Kidfluencers

Samia is now 4 and has 143,000 followers on Instagram and 203,000 subscribers on YouTube. Her feeds are mostly populated with posts of her posing and playing, but they also feature paid promotions for brands like Crayola and HomeStyle Harvest chicken nuggets. […]

Another parent shared the prices commanded by the parent’s child on the condition of anonymity, citing concern that the disclosures could harm negotiations with brands. The parent said brands might pay $10,000 to $15,000 for a promotional Instagram post while a sponsored YouTube video might earn $45,000. A 30- to 90-second shout-out in a longer video can cost advertisers between $15,000 and $25,000.

Who Are Online, Recruited by Advertisers and 4 Years Old? Kidfluencers: Brands are giving lucrative endorsements to young children on YouTube and Instagram, by By Sapna Maheshwari, New York Times, March 1, 2019 (Hedline and sub-heading are as appeared in the NYT app)

Times change

“…We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers. Since it is very difficult even for experts to evaluate search engines, search engine bias is particularly insidious.”
The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, Stanford University, 1998

It just requires that Twitter would care

Imagine if signing up to read Twitter was free, but posing required you to spend a week doing moderation first.

Everyone who came into the community would have to learn the rules before they violated them.

Then, when you’re tempted to break the rules, you’d remember that there were people who would read what you wrote, just like you did for others, and you’d lose your account and have to do another week of moderation before getting to post again.

This is not too hard to implement. It’s certainly easier than inventing a magic AI that will solve all your problems. It just requires that Twitter care enough about their community to do it.

Derek Powazek (@fraying), 15 March 2019

"It wasn't always this way"

Of course, it wasn’t always this way. There was a brief moment, in the early 1990s, when the digital future felt open-ended and up for our invention. Technology was becoming a playground for the counterculture, who saw in it the opportunity to create a more inclusive, distributed, and pro-human future. But established business interests only saw new potentials for the same old extraction, and too many technologists were seduced by unicorn IPOs. Digital futures became understood more like stock futures or cotton futures – something to predict and make bets on. So nearly every speech, article, study, documentary, or white paper was seen as relevant only insofar as it pointed to a ticker symbol. The future became less a thing we create through our present-day choices or hopes for humankind than a predestined scenario we bet on with our venture capital but arrive at passively.
How tech's richest plan to save themselves after the apocalypse by Douglas Rushkoff, The Guardian, 24 July 2018

Browsers are free to ignore…

“…The Web is a system that allows users to consume content in any combination and presentation that user-chosen software can achieve…Browsers are free to ignore, rearrange, mash-up and otherwise make use of any content from any source.”
— Brave Software, in response to a Newspaper Association of America complaint that its web browser is “blatantly illegal.”

Brave’s web browser replaces ads that use 3rd party tracking with ads that give users more privacy and security—and it it then returns up to 70% of ad revenue back to the publishers. https://brave.com/blogpost_4.html

The full quote:

"…The Web is a system that allows users to consume content in any combination and presentation that user-chosen software can achieve. 

Browsers do not just play back recorded pixels from the publishers’ sites. Browsers are rather the end-user agent that mediates and combines all the pieces of content, including third-party ads and first-party publisher news stories. Web content is published as HTML markup documents with the express intent of not specifying how that content is actually presented to the browser user. Browsers are free to ignore, rearrange, mash-up and otherwise make use of any content from any source.

If it were the case that Brave’s browsers perform “republication”, then so too does Safari’s Reader mode. The same goes for any browser with an ad-blocker extension installed, or the Links text-only browser, or screen readers for the visually impaired."

Even wider destinies

“A newspaper has two sides to it. It is a business, like any other, and has to pay in the material sense in order to live. But it is much more than a business; it is an institution; it reflects and it influences the life of a whole community; it may affect even wider destinies. … It plays on the minds and consciences of men. It may educate, stimulate, assist, or it may do the opposite. It has, therefore, a moral as well as a material existence, and its character and influence are in the main determined by the balance of these two forces.”
— CP Scott, editor of the Guardian newspaper, 1921, as quoted in http://www.theguardian.com/membership/2014/sep/10/-sp-guardian-editor-alan-rusbridger-welcome-to-guardian-membership

Open Science

“A crucial aspect to this project [the Allen Institute for Brain Science] –and others the Allen Institute has pursued over the last eight years–is an “open science” research model. Early on, we considered charging commercial users for access to our online data. From a strictly financial standpoint, it made sense to reap front-end fees and, down the line, intellectual property royalties. The revenue could cover the high costs of maintenance and development to keep the resource current and useful.”
— Why We Chose Open Science by Paul Allen, Wall Street Journal, Nov 30, 2011

Allen continues,

But our mission was to spark breakthroughs, and we didn’t want to exclude underfunded neuroscientists who just might be the ones to make the next leap. And so we made all of our data free, with no registration required. 

