, from June 2019 through December 2021.

The algorithm was trained to recognize text in posts from these extremist movements and identify reemerging Boogaloo content, not through identical keywords or images, but through similarities in rhetoric and style. Once the algorithm identified these posts, researchers confirmed the content was Boogaloo-related, finding explicitly Boogaloo aesthetics and memes that included Hawaiian shirts and red laser eyes.

“The coded language that they were using had totally evolved,” Goldberg said, noting that the movement appeared to discard terms like “boog” and “big igloo.” “This was a very intentional adaptation to evade the removals,” she said.

By their analysis, the initial Boogaloo ban worked, largely reducing the militia movement’s content, but 18 months after the ban, in late 2021, the quantity of Boogaloo-related content on public Facebook groups — including discussions of custom gun modifications and preparations for a civil war — had nearly returned to its pre-ban level.
[…]
However, in a blog post on the research published Friday Jigsaw noted that an increasing interconnectedness between mainstream and alternative platforms — including Gab, Telegram and 4Chan, which may lack the will or resources to remove hateful and violent extremist content — make curbing this content a more complicated problem than ever.
[…]
The new study builds on a small body of academic research, which generally shows that when extremists are banned from mainstream platforms, their reach diminishes. The research also suggests a push to alternative platforms can have the unintended effect of radicalizing followers who move to smaller, unmoderated or private online spaces.

Jigsaw also posted results of a recent qualitative study in which researchers interviewed people who had had posts or accounts removed by mainstream social media platforms as a result of enforcement actions. They reported turning to alternative platforms and being exposed to more extreme content, some of which, in another boomerang effect, they posted back on mainstream platforms. Jigsaw reported that almost all the people interviewed ultimately returned to mainstream platforms.
[…]
Tech platforms’ efforts to keep online spaces safe are overly reliant on algorithmic devices and tools, Argentino said.

“They want to automate the process and that is not a sophisticated way to take down human beings who are actively working to come back on the platform to get their messages heard,” he said.

Meta has reportedly ended contracts or laid off hundreds of workers tasked with content moderation and trust and safety positions, according to documents filed with the U.S. Department of Labor. The recent cuts echo the guttings at other tech companies of teams that monitor hate speech and misinformation.

“They’re cutting teams, and there’s no resources to actually deal with the multitude of threats,” Argentino said. “Until there is a way to keep the platforms accountable, and they have to play ball in a meaningful way. It’s just gonna be these patchwork solutions.”

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/facebook-banned-boogaloo-groups-new-research

…so…it’s a storm in a virtual teacup…but

Indictment paints tale of Chinese interests and 2016 Trump campaign [WaPo]

Personal debts said to scuttle nomination of Biden’s acting cyber director [WaPo]

…it’s not nothing?

Last week, Meta rolled out Threads, a social media product similar to Twitter that quickly got over 100 million sign-ups. This is more than just a tech founder cage match — it is the latest incident in a pattern of increasing chaos. Large parts of internet community site Reddit went dark recently in a user protest over its decision to charge other companies more for using its data. This came right after the livestreaming platform Twitch walked back restrictions on creators after boycott threats. There’s change in the air in social media, and it is spreading fast.

I spent most of the past decade working at large social media companies. I briefly helped Elon Musk after his acquisition of Twitter, in which my firm is an investor. My firm is also an investor in Substack, Reddit and other social media companies, and our general partner Marc Andreessen is on the board of Meta.

…small world or no…when you put it like that…it sounds a tad incestuous

Think of the current large social networks as various European nations at the dawn of the 20th century. Often ruled by monarchs and autocrats (C.E.O.s), they exist in an uneasy balance with their own users and with one another.

Users and social networks have an unspoken agreement: In return for entertainment, utility and an audience, users hand over control. If the network chooses to kick you out, you’re out in the cold. Choosing to leave one platform means losing your audience forever. You can’t take it with you.

…nor…as I’m still sore about…can you re-aggregate a satisfactory feed when the crowd dissolves…but these sorts of pieces seldom approach the matter that way

Large social networks act like geopolitical neighbors in an uneasy Westphalian peace with one another. They often move in lock step, swiftly introducing similar features. Stories on Snap? Copied by Instagram and YouTube. TikTok reels? See Reels and YouTube Shorts.

