Category: Gigaom

Warning: This post may contain statements that sound like an old person lecturing younger readers about how things were better back in the day. I’d like to apologize for that in advance.

Unless you’ve been holed up in a bunker somewhere, you’ve probably heard about Ello, the new social network/platform/website that launched recently and has swept through the social web like a whirlwind. You may even have read one of the dozens of blog posts and news articles about it, including some criticizing its founders for taking venture capital investment after posting a manifesto about the need for freedom, and some that seem to see it as just the latest flash-in-the-pan.

Some or even all of those views may be true. For what it’s worth, the founders of the site — Paul Budnitz and Todd Berger — have told my colleague Carmel DeAmicis and others that pressure to monetize Ello won’t be a problem, despite having raised almost half a million dollars from venture investors, something that blogger Andy Baio of Waxy.org was the first to notice.

A few of the site’s venture backers have also given interviews in which they say they are long-term investors who are primarily interested in the health of the site and building a useful service, not in cashing out as quickly as possible. So perhaps there is a chance that Ello won’t become over-run with banner ads or sponsored posts (the founders say they plan to use a freemium model).

It’s not you, Facebook, it’s me

Business models aside, I’ve been kind of fascinated by Ello since it launched, in part because it seemed to attract a substantial group of users in my social network over a very short space of time — much more so than other networks like App.net, a previous attempt at replacing Twitter with a more open platform. Why is that? I think my friend Om put his finger on it when he said that this frenzy of interest says more about people’s dissatisfaction with the current networks than it does about Ello.

The obsessive coverage of Ello is less about Ello. Instead it really is about our growing dissatisfaction with the state of social networks.

That seems even more likely to be the case because Ello is so difficult to use, and so frustratingly designed: for a site that was founded by artists and designers, and one that seems to have appealed to many early tech adopters and developers, it can be annoying in dozens of small ways. The search function doesn’t really work, you can’t find comment threads very easily — even ones you have participated in — and it periodically just refuses to do something no matter how hard you try.

So why on earth would anyone want to use this new thing? The easy answer is that it’s new, but I think it also fills a kind of yawning void in some users — a void that has been created by a number of factors, including the corporatization not just of Facebook and Twitter but the entire social web. The tools we used to love for their freedom seem more and more constrained — and not designed for us, but for advertisers.

A chance to start over again

As I said when Ello first arrived, I kind of like the fact that it’s hard to use and doesn’t really work properly most of the time, and is filled with a lot of weirdos and cranks. It reminds me of when blogs were new — before they became giant media entities that had to toe the bottom line — or when Twitter had just launched and didn’t work most of the time, and the only people who used it were geeks and nerds.

I remember something that Microsoft researcher danah boyd said when Chatroulette first came out, and people were complaining about how it seemed to be just random people displaying their genitals to strangers — which was undoubtedly true. But boyd said that despite all that, she kind of liked it because it was so anarchic and weird, and reminded her of when the whole web was that way.

I feel the same about Twitter and Facebook — although Facebook has always been a much more tightly-controlled experience, even before it started selling ads and Mark Zuckerberg became a billionaire. But Twitter seems so grown up now, partnering with TV networks and showing you content you may not even want, that it just doesn’t seem the same.

One of the fascinating things about Twitter when it was new was that literally no one had any clue what it was, or what it was good for (if anything) or what it would become, and that includes the founders of the company, as my friend Nick Bilton has chronicled in his book Hatching Twitter. And out of that chaos came something amazing, something that succeeded almost in spite of itself.

New things make us question assumptions

That’s the kind of feeling I get from Ello: not so much that it shows signs of being something hugely successful, but that it’s such a raw, experimental network at this point that it could become anything — or nothing. And that’s interesting. It makes it hard to use, but there’s a sense of freedom and possibility as well.

Clay Shirky, a media theorist and cultural anthropologist, has written about how Ello seems to be trying to find a happy medium between a social network focused mostly on conversation and one focused mostly on blog-style writing. And sociologist Nathan Jurgenson has said one of the most interesting things about Ello is the features that aren’t there, such as “likes” (which the founders have said they excluded deliberately).

