Saturday, March 25, 2023
Are ad-driven business models bad?
Saturday, March 18, 2023
NATO on bots, sockpuppets, and shills manipulating social media
Buying manipulation remains cheap ... The vast majority of the inauthentic engagement remained active across all social media platforms four weeks after purchasing.The fake engagement gets picked up and amplified by algorithms like trending, search ranking, and recommenders. That's why it is so effective. A thousand sockpuppets engage with something new in the first hour, then the algorithms think it is popular and show crap to more people. I think there are a few questions to ask about this: Is it possible for social media platforms to stop their amplification of propaganda and scams? If it is possible but some of them don't, why not? Finally, is it in the best interest of the companies in the long-run to allow this manipulation of their platforms?[Scammers and foreign operatives are] exploiting flaws in platforms, and pose a structural threat to the integrity of platforms.
Saturday, February 25, 2023
Too many metrics and the Otis Redding problem
Superhuman AI in the game Go
Thursday, February 16, 2023
Huge numbers of fake accounts on Twitter
Details on personalized learning at Duolingo
When students are given material that’s too difficult, they often get frustrated and quit ... [Too] easy ... doesn’t challenge. Duolingo uses AI to keep its learners squarely in the zone where they remain engaged but are still learning at the edge of their abilities. Bloom’s 2-sigma problem ... [found that] average students who were individually tutored performed two standard deviations better than they would have in a classroom. That’s enough to raise a person’s test scores from the 50th percentile to the 98th When Duolingo was launched in 2012 ... the goal was to make an easy-to-use online language tutor that could approximate that supercharging effect. We'd like to create adaptive systems that respond to learners based not only on what they know but also on the teaching approaches that work best for them. What types of exercises does a learner really pay attention to? What exercises seem to make concepts click for them?Great details on how Duolingo maximizes fun and learning while minimizing frustration and abandons, even when those goals are in conflict. Lots more in there, well worth reading.
Massive fake crowds for disinformation campaigns
Misinformation and disinformation are the biggest problems on the internet right now. And it's never been cheaper and easier to do.
Note how it works. The fake accounts coordinate together to shout down others and create the appearance of agreement. It's like giving one person a megaphone. One person now has thousands of voices shouting in unison, dominating the conversation.
Propaganda is not free speech. One person should have one voice. It shouldn't be possible to buy more voices to add to yours. And algorithms like rankers and recommenders definitely shouldn't treat these as organic popularity and amplify them further.
The article is part of a much larger investigative report combining reporters from The Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, El Pais, and others. You can read much more starting from this article, "Revealed: the hacking and disinformation team meddling in elections".
Tuesday, January 31, 2023
How can enshittification happen?
Layoffs as a social contagion
[CEOs] know layoffs are harmful to company well-being, let alone the well-being of employees, and don’t accomplish much, but everybody is doing layoffs and their board is asking why they aren’t doing layoffs also. The tech industry layoffs are basically an instance of social contagion, in which companies imitate what others are doing. If you look for reasons for why companies do layoffs, the reason is that everybody else is doing it ... Not particularly evidence-based. Layoffs often do not increase stock prices, in part because layoffs can signal that a company is having difficulty. Layoffs do not increase productivity. Layoffs do not solve what is often the underlying problem, which is often an ineffective strategy ... A bad decision.For more on the harm, please see my old 2009 post from the last time this happened, "Layoffs and tech layoffs".