They are also aligned ideologically on what content to censor. Major companies agreed on how to handle theories on the origin of Covid or stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop, leading to what Evelyn Douek, a Stanford law professor, calls “content cartels.” In many ways, there has been a prevailing monolithic culture on how things get done.
[…]
The first domino was economic. As interest rates started to rise, social media companies discovered they weren’t immune to macroeconomic forces. C.E.O.s reacted with an increased emphasis on products that make money directly from the consumer and reducing employee head count.

The second domino was the introduction of A.I. assistants like ChatGPT. While many were blown away by their possibilities, they forced social media websites to re-evaluate how their data is used externally. Historically many websites like Reddit and Stack Overflow allowed some of their content — especially the discussions among their users on various topics — to be available free. This was typically done to allow search engines to find this content and send users back to these sites. Want to compare two highly recognized San Francisco restaurants? Enter their names and “Reddit” in Google, and recent Reddit conversations are likely to appear. Click on one of the links, and you’re now in Reddit (thereby boosting its business). Third-party developers also tapped this data to build useful tools on top of this content.

How addictive, endless scrolling is bad for your mental health [WaPo]

‘Not for Machines to Harvest’: Data Revolts Break Out Against A.I. [NYT]

Why you shouldn’t tell ChatGPT your secrets [WaPo]

The third domino was Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter. Whether or not you agree with Mr. Musk’s moves after he bought Twitter, they have sparked a chain reaction. Reddit’s C.E.O. cited Twitter as a template for how to cut costs. Meta’s Facebook and Instagram followed Twitter in charging for verification of individual users. Meta introduced Threads, the Twitter alternative. While it’s early days to see how this plays out, it is clear the social media landscape has shifted quickly and profoundly.
[…]
Decentralized services try to bring modern democratic ideas to internet platforms. While social media giants endure a constant stream of accusations that they curate their content in a way that furthers political agendas, the goal of decentralization is a network that is credibly neutral in the way it works. The network should be able to resist attempts by any party to seize power and become centralized. Most important, no centralized gatekeeper can delete a user’s account or data — and you should be able to take your audience with you wherever you go.

…which…if you look at that boogaloo example…is not necessarily the advantage it might initially seem?

Interest in decentralized services has been increasing for some time, as various groups have disagreed with the management of the platforms they use. One such service is Farcaster, a decentralized social network in which I’m a direct investor. Others are apps like Bluesky and Mastodon. Instagram has said Threads will support some flavor of this in the future.

The second major development is that large internet sites are fighting back against A.I. models with the internet equivalent of raising the castle drawbridge. The coding site Stack Overflow, Reddit and others have raised the prices for their data to be used. In Reddit’s case, the change had the effect of blocking some popular third-party applications, setting off continuing protests and blackouts.

We will need a fundamentally different mechanism for websites to exchange value with A.I. assistants. Otherwise, expect more raised drawbridges and more user protests. Some industry experts believe the answers are in legal action and older sites forming content alliances.

As a technologist, my hope is that the answers lie in code rather than lawyers and that we see creative technology solutions to help keep the internet open.

…call me a cynic…but I think trying to solve people problems in code is arguably the root of a bunch of problems we didn’t used to have…not that what I think has much bearing on any of this…or much else, in the grand scheme of things

For far too long, the online world has been in stasis limited to a few options dominated by a few large companies. Technological breakthroughs and unrest were needed to shake things up, and that has happened. A pessimist might say that this is going to lead to chaos and challenges. As an optimist who invests in technology entrepreneurs for a living, I believe we are in for an age of major innovation, with all of us having more options and say in how things are run online.

You’re Not Imagining It: Social Media Is in Chaos [NYT]

…the online realm is often sought as an escape from the mundane

We’re an artist collective whose work explores contemporary computer and video games. Here, we reflect on the question of work and what’s supposed to be normal. Despite the game’s turn-of-the-century setting, the labor routines, activity patterns — as well as bugs and malfunctions — paint a vivid analogy for how workers today toil under capitalism.