As Jurgenson suggested in one of his posts, one of the good things about having a brand new network with new features and new requirements — especially one where you can’t just connect with Twitter and duplicate your existing social graph — is that you have to start from scratch. And maybe by doing so, you reconsider some of the decisions you made on other networks, whether it’s who to follow, or what you choose to share, or even how to behave.

I love these moments of new social media when conversation explodes, moved to imagine how social media can be different, questioning core assumptions instead of just fretting and complaining -all before this paint even dries. That complaining is important, and we’ve done some righteous complaining about Ello already, but I’m embracing this brief, and especially pronounced, moment of imagination.

Will Ello still exist or be useful to large numbers of people a year or two from now? Who knows. I certainly don’t; I thought Twitter would disappear in a matter of months, and look where it is now. But new things like Ello are interesting — if only because they force us to think about how the social web works, and provide a tantalizing glimpse of what might be possible if they worked differently.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock / Amenic181 and Flickr / Jack Dorsey

Just over a year ago, a Dutch news site called De Correspondent made a fairly spectacular debut — raising more than $1.7 million from about 20,000 people, in what is still one of the world’s most successful journalistic crowdfunding efforts. And how is the site doing now? As it turns out, it is not only doing well financially but along the way it has learned a number of important lessons that other media outlets, both traditional and digital, could stand to learn from.

De Correspondent co-founder Ernst-Jan Pfauth — a former digital journalist with Dutch media entity NRC — recently published an update on Medium about the site’s progress, and said it has been able to convert over half of its initial supporters into regular subscribers. That means it now has almost 30,000 paying customers who contribute $76 a year, or about $2 million.

That’s a fairly amazing amount, considering De Correspondent is a brand new entity — and it’s even more incredible when you consider that the Netherlands only has a population of about 17 million, meaning De Correspondent has attracted a relatively large proportion of the potential audience for digital news in that country.

As I noted when I first wrote about it, the site had a head start in the sense that Pfauth and his co-founder Rob Wijnberg were both widely-known journalists for a popular media outlet, and they also got a lot of TV coverage when they made their crowdfunding appeal. But still, raising $2 million is a notable achievement.

But more than just raising money, De Correspondent has also tried hard to rethink how the news and journalism business works, and how the relationship of a media entity with its readers needs to change, and that’s a big part of what makes it different, as Pfauth describes in his Medium post. Among the key differences are:

Telling readers where the money goes: This is something that succcessful crowdfunding projects often do, but it’s rare for media companies — De Correspondent didn’t just say thank you for the money they raised, they wrote detailed reports for their readers on where the funding was being used and why. It’s a smart way of helping to build trust with your audience, which in turn makes them feel better about contributing.

Talking about your mistakes: The site has freely discussed what it is not doing well, and how it needs to improve — for example, Pfauth has written about how even though the news outlet is digital only and is trying to break the newspaper mold, it still falls into the habit of publishing stories on a predictable schedule instead of figuring out what readers need and giving it to them at a time and in a way that makes sense for them, not for the site or its traditional publishing schedule.

Pfauth and some of the site’s editors and writers also pledged to become more diverse in the types of stories they cover, and more diverse in terms of the people they get to cover those stories — and to broaden the methods they use for storytelling, instead of lapsing back into the tried-and-true newspaper model.

This kind of soul-searching is not common in traditional media, needless to say. It certainly didn’t emerge from the New York Times when that paper announced it was shutting down its NYT Opinion app and laying off 100 editorial staff, nor did any of that play a role in the paper’s internal innovation report.

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Treating your readers like partners: Apart from its openness about finances, or its willingness to admit its mistakes, one of the most compelling things that De Correspondent has done — and in fact the reason why it is committed to those other two things — is to connect readers directly to the writers who work for the site, in as many ways as possible. This is exactly the kind of thing I tried to describe in a post about the NYT’s mobile woes. As Pfauth puts it:

At De Correspondent, we believe that journalists should work together with readers, since every reader is an expert at something. And 3,000 teachers know more than just one education correspondent. That’s why we see our journalists as conversation leaders and our members as contributing experts.

