Collection
Open
Prosocial Media
Updated 12d
Collection
Updated 12d
What Happens When You Have a Choice? : A Breakdown of The People's Assembly and Blacksky's Vision for Democratic Tooling
Blacksky’s foundation is built on self-governance and self-determination. We took learnings from Black and Brown revolutionaries with our belief that everyone has the ability and the self-efficacy to do the things that are best for their community, but we also realize that that ability is something that is not seen as a right that everyone should be able to experience. Due to this, we sought out to create a solution, at least in the digital space, specifically for Blacksky.
Sparkable
Social media as it should be. Find your community among millions of users, unleash your creativity, and have some fun again.
What Does Constructive Mean?
How our “bridging” algorithms actually work, and our future plans.
MySky Social | Jonathan Stray | Substack
Open-source AI-driven Social Media Feeds for Everyone. Click to read MySky Social, by Jonathan Stray, a Substack publication with hundreds of subscribers.
Prosocial Media
Social media empower distributed content creation by algorithmically harnessing "the social fabric" (explicit and implicit signals of association) to serve this content. While this overcomes the...
Bridging-Based Ranking
There is significant concern about the engagement-based ranking systems used by TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, etc. to recommend content. Bridging-based ranking systems can address one of the most dangerous aspects of such algorithmic recommendations—the push toward polarization and divisiveness that is tearing nations apart—and do so without reducing anonymity or increasing censorship. This report explores what bridging-based ranking is, how it helps (overcoming downsides of chronological feeds and middleware), addresses common objections, and provides early examples of its use and benefits in the wild. The report concludes by providing next steps for platforms, governments, funders, and researchers in order to accelerate the deployment of bridging.
Enterpreneur in Residence
A virtual residency for founders with bold ideas for the internet
Governing Together: Toward Infrastructure for Community-Run Social Media
Decentralizing the governance of social computing systems to communities promises to empower them to make independent decisions, with nuance and in accordance with their values. Yet, communities do not govern in isolation. Many problems communities face are common, or move across their boundaries. We therefore propose designing for "inter-community governance:" mechanisms that support relationships and interactions between communities to coordinate on governance issues. Drawing from workshops with 24 individuals on decentralized, community-run social media, we present six challenges in designing for inter-community governance surfaced through ideas proposed in workshops. Together, these ideas come together as an ecosystem of resources, infrastructures, and tools that highlight three key principles for designing for inter-community governance: modularity, forkability, and polycentricity. We end with a discussion of how the ideas proposed in workshops might be implemented in future work aiming to support community governance in social computing systems broadly.
Civic Health Project
Technology can connect or divide us. At Civic Health Project, we're dedicated to advancing massively scalable solutions to society's dangerous divisions.
Normsy App
Bulletin Board: Cloud Atlas, Portland, and Small AI
Links and updates from New_ Public
The case against efficiency: friction in social media
Social media platforms frequently prioritize efficiency to maximize ad revenue and user engagement, often sacrificing deliberation, trust, and reflective, purposeful cognitive engagement in the process. This manuscript examines the potential of friction—design choices that intentionally slow user interactions—as an alternate approach. We present a case against efficiency as the dominant paradigm on social media and advocate for a complex systems approach to understanding and analyzing friction. Drawing from interdisciplinary literature, real-world examples, and industry experiments, we highlight the potential for friction to mitigate issues like polarization, disinformation, and toxic content without resorting to censorship. We propose a state space representation of friction to establish a multidimensional framework and language for analyzing the diverse forms and functions through which friction can be implemented. Additionally, we propose several experimental designs to examine the impact of friction on system dynamics, user behavior, and information ecosystems, each designed with complex systems solutions and perspectives in mind. Our case against efficiency underscores the critical role of friction in shaping digital spaces, challenging the relentless pursuit of efficiency and exploring the potential of thoughtful slowing.
Bonsai: Intentional and Personalized Social Media Feeds
Social media feeds use predictive models to maximize engagement, often misaligning how people consume content with how they wish to. We introduce Bonsai, a system that enables people to build personalized and intentional feeds. Bonsai implements a platform-agnostic framework comprising Planning, Sourcing, Curating, and Ranking modules. This framework allows users to express their intent in natural language and exert fine-grained control over a procedurally transparent feed creation process. We evaluated the system with 15 Bluesky users in a two-phase, multi-week study. We find that participants successfully used our system to discover new content, filter out irrelevant or toxic posts, and disentangle engagement from intent, but curating intentional feeds required more effort than they are used to. Simultaneously, users sought system transparency mechanisms to effectively use (and trust) intentional, personalized feeds. Overall, our work highlights intentional feedbuilding as a viable path beyond engagement-based optimization.
blacksky-algorithms/assembly.blacksky.community
Blacksky People’s Assembly – a space for public deliberation and collective decision-making.
communitycheck/design at main · rosestt/communitycheck
A design specification for attaching representative public opinion data to viral social media posts — correcting the gap between what people think and what they think others think. - rosestt/commun...
The Noisy Room
Only 3% of social media users post toxic content — but Americans estimate 43%. An interactive essay.
NEW: We are piloting a three month virtual residency, for two entrepreneurs with bold ideas for making the internet more human and healthy. This is a paid opportunity to spend time exploring and building, and go from early hunch to conviction and clarity. Apply here by Sept 9: newpublic.org/eir
Enterpreneur in Residence
newpublic.org