Our facility is neither the first nor the last to use a shared database to embrace ‘open science’ and reject the competitive, single-lab paradigm. Traditional research incentives — where journal publications are the coin of the realm — tend to discourage vital sharing. What I’ve concluded is that foundations and other private funders who support scientific research also can help promote wider sharing of scientific data. Before funders write a check to a university, they should ask about the researcher’s policies and track record on sharing.

“The most satisfying proofs are existence proofs. A platypus is an existence proof that mammals can lay eggs. The Internet is an existence proof of the remarkable information processing power of a decentralized network of hobbyists, amateurs, universities, businesses, volunteer groups, professionals, and retired experts and who knows what else. It is a network that produces useful information and services. Frequently, it does so at no cost to the user and without anyone guiding it. Imagine that energy, that decentralized and idiosyncratically dispersed pattern of interests, turned loose on the cultural artifacts of the twentieth century. Then imagine it coupled to the efforts of the great state archives and private museums who themselves would be free to do the same thing…”
— James Boyle, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind, 2008. p. 13
“Arguments concerning the opportunity cost of open access (giving away potential revenues, for example) are based less on specific examples than on hypothetical opportunities — “the magic app” — that frankly never materialise.”
— From The Problem of the Yellow Milkmaid: A business model perspective on open metadata (PDF), Europeana, 2011. (quote is from a case study about Yale University // an interview with Meg Bellinger, page 23)
“The non-commercial clause that has governed use and re-use of the Museum’s metadata is rooted in the belief that non-profit academic charities should enable free use only for non-profit purposes. But in the digital age, with evidence that use and re-use can increase knowledge when it is openly linked across the entire web, the new view is that data funded by the taxpayer should have the broadest possible distribution.”
— From The Problem of the Yellow Milkmaid: A business model perspective on open metadata (PDF), Europeana, 2011. (quote is from a case study about the British Museum; an interview with Dominic Oldman, page 24)

Overlapping, partial, competitive, cooperative attempts

“All of this seems to offer the grandmotherly option between Starkman and the FON [Future Of News] crew — ‘You’re both right, dear. We need institutions and we need experiments.’ Even given this hybridization, though, our views diverge: Plan A assumes that experiments should be spokes to the newspapers’ hub, their continued role as the clear center of public interest journalism assured, and on the terms previously negotiated.

Plan B follows Jonathan Stray’s observations about the digital public sphere: in a world where Wikipedia is a more popular source of information than any newspaper, maybe we won’t have a clear center anymore. Maybe we’ll just have lots of overlapping, partial, competitive, cooperative attempts to arm the public to deal with the world we live in.

Some of the experiments going on today, small and tentative as they are, will eventually harden into institutional form, and that development will be as surprising as the penny press subsidizing journalism for seven generations. The old landscape had institutions and so will the new one, but this doesn’t imply continuity.”
— Clay Shirky, Institutions, Confidence, and the News Crisis, December 2, 2011

No medium has ever survived the indifference of 25 year olds

“If you believe, as I do, that many of those [newspaper publishing] institutions are so mismatched to the task at hand that most of them face a choice, at best, between radical restructure and outright collapse, well, in that case, you’d probably find the smartest 25 year olds you know, and try to convince them that now would be a pretty good time to start working on Plan B… No medium has ever survived the indifference of 25 year olds.”
— Clay Shirky, Institutions, Confidence, and the News Crisis, December 2, 2011

Long-term accidents

“Twentieth-century beliefs about who could produce and consume public messages, about who could coordinate group action and how, and about the inherent and fundamental link between intrinsic motivations and privation actions, all turned out to be nothing more than long-term accidents. Those accidents are now being undone by new opportunities, created by us, for one another, using abilities afforded to us by new tools. The driving force…is the ability of loosely coordinated groups with a shared culture to perform tasks more effectively than individuals, more effectively than markets using price signals, and more effectively than governments using managerial direction.”
— Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus, Chapter 4 (last page)