Notice the language: De Correspondent doesn’t have readers or users, it has members. And it doesn’t have comments, it has conversations — ones its journalists are expected to take part in and lead — and it doesn’t have commenters, it has contributing experts. All of those things make a powerful statement about how De Correspondent sees the relationship between its journalism and the people it serves, namely the people formerly known as the audience. Words to live by.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr / Christian Scholz

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange doesn’t normally give a lot of interviews from his sanctuary in the Ecuadorian embassy in London — but when he is promoting a new book, exceptions can be made. So the Australian freedom-of-information activist did one of Reddit’s trademark “Ask Me Anything” interviews about some of the topics he writes about in the book, including Google chairman Eric Schmidt, the future of Bitcoin and the terrorist group ISIS. What follows is a heavily condensed version of that interview.

On the potential of decentralized data protocols like Bitcoin:

Bitcoin is an extremely important innovation, but not in the way most people think. Bitcoin’s real innovation is a globally verifiable proof publishing at a certain time. The whole system is built on that concept and many other systems can also be built on it. The blockchain nails down history, breaking Orwell’s dictum of “He who controls the present controls the past and he who controls the past controls the future.”

On Bitcoin’s long-term value as a currency:

Here’s footnote 185 [from Assange’s book]: On the day of the conversation [with Eric Schmidt], Bitcoin had risen above the US dollar and reached price parity with the Euro. By early 2014 it had risen to over $1,000, before falling to $430 as other Bitcoin-derived competing crypto-currencies started to take off. WikiLeaks’ strategic investments in the currency saw more than 8,000 percent return in three years, seeing us through the extralegal US banking blockade.

Google and its chairman Eric Schmidt

On what Google could be doing to fight surveillance culture:

I think it is misguided to be looking to Google to help get us out of this mess. In large part, Google has us in this mess. The company’s business model is based on sucking private data out of parts of human community that have never before been subject to monitoring, and turning that into a profit. I do not think it is wise to try to “reform” something which, from first premises, is beyond reform.

On Assange’s personal relationship with Eric Schmidt:

Eric Schmidt is personally likeable in the sense that most billionaires are. You can’t get there without making friends. Obama’s also likable, but runs an extrajudicial kill list each tuesday and has prosecuted more whistleblowers than all previous presidents combined. The problem with Google, as in the US administration is not the personalities. It is the structure, the business model and social and ideological matrix in which its decision makers are embedded.

On what countries like Greece should do in dealing with Google:

Your recognition of that visit and what it means is exactly what I was hoping for–simply that people see Google for what it is and when its representatives turn up in Greece or elsewhere they are not falsely perceived to be kindly wizards with hats stuffed with cash but rather understood in the same way that, say, an information pied piper from SAIC might be.

On ISIS and corporate censorship

On terrorist networks like ISIS and what the U.S. should do:

People who argue that ISIS poses a threat to our democracies are out to lunch. ISIS is an ugly phenomenon, but it’s largely the consequence of one blunder after another by the US and its allies in the region, who shouldn’t have been meddling there in the first place. If ISIS poses a threat to anyone, it is to countries in the region, and they are the appropriate parties to address it. If the US and its allies want to reduce “terror” in the region – as Noam Chomsky says – they need to stop participating in it.

On the movie about him, The Fifth Estate:

It is an interesting experience having a $60m attack on your reputation distributed by Disney. It even had a scene in it showing us helping the Iranians explode a nuke until we leaked the script and attacked the producers. The audience could see it was not well intentioned and turned against it. Some of my friends went to see the film, and this was their reaction: We also released our own movie, Mediastan, to compete with the launch of the film. It did well!

On allegations of censorship on Reddit following GamerGate:

It’s pathetic. But censorship by companies controlling privatized political space is now almost a norm. Facebook is implementing its own “laws” for social behavior and politics. Even Twitter has now folded; censoring for example, leaks about the New Zealand prime minister just this week and some time ago banning Anonymous Sweden after a request from that country. High volume publication+control of publication by powerful organisations = censorship, all the time. We have to fight to create new networks of freedom. The old and powerful always become corrupt.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user espenmoe

On a recent visit to New York, I had a chance to catch up with some of that city’s new-media stars, including BuzzFeed, Quartz, VICE Media, Gawker and Tumblr. I’ve already written about one of my takeaways from that trip: namely, how some or all of those companies are looking at what they do through a different lens than many traditional outlets, by seeing their journalism as a service — that is, part of a two-way relationship with readers — rather than just the distribution of content.

