Horrific-Terrific - 👎 Curated Feeds
If someone forwarded this email to you, consider subscribing! Also if you’re already subscribed… consider paying? I write this newsletter every week in my spare time and require compensation, dammit. Thanks :) 👎 Curated FeedsMy analysis of a shoddy new article discovery app | EU to charge Big Tech for new infrastructure | Twitter to take more of your moneyThis week I spent too many minutes watching Nothing, Forever, which is a Twitch stream that runs 24/7. It’s completely generated by AI, and seems to emulate popular 90s sitcom Seinfeld (which was known as ‘a show about nothing’). In Nothing, Forever there are long periods where no one says anything. The characters move like demented puppets and constantly glitch with the furniture. Why am I watching this? What have I become? This week was a smelly 8-bit fart 👎. Make of that what you will. Scroll down for:
📰 Newton’s new newsfeed for newsThis bit is going to be a little different to the usual: I subscribe to Casey Newton’s Platformer and this week he decided to use his free-to-read article to write about how much he likes Artifact, which is a news-sharing app developed by the co-founders of Instagram. Casey’s post is not a critical analysis of the app — it’s literally a puff piece about what Artifact will be able to do, and why the founders wanted to make it. My congratulations to Artifact’s PR team. I find it grotesque that Casey Newton would think this was a valid and interesting thing to write about without even criticising it slightly. ☝️ I have observations about Artifact itself, but first let me just quickly explain what it actually is:
I’ve been reflecting on this a lot this week, because Artifact perfectly exemplifies how the makers of technology literally don’t even care slightly about the people they are making the technology for. Do we really need to add another algorithmically-curated feed to our already loathsome app libraries? Do we?? Look at this quote from Platformer:
So funny that the framing here is that they were ‘inspired’ by TikTok’s success — were they? Or was it that they too wanted to run a platform powered by an aggressive recommendation system, so that they could reap all the benefits? I think what really ‘inspires’ these stodgy men is having an opportunity to own a machine that shoves content down people’s throats, instead of just letting them decide what they might like to read. The current social app landscape has stuck us in a place where we simply have to accept that a machine knows what we want better than what we do — and daft apps like Artifact will only keep us here longer. It’s also quite alarming that the ‘decade-plus of lessons learned’ that they refer to here are NOT the ones about how newsfeeds governed by machine recommendations have destabilised democracies, allowed misinformation to proliferate in unpredictable ways, and enabled advertisers to exploit fine-grain audience segmentation to the detriment of users. The purported benefit of Artifact is that it will serve users with high-quality news articles and think-pieces. If you click on X article, you’ll get recommended similar things in the future. We all know how this plays out. Choosing to open up an article and then having a look does not mean that you ‘like’ it; it doesn’t mean that you want to see anything like it ever again; it could mean you hate it and you’re just curious/outraged — will Artifact not just do what Facebook and Youtube do, which is to pile on more and more extreme content because it keeps you in the app longer? Note, the articles on Artifact are “chosen from a curated list of publishers ranging from leading news organizations like the New York Times to small-scale blogs about niche topics”. This just sounds like yet another place for bloggers to compete with each other tbh. But, Artifact don’t disclose every publisher they partner with — so there’s no way of telling if they include publications written by white supremacists or TERFs or other hate groups, unless the machine recommends them to you. It’s painfully obvious that Artifact will very likely be monetised with ads. That means the founders have no reason to remove content that is ‘popular’ (and hateful) because as we’ve seen, this is the kind of content that makes the most money. This app will not solve any problems, it will simply compound existing ones — and I don’t mean existing social problems from before social media; I mean the new problems that social media itself has given us. I spend a lot of time trawling for bits of news that might be interesting to put in this newsletter, and even I don’t see a valid use for an app that will show me articles based on my interests. I literally don’t need help ‘discovering’ the news — I just want to read it. I can already do that. If Artifact does solve any problems, it’s that the founders feel they are still not rich enough. 🍟 Other bits and bytesIt looks like the EU are proposing to push the cost of internet infrastructure upgrades onto companies that use the most bandwidth: such as Netflix and Facebook etc. This sort of makes sense on paper; these large platforms put the most strain on resource, so should probably help out with upgrades. But the problem with this is that then you either get one of these not so great things:
Twitter is going to start charging people to use its API. This is of course Right that’s me done — I’m off to go help a hot woman achieve multiple orgasms, I hope your weekend is as fun as mine x 💌 Thank you for subscribing to Horrific/Terrific. If you need more reasons to distract yourself try looking at my website or maybe this ridiculous zine that I write or how about these silly games that I’ve made. Enjoy! |
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Friday, January 27, 2023
Hello! In today's newsletter I informed you about my involvement in this report about privacy enhancing technologies by The Royal Society. Parts…
👎 Delay & Obfuscate
Friday, January 27, 2023
Open AI's gears of exploitation | The Paris Olympics surveillance project | Scroll to the end for something sincere
📡 My technology > your technology
Friday, January 20, 2023
Thoughts on why the Online Safety Bill is probably a pile of trash, constructed from other trash
👎 Outsource & Deskill
Friday, January 20, 2023
Insurrection in Brazil | Meta's content moderation loss | FTC to ban noncompetes
🤷♀️ Bing It
Friday, January 6, 2023
Google Search under threat | Is TikTok 'spying on you'? Gimme a break
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