We Become What We Behold

Saving Incremental Games | The Paper Pilot

The Paper Pilot's digital garden of thoughts on philosophy, politics, and sociology

The hidden ‘rules of the game’ that dictate how we navigate the world | Psyche Videos

How free are we really, if human behaviour embodies the complex, intertwined webs of society and history?

Game Dev Tree | The Paper Pilot

The Paper Pilot's digital garden of thoughts on philosophy, politics, and sociology

#760: Gambling the future into existence

Plus: Cosmo for conservatives, AI;DR and being "agentic"

Resonite

A novel digital universe with infinite possibilities. Whether you resonate with people around the world in a casual conversation, playing games and socializing. Or you riff off each other when creating anything from art to programming complex games, you'll find your place here.

You couldn't create a more anti-news internet if you tried

What behavioral economics can add to the story of news decline.

Accelerating dynamics of collective attention

With news pushed to smart phones in real time and social media reactions spreading across the globe in seconds, the public discussion can appear accelerated and temporally fragmented. In longitudinal datasets across various domains, covering multiple decades, we find increasing gradients and shortened periods in the trajectories of how cultural items receive collective attention. Is this the inevitable conclusion of the way information is disseminated and consumed? Our findings support this hypothesis. Using a simple mathematical model of topics competing for finite collective attention, we are able to explain the empirical data remarkably well. Our modeling suggests that the accelerating ups and downs of popular content are driven by increasing production and consumption of content, resulting in a more rapid exhaustion of limited attention resources. In the interplay with competition for novelty, this causes growing turnover rates and individual topics receiving shorter intervals of collective attention.

Recognizing Vibe Coded Games | The Paper Pilot

The Paper Pilot's digital garden of thoughts on philosophy, politics, and sociology

The Growth and Impact of Cable News

Cable news has had a tremendous impact on how people consume news. We discuss the growth and impact of cable news including the good, bad and downright ugly.

Video Game Monetization | The Paper Pilot

The Paper Pilot's digital garden of thoughts on philosophy, politics, and sociology

WE ALL WE GOT

Welcome to We All We Got: A Digital Green Book for the Culture—a guide for navigating the ever-growing wave of digital manipulation aimed at dividing, deceiving, and discouraging Black communities.

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.

(please don't) add me to the group

We talk a lot about how broken the internet is for all of us as individuals. Doomscrolling, algorithmic feeds, overall exhaustion at The Horrors. But this...