This post is more of a round-up of what is happening at each of those companies, as they expand into new areas, which all of them are doing. In fact, my other major takeaway was just how rapidly some of them are growing — Quartz and The Wire just moved into a new space in January and have almost outgrown it, Gawker is moving into a new building next year, and Tumblr is taking over a third floor.

I should point out that my focus on these companies doesn’t mean they are the only ones worth watching in new media, by any stretch. There are dozens of other interesting startups and players both in NYC and elsewhere, including Circa (which just rolled out an upgrade) and NBC’s Breaking News — which recently launched an interesting experiment in location-based news — as well as Business Insider, Vox and solo operations like The Daily Dish and The Information.

Continue reading “New York roundup”

As my colleague Laura Owen has reported, Authors United — a group of writers who are upset at the tactics Amazon is using to negotiate with the French publisher Hachette — has posted a letter to the company’s board of directors, arguing that the online retailer is being unfair to authors. Among other things, the group says Amazon is making a mistake by treating books like any other consumer product.

In fact, in a somewhat bizarre turn of events for a group that is supposedly protesting Amazon’s methods — the refusal to allow advance orders of Hachette books, the removal of some books from the search index, and so on — Authors United makes an odd admission: it agrees Amazon “has every right to refuse to sell consumer goods in response to a pricing disagreement with a wholesaler.”

But wait — isn’t that exactly what Amazon is doing with Hachette, by using a variety of retailing tactics to send a message to the publisher that it is charging too much for its books and/or not giving Amazon enough of the proceeds? It sure is.

So then how could the authors’ group claim that Amazon shouldn’t be able to do the same thing with Hachette that it does with every other product? Simple: because Authors United argues that books are not a consumer good like any other. Books exist in a special category, and that category of products should not be open to traditional negotiating tactics used by retailers. As the letter says:

Amazon has every right to refuse to sell consumer goods in response to a pricing disagreement with a wholesaler. We all appreciate discounted razor blades and cheaper shoes. But books are not consumer goods. Books cannot be written more cheaply, nor can authors be outsourced to China. Books are not toasters or televisions. Each book is the unique, quirky creation of a lonely, intense, and often expensive struggle on the part of a single individual.

Do books belong in a special category?

So that’s the case in a nutshell — books are not like razor blades or shoes, or toasters or televisions. They can’t be produced more cheaply, and therefore by extension prices for books must not fall but should only rise, because that’s what lonely and intense writers require for their livelihood. And authors are better than people who make toasters or televisions, or who work in China.

As with most arguments related to Amazon’s behavior, the Authors United letter plays on a host of emotionally-loaded assumptions about the book business (and it is a business, although perhaps not a very good one). It implies that all authors are starving and intense loners, who write because their muse compels them to, and therefore shouldn’t be used as pawns in Amazon’s chess game with Hachette or any other publisher. Or as author JA Konrath puts it:

We’re special snowflakes, unique and quirky, and the lonely, intense struggle we endure for the sake of ART is much more difficult than coal mining or waitressing or mechanical engineering or brain surgery or conservationism or rocket science.

And yet, despite this image of writers as lonely, starving artists in a garret somewhere, huge quantities of books are sold every year that are clearly based on cold, calculated marketing decisions made by either authors or publishers. Most aren’t even remotely unique, quirky or created by intense individuals struggling to follow their inner voice. So maybe it should be okay for Amazon to fiddle with that supply chain, but not with the one that applies to “real” books.

Clearly, some books play a critical role in society — but then so does music, and no one got upset when Apple started dictating prices and terms to the major record labels, just as Amazon is doing to the big publishers. Here’s Konrath again: “I don’t believe I’m owed a living, or that what I do is particularly important. I’m not curing cancer. I’m not even saving whales. In fact, I’m a damn lucky son of a bitch who gets to make a living doing what I love.”

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Thinkstock / Vasabii and Thinkstock / Worac

Not that long ago, it looked as though Facebook might be softening its previous stance on real names, with comments from CEO Mark Zuckerberg that suggested he saw the value of anonymity in some cases — and at the same time, the social network has expanded the number of gender-related selections users have to choose from. Despite those moves, however, some gay and transgender users say the site is forcing them to use their birth names or have their pages blocked.

