Aliens in the valley: The complete and chaotic history of Reddit

The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

Can a human touch make Silicon Valley’s biggest discussion forum a more thoughtful place?

Part I: The Next Great Online Community

There’s a lack of innovation in community software. Let's dive into internet history, and get inspired!

Rebuilding the Web We Lost - Anil Dash

A blog about making culture. Since 1999.

The Web We Lost - Anil Dash

A blog about making culture. Since 1999.

The Subversive Hyperlink

Writing about the big beautiful mess that is making things for the world wide web.

‘I Believe My Time at Reddit Made the World a Worse Place’

A conversation with former Reddit product head Dan McComas on the problems with Reddit, Twitter, and the rest of the web.

The history of Yahoo, and how it went from phenom to has-been - Fast Company

For one brief shining moment, Yahoo was the king of all it surveyed. Then everything went to hell.

Storming Reddit's Moat

A Guide to Reddit, Its Key Competitive Advantages, and How to Unbundle It

Historical pragmatism and the internet

This article argues that the literature describing the internet revolution in the 1990s was characterized by the rhetoric of the technological sublime. This rhetoric suffered from three fatal flaws: (1) it was not sufficiently grounded in the historical development of technology; (2) it viewed the internet in isolation, failing to consider the wider technological context; and (3) it failed to examine the internet in view of the social, economic, religious and political circumstances of its users. Several examples from history are cited, demonstrating that changes in various systems for the production, dissemination and preservation of cultural information both border and deborder the world. The article suggests that if internet researchers take a pragmatic, historically grounded approach, they will discover that the introduction of internet technology can be seen to have similar consequences. While the technology overcomes many boundaries (of space and time, politics and economics), other social borders may be created at the same time. It is easier to see old boundaries coming down than to see new ones being erected. Rather than being swept by utopian or dystopian enthusiasms, the article insists that the really interesting discoveries are to be made in locating the subtle social shifts taking place, relatively unnoticed, as a consequence of technological change.

Mozilla and the Washington Post Are Reinventing Online Comments | The Mozilla Blog

To engage readers, build community, and strengthen journalism, Mozilla’s open-source commenting platform will be integrated across washingtonpost.com

ChatGPT's Atlas: The Browser That's Anti-Web - Anil Dash

A blog about making culture. Since 1999.

The spreading of misinformation online

Significance The wide availability of user-provided content in online social media facilitates the aggregation of people around common interests, worldviews, and narratives. However, the World Wide Web is a fruitful environment for the massive diffusion of unverified rumors. In this work, using a massive quantitative analysis of Facebook, we show that information related to distinct narratives––conspiracy theories and scientific news––generates homogeneous and polarized communities (i.e., echo chambers) having similar information consumption patterns. Then, we derive a data-driven percolation model of rumor spreading that demonstrates that homogeneity and polarization are the main determinants for predicting cascades’ size. , The wide availability of user-provided content in online social media facilitates the aggregation of people around common interests, worldviews, and narratives. However, the World Wide Web (WWW) also allows for the rapid dissemination of unsubstantiated rumors and conspiracy theories that often elicit rapid, large, but naive social responses such as the recent case of Jade Helm 15––where a simple military exercise turned out to be perceived as the beginning of a new civil war in the United States. In this work, we address the determinants governing misinformation spreading through a thorough quantitative analysis. In particular, we focus on how Facebook users consume information related to two distinct narratives: scientific and conspiracy news. We find that, although consumers of scientific and conspiracy stories present similar consumption patterns with respect to content, cascade dynamics differ. Selective exposure to content is the primary driver of content diffusion and generates the formation of homogeneous clusters, i.e., “echo chambers.” Indeed, homogeneity appears to be the primary driver for the diffusion of contents and each echo chamber has its own cascade dynamics. Finally, we introduce a data-driven percolation model mimicking rumor spreading and we show that homogeneity and polarization are the main determinants for predicting cascades’ size.