Can we, the nonplayer characters of a political economy that controls, exploits and alienates us, find a way to rebel against the absurdity of our own activities?

All Work, No Play for These Video Game Characters [NYT]

…but

The Crisis Over American Manhood Is Really Code for Something Else [Politico]

…is less attention what reality demands?

#UPDATE Canadian wildfires have burned more than 10 million hectares (24.7 million acres) this year, a record-breaking figure which will continue to rise in the coming weeks, government data showed Saturday. pic.twitter.com/r5y5H2xb2y

— AFP News Agency (@AFP) July 15, 2023

Severe and prolonged heat wave nears peak: live weather updates [WaPo]

‘I’ve never seen heat this bad. It’s not normal’: Italy struggles as temperature tops 40C [Guardian]

European heat wave sparks multiple warnings, shuts Greece’s Acropolis [WaPo]

Cerberus heatwave threatens new record temperatures for Europe [Reuters]

…or…we can wait for life to catch up to imitating art as people accuse the innocent of being “groomers” while turning a blind eye to…well…even as much of a fan of irony as I am…there isn’t anything to like about this

Former Olympian and national team coach Conal Groom was accused of abusing young rowers. Colleagues, parents and regulators failed to act. [WaPo]

…not that when you get down to it that doesn’t seem very much like it might be the point from the abusive party in that relationship

House Republicans wage ‘woke’ culture wars with the military [WaPo]

…yeah

…about that

Confuse and mislead: US anti-abortion groups’ strategy to soften extreme bans [Guardian]

Record-setting fastest “you gotta hand it to Hitler” tweet from a newly hired member of a metro newspaper’s editorial board pic.twitter.com/3oizeueo4r

— Dan Nguyen (@dancow) July 12, 2023

US Republicans oppose climate funding as millions suffer in extreme weather [Guardian]

Exclusive: Arizona’s top prosecutor is ramping up a criminal investigation into alleged attempts by Republicans to overturn the 2020 presidential election results in the state by signing and transmitting paperwork falsely declaring Donald Trump the winner, according to two people… pic.twitter.com/4NfBuA9uWh

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) July 13, 2023

…I mean

Rudy Giuliani is a moron.
by u/SophiaLuuna in facepalm

…& much as it might make sense to try to keep things in perspective

Some caveats are in order. Since Threads is a Meta project, it was able to take advantage of Instagram’s network effects to boost its growth. This gave it an immense advantage that other Twitter alternatives — such as Bluesky, Notes and Mastodon — didn’t enjoy. In addition, as Isaac reminded readers in a cautionary follow-up piece, early growth isn’t a guarantee of ultimate success.

Still, even with those caveats, Threads’ early success is remarkable. It not only caught the attention of Twitter’s owner, Elon Musk (after Threads’ introduction, he hurled a series of childishly obscene taunts at Zuckerberg); its debut coincided with an apparent decline in Twitter’s internet traffic. So it’s worth exploring why — beyond Meta’s market power — Threads has grown so quickly.
[…]
To understand what Musk did to Twitter, we shouldn’t exaggerate the virtue of Twitter before Musk any more than we should exaggerate the health of our body politic before Trump. Even before Musk, Twitter had become a toxic force in American culture, so toxic that I wrote last year it might be beyond repair. The site lurched from outrage to outrage, and the constant drumbeat of anger and crisis was bad for the soul.
[…]
For all of Twitter’s many flaws, it was still by far the best social media app for following breaking news, especially if you knew which accounts to follow. It was also the best app for seeing the thoughts of journalists, politicians and scholars in real time, sometimes to our detriment. It wasn’t the American town square — there are still many places where we talk to one another — but it was one of our town squares. Twitter mattered.

Then Musk bought it. He restored several banned accounts while stripping thousands of journalists, politicians and others of the blue verification badges that confirmed their identities. Instead, he allowed anyone to buy a blue check mark by subscribing to a premium service, Twitter Blue, that also boosted the visibility of some subscribers’ posts. He claimed he was ending a “lords & peasants system” and granting “power to the people.”