According to the website Queerty, the network has been ordering gay users who registered using their drag personas to either set up a fan page or change to their legal name, and has been asking them to send copies of birth certificates and driver’s licenses to verify their identity. Queerty said it was alerted to the crackdown by Sister Roma, the drag persona of a gay man named Michael Williams, who has been forced to change his account to his given name.

What’s odd about the move is that Facebook put together a significant PR campaign earlier this year to promote the fact that it had changed the gender-related menu choices for users, offering more than 50 options for the gay and transgendered — something it said was done after much consultation with gay and transgender advocates. In one article, a trans Facebook engineer named Brielle Harrison even talked about how important this option was for people like herself.

Taylor Hatmaker at The Daily Dot says reports have been emerging from a number of gay communities that other users who registered under drag personas like Sister Roma are also being forced to change their names or risk losing their pages. Although setting up a fan page is an option, Hatmaker — who is gay — points out that this isn’t appropriate for many users, and that forcing them to do so or risk being shut out of Facebook altogether is unfair:

Presumably, Facebook wants to shoehorn these personal identities into Pages, like the ones brands and celebrities use. But for queer users more interested in keeping up with friends and building community than collecting followers, it’s an extremely poor fit. Facebook is making an implicit judgment call here, operating off of the hunch that an account in question is not the “true” identity of the user, which is an inappropriate position to begin with.

As Hatmaker and others like ZDNet columnist Violet Blue have noted, pseudonymity is not just a convenience for many gay and transgender users, but is something they are in many cases compelled to use because of threats of violence, or because revealing their identity could put their jobs at risk. Forcing them to use legal names essentially means forcing them not to use Facebook.

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As Jillian York of the Electronic Frontier Foundation pointed out during a discussion of the topic on Twitter, the action against Sister Roma and others may not be a sign that Facebook is actively targeting gay men or drag queens, but could be a result of complaints from those who do want to target those individuals, which Facebook then has to pursue. In any case, she says, the policy is unwise.

Facebook and Google+ were both involved in a “real names” crackdown several years ago, saying their networks were designed for real identities and that pseudonyms made bad behavior more likely to occur. Google has since given up on its real-name policy for Google+, but it seems Facebook is still pursuing that goal — even though it may drive some users away.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock / Andrea Michele Piacquadio

Even as The Guardian has expanded its international readership dramatically over the past few years, critics have slammed the British news outlet for being a perennial money-loser, with no viable business model apart from the funding it receives via the Scott Trust. As it turns out, that is a pretty viable business model, but now the paper is expanding beyond that by launching a major new live-events strategy and a membership-driven revenue model — and there is a lot to like about that approach as opposed to the paywall model other papers have chosen.

As described in a piece by editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger on Wednesday, the new focus on live events at the Guardian (please see disclosure below) begins with the renovation of a massive former railway structure that’s located near the paper’s office in Kings Cross, which the newspaper company is turning into a kind of convention center or conference venue.

This ambitious effort started with a kind of open-house for readers that the paper put on in 2012, Rusbridger says, in which it opened its headquarters up and spent the weekend having conversations about the future of journalism and society, along with food and music and other entertainment. That weekend convinced the Guardian that a membership-based strategy was a crucial part of its future, he says:

The prospect of being part of the debates, ideas and conversations we could start and host was immensely appealing. Most readers said they would happily contribute money to the ’cause’ of the Guardian – but an overwhelming majority also wanted the journalism to be free, so that it could reach the maximum possible audience. A fair number were happy to be subscribers, but the most hands shot up when asked if they would like to be ‘members.’

Friends, partners and patrons

And so, the paper has launched a formal membership model: without paying anything, readers known as “friends” get access to all of the paper’s journalism online, and can buy tickets to Guardian live events. If they become a “partner,” for $24 a month, they get a discount on tickets as well as the ability to book their tickets in advance and watch livestreams of the events. And for $97 a month they can become a “patron,” and get special access to private events and “unique experiences” not open to other members.

