This recent @TechCrunch article about a new social network for creatives and artists makes me wonder what sort of features are missing for Fediverse alternatives like @pixelfed.
I've found an excellent podcast series about how online companies use your data. The second episode of the new season is all about how social media giants gather data to keep you engaged, enraged and staying in their apps looking at ads.
It's presented in a pleasantly approachable way. The fediverse is mentioned (Flipboard), along with a new platform I haven't heard of, Small Town and the idea of the Pluriverse.
New York’s state legislature has passed a bill that would prohibit social media companies from showing “addictive feeds” to children under 18 without parental consent. Tech Crunch has more, including where the bill goes next and how “addictive feed” is being defined. https://flip.it/8cubJE #Tech#Technology#SocialMedia#Law#Politics#NewYork
#SiliconValley#BigTech#VCs#SocialMedia#Web#AI#Capitalism: "I believe we're at the end of the Rot-Com boom — the tech industry's hyper-growth cycle where there were so many lands to conquer, so many new ways to pile money into so many new, innovative ideas that it felt like every tech company could experience perpetual growth simply by throwing money at the problem.
It explains why so many tech products — YouTube, Google Search, Facebook, and so on — feel like they’ve got tangibly worse. There’s no incentive to improve the things you’ve already built when you’re perpetually working on the next big thing.
This belief — that exponential growth is not just a reasonable expectation, but a requirement — is central to the core rot in the tech industry, and as these rapacious demands run into reality, the Rot-Com bubble has begun to deflate. As we speak, the tech industry is grappling with a mid-life crisis where it desperately searches for the next hyper-growth market, eagerly pushing customers and businesses to adopt technology that nobody asked for in the hopes that they can keep the Rot Economy alive."
"Up to 95% of teenagers say they use social media, with more than one-third saying they are on it 'almost constantly,' according to the Pew Research Center...
#SocialMedia#Misinformation#Disinformation#FakeNews: "“Misinformation,” some say, is now just code for views one disagrees with. (Right-wing figures have harassed Donovan online and off, and accused her of perpetuating a “censorship-industrial complex.” Other researchers have faced even greater scrutiny, in the form of congressional subpoenas and public-records lawsuits.)
Quantifying the effect of misinformation is even harder than defining it. In the debate over why people fall for conspiracies, some scholars say that too much attention is paid to social media’s role and not enough to other factors, like government officials who make false claims on prime-time TV. Studies have failed to reliably find a direct causal relationship between viewing online misinformation and changing specific behaviors, such as switching voting positions. But to Donovan, Facebook’s ability to disseminate falsehoods at unprecedented scale has obvious consequences. When vigilantes take up arms in the wake of online rumors about “antifa” invaders, when people read on their feeds that vaccines are microchipped and voting is rigged, other members of the public — law-enforcement officials, doctors, journalists, election workers — spend time debunking and reassuring. “There are millions of resources lost to mitigating misinformation-at-scale, where the cost of doing nothing is even worse,” Donovan has written. She is among those advocating for “a public-interest internet,” one where social-media feeds would be required to contain “timely, relevant, and local” news curated by librarians."
I’d like to point out to younger people that good or bad, future employers check your social media before deciding whether to hire you or not. They’re not supposed to do that but I know many do so consider what you post and how it could affect your future. #jobs#employment#socialmedia