Instead, he created a lords and peasants system in which the lords were Twitter Blue subscribers — often Musk fans and right-wing trolls — and the peasants were the journalists and politicians whose tweets had previously given the site its value. Twitter without those political and cultural leaders is little more than Gab or Parler, smaller competitors that are the near-exclusive domain of bigots and bullies.

Making comparisons to these niche right-wing sites even more inevitable, Musk began publicly interacting with and thus elevating some of the most unpleasant and absurd accounts on Twitter, including, most notably, an anonymous right-wing troll who calls himself “Catturd.” The cumulative effect was to create an online space that was miserable for the very people who had been responsible for much, if not most, of the traffic and attention to the site.

It’s one thing to do this to a captive audience. When people perceive that there’s no other option, they’ll grit their teeth and make the best of a bad situation. After all, people had spent years on Twitter, building sometimes-immense followings. But this is a free society with a free market, and though that free market can move slowly and imperfectly, move it shall. In this case, the prime movers were Zuckerberg and Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram.
[…]
But there’s a bigger lesson here than the simple truism that free markets are quite adept at building better mousetraps (or websites). The new right’s theory of power is based on a model of domination and imposition, and it just doesn’t work. In the new right’s telling, the story of contemporary American culture is the story of progressive elite capture of the nation’s most important institutions — from the academy to big business to pop culture to the “deep state” — followed by its remorseless use of that institutional power to warp and distort American values.

And what’s the new right’s response to its theory of the left’s use of power? Fight fire with fire. Take over institutions. They tried to cancel us? Cancel them. They bullied us? Bully them. Or, as Sohrab Ahmari put it directly, “fight the culture war with the aim of defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils in the form of a public square reordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good.”

This is a fundamentally top-down model of culture change, and it’s not entirely off. Leaders can have a profound cultural impact, and we have seen that when institutions are captured by a monoculture, they can grow intolerant. There has, in fact, been too much bullying in elite American institutions.
[…]
But rebellions don’t arise only from the right. Any form of domination and bullying will create a backlash, and that backlash will gain particular momentum when the bullies are both aggressive and absurd — and that’s exactly the world that both Trump and Musk built.
[…]
Musk is yet another sad symbol of a sad time for the American right. In a country that needs good leaders, populism has delivered Donald Trump and Elon Musk. A government that needs reform encountered a politician who broke far more than he built. A social media platform that needed repair was purchased by its most prominent troll. The results were predictable. Thankfully, free people and free markets can still correct our national course.

Twitter Shows, Again, the Failure of the New Right’s Theory of Power [NYT]

Drought and extreme heat burn through farmers’ margin for error — and it’s only July [NBC]

According to Google’s news search, the media has run more than 10,000 stories this year about Phillip Schofield, the British television presenter who resigned over an affair with a younger colleague. Google also records a global total of five news stories about a scientific paper published last week, showing that the chances of simultaneous crop losses in the world’s major growing regions, caused by climate breakdown, appear to have been dangerously underestimated. In mediaworld, a place that should never be confused with the real world, celebrity gossip is thousands of times more important than existential risk.

The new paper explores the impacts on crop production when meanders in the jet stream (Rossby waves) become stuck. Stuck patterns cause extreme weather. To put it crudely, if you live in the northern hemisphere and a kink in the jet stream (the band of strong winds a few miles above the Earth’s surface at mid-latitudes) is stuck to the south of you, your weather is likely to be cold and wet. If it’s stuck to the north of you, you’re likely to suffer escalating heat and drought.

In both cases, the stuck weather, exacerbated by global heating, affects crops. With certain meander patterns, several of the northern hemisphere’s major growing regions – such as western North America, Europe, India and east Asia – could be exposed to extreme weather at the same time, hammering their harvests. We rely for our subsistence on global smoothing: if there’s a bad harvest in one region, it’s likely to be counteracted by good harvests elsewhere. Even small crop losses occurring simultaneously present what the paper calls “systemic risk”.

Already, regional climate shocks have helped cause a disastrous reversal in the trend of global chronic hunger. For many years, the number of hungry people fell. But in 2015 the trend turned and has been curving upwards since. This is not because of a lack of food. The most likely explanation is that the global food system has lost its resilience. When complex systems lose resilience, instead of damping the shocks that hit them, they tend to amplify them. The shocks amplified across the system so far have landed most heavily on poor nations that depend on imports, causing local price spikes even when global food prices were low.
[…]
Other papers have been published with similar themes, showing, for example, the impacts of the rising frequency of “flash droughts” and concurrent heatwaves in grain-producing regions, and how global heating hits food security. All have been largely or entirely ignored by the media.
[…]
There are plenty of signs, some of which I’ve tried to explain in the Guardian and, with a sense of rising urgency, in a presentation to parliament, suggesting that the global food system may not be far from its tipping point, for structural reasons similar to those that tanked the financial sector in 2008. As a system approaches a critical threshold, it’s impossible to say which external shock could push it over. Once a system has become fragile, and its resilience is not restored, it’s not a matter of if and how, but when.

So why isn’t this all over the front pages? Why, when governments know we’re facing existential risk, do they fail to act? Why is the Biden administration allowing enough oil and gas drilling to bust the US carbon budget five times over? Why is the UK government scrapping the £11.6bn international climate fund it promised? Why has Labour postponed its £28bn green prosperity fund, while Keir Starmer is reported to have remarked last week “I hate tree huggers” (a pejorative term for environmental campaigners)? Why are the Sun, the Mail, the Telegraph and the Express competing to attack every green solution that might help to prevent climate chaos? Why does everything else seem more important?

…well…they may not get away with that bit of scrapping

Rishi Sunak must stick to £11.6bn climate commitment, say MPs [Guardian]

…but…the meager public service raises that have to come out of presently available funds aren’t going to pay for themselves

The underlying problem isn’t hard to grasp: governments have failed to break what the economist Thomas Piketty calls the patrimonial spiral of wealth accumulation. As a result, the rich have become ever richer, a process that seems to be accelerating. In 2021, for example, the ultra-rich captured almost two-thirds of all the world’s new wealth. Their share of national income in the UK has almost doubled since 1980, while in the US it’s higher than it was in 1820.

The richer a fraction of society becomes, the greater its political power, and the more extreme the demands it makes. The problem is summarised in one sentence in the resignation letter of the UK environment minister Zac Goldsmith: instead of attending a crucial environment summit, Rishi Sunak went to Rupert Murdoch’s summer party. We cannot work together to solve our common problems when great power is in the hands of so few.
[…]
Corporations and oligarchs with massive fortunes can hire as many junktanks (so-called thinktanks), troll farms, marketing gurus, psychologists and micro-targeters as they need to devise justifications and to demonise, demoralise, abuse and threaten people trying to sustain a habitable planet. The junktanks devise new laws to stifle protest, implemented by politicians funded by the same plutocratic class.

It could scarcely be more screwed up. The effort to protect Earth systems and the human systems that depend on them is led by people working at the margins with tiny resources, while the richest and most powerful use every means at their disposal to stop them. Can you imagine, in decades to come, trying to explain this to your children?

Looking back on previous human calamities, all of which will be dwarfed by this, you find yourself repeatedly asking “why didn’t they … ?” The answer is power: the power of a few to countermand the interests of humanity. The struggle to avert systemic failure is the struggle between democracy and plutocracy. It always has been, but the stakes are now higher than ever.

With our food systems on the verge of collapse, it’s the plutocrats v life on Earth [Guardian]

…maybe we should leave it to older & wiser heads

Jonathan was born in 1832 in the Seychelles. He has been living in Saint Helena since 1882 and just celebrated his 190th birthday.
by u/OneHundredForcer in Damnthatsinteresting

…either way…barely a dent is still more of an impression than no dent at all

Cleaning up a beach by extracting small plastics from sand
by u/JulianThompson5 in Satisfyingasfuck

…but…you know what they say about the importance of a step in the right direction

Father makes sure his autistic son doesn’t get too close or touch the royal guard and then this happens…
by u/Sufficient-Bug-9112 in wholesome

…speaking of which…let me head off to track down a few suitable tracks