The Guardian isn’t the only newspaper to offer a form of membership, with different benefits based on how much they contribute: the Wall Street Journal offers something called WSJ+ to paying subscribers, which gives them access to invitation-only talks by experts on various topics, as well as special events like museum tours, or discounts on a round of golf at a private course. The New York Times also offers something called “Premier,” which gives subscribers who pay extra access to special features, including behind-the-scenes interviews with journalists.

As Ken Doctor notes in a post at the Nieman Lab blog, a number of media companies are also investing heavily in live events, since some success stories such as Atlantic Media’s dramatic turnaround have shown that events can be a significant draw for readers, and can generate additional revenue.

But what makes The Guardian‘s approach a bit different, I think, is the sheer scale of what they are talking about, and how the events tie together with the membership model. It’s not just one or two events — the British paper is spending a large sum to renovate the former Midland Goods Shed because it plans to host dozens of daily or weekly events, from the small to the large. In a sense, it is going into the conference business in a big way. Is that risky? Sure it is.

Deepening the relationship with readers

What those live events accomplish, as Rusbridger notes when talking about the open-house weekend, is that they deepen and extend the relationship with readers, a relationship that the Guardian editor notes is the most important thing the paper has — more important than its relationship with advertisers, and certainly more important than a relationship with shareholders. As he puts it:

The Guardian and our Sunday title the Observer have no proprietor: the only relationship our journalists have is with our readers. We felt we had a real possibility of deepening the intense bond between the producers and consumers of what we do.

The bottom line is that this relationship with readers is the core of whatever value newspapers have in this digital age — it’s not their ability to print things on paper, or drop objects off at your house. It’s their status as a trusted source of information and content that is relevant to you and your life. And the more they get to know you, the more valuable that relationship becomes.

I’ve written a number of times before about membership-based models like the ones at Talking Points Memo and Techdirt, and how the best of those models replicates what is happening in the music industry: namely, a focus on a deep relationship with fans, and deriving revenue from that instead of focusing on selling access to a specific unit of content or a specific physical product. I think the Guardian is smart to dive into that model in a big way.

Disclosure: Guardian News & Media is an investor in the parent company of Gigaom. Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Thinkstock / Digital Vision

It’s more a cruel coincidence than outright irony, but Reddit finds itself this week at the confluence of two streams, and both of them sum up the site in different ways — one pointing towards the past, and one towards the future. At the same time that the site has come under fire for its role in distributing stolen nude photos of celebrities, it is also rumored to be working on a venture financing round that could value the company at more than half a billion dollars. Will Reddit’s desire for funding trump its legendary commitment to free speech?

Reddit wasn’t actively involved in the hacking of iCloud accounts that led to the publication of hundreds of nude photos of celebrities such as actress Jennifer Lawrence and model Kate Upton, but the site quickly created a forum or sub-Reddit devoted to the pictures — or rather, users of the site did, since one of the unique things about Reddit is that users can create any kind of forum they wish and appoint themselves moderators of it without the company’s approval.

Reddit is a microcosm of the wider Internet. All the good and horrible stuff that happens there happens elsewhere too.

— Alex Fitzpatrick (@AlexJamesFitz) September 8, 2014

Open government or failed state?

The site — which is majority owned by Advance Publications, the parent company of Conde Nast, who bought it in 2006 and spun it off in 2012 — has since removed the sub-Reddit known as The Fappening, and CEO Yishan Wong made a public statement about the move, in which he tried to make it clear what Reddit would do in similar cases. Unfortunately, his comments (both in a public blog post and in a subsequent posting on Reddit itself) seemed to make the situation worse, or at least more confusing. In his blog post, Wong said:

[blockquote person=”” attribution=””]We understand the harm that misusing our site does to the victims of this theft, and we deeply sympathize. Having said that, we are unlikely to make changes to our existing site content policies in response to this specific event. The reason is because we consider ourselves not just a company running a website where one can post links and discuss them, but the government of a new type of community. [/blockquote]

Many interpreted this as meaning Reddit would let any kind of content appear on the site, including violent pornography and other deviant or repulsive behavior, unless that content involved a copyright issue or had to do with celebrities who might launch a lawsuit. The Verge said that if Wong’s analogy to a government was to be taken at face value, then the site would have to be considered “a failed state,” since it allowed its residents to be subjected to all manner of violent imagery and abuse without taking action.

Free speech is a double-edged sword

There’s no question that Reddit is an anarchic environment, in much the same way that its predecessor 4chan is. The Awl published a list of sub-Reddits that few people would be prepared to discuss in normal social circles, including one devoted to bestiality, another dedicated to photos of attractive-looking female corpses, and so on. And yet, it is also responsible for a number of positive things as well (Redditors recently found someone’s missing father), and is seen by many as a force for good rather than evil.

empathy is hard. reddit is a rare place online where there are people actively thinking about how to express it and give more of it.

— joanne mcneil (@jomc) September 8, 2014

Reddit has been down this particular road a number of times already, including a public outcry involving a moderator known as Violentacrez, who ran a sub-Reddit devoted to pictures of women taken without their permission. After he was outed by Gawker — or “doxxed,” as a number of online communities call it when someone’s identity is revealed without their permission — the site removed him as moderator and banned the sub-Reddit. But others continue to be hosted that are just as bad, if not worse.

And yet, the site’s commitment to freedom of speech lies deep in its DNA, as co-founder Alexis Ohanian pointed out in a post earlier this year about his investment in Secret — an anonymous app that has also been criticized for the kind of abusive behavior it allegedly encourages in users, and for what some critics say is a lack of safeguards or protection for those who are targeted by abusers. At the time, Ohanian said:

[blockquote person=”” attribution=””]Like all tools, this new publishing technology comes down to how we as individuals use it, but I’m heartened by every post I see that allows someone to share something about themselves that they’d never have been able to with their name attached… anonymity enables us to be truly honest, creative, and open.[/blockquote]

Can Reddit bridge the gap?

The challenge for Reddit now is: How does it retain its commitment to such free-speech principles while it is trying to raise money from a group of what could be nervous or conservative venture funds? Twitter has also wrestled with its early commitment to being the “free-speech wing of the free-speech party,” and its desire to grow and generate revenue for its public shareholders has led to a form of quasi-censorship in which certain tweets and accounts are banned or hidden from users at the request of governments. But Twitter’s challenges are like a day at the beach compared with Reddit’s.

Remaining committed to free speech is hard enough when the speech you are trying to protect is violent or homophobic or repulsive in a number of other ways, but it becomes exponentially more difficult when you have investors with hundreds of millions of dollars on the line breathing down your neck. Will Reddit start to water down its commitment, in the hope that it can bridge those two divides without losing its soul? Or will it be forced to mimic Facebook, which routinely removes photos of women breast-feeding and never says why?

4chan founder Chris “Moot” Poole has talked about his commitment to free speech and the value of anonymous behavior, and also about how he never really seriously considered raising outside funding because he assumed the content of the site would make that impossible. Reddit is about to try and thread that particular needle, and what the site will ultimately look like after that process is anyone’s guess.

When it comes to content — personal or professional — [company]Facebook[/company] is a classic double-edged sword: it has such incredible reach that you almost have to use it, and it can drive huge amounts of traffic to your content. But at the same time it is a classic walled garden, run by a black-box algorithm that uplifts or down-ranks content for reasons that are completely unknown to anyone outside of the company’s ranks of developers. So how do you work with it, and not give all the power over your content to a proprietary platform?

Blogging and RSS pioneer Dave Winer has one potential solution: work with Facebook, but make sure the blog or site you control remains primary. Winer’s latest blogging tool posts simultaneously to Facebook and a self-hosted blog — and unlike other tools that do this, any changes or updates to the blog version are automatically reflected in the Facebook version as well. That way bloggers and other content creators can take advantage of the strengths of Facebook while still maintaining ultimate control over their work and its distribution.

Especially for media companies, Winer said in an interview, trying to pretend that Facebook doesn’t exist doesn’t really make sense, and isn’t going to work anyway — so as he described in a post, better to figure out ways to use the platform to broaden your reach, but do so in ways that don’t trap your content. That way Facebook wins, but so do you. As he put it to me in our interview:

[blockquote person=”” attribution=””]If you’d asked me whether I thought there should be a Facebook I would have said no, but now they have a billion users or whatever, and at some point you have to reset your thinking, you can’t just say I wish they weren’t there. Any software shipped now exists in a context where Facebook also exists, and to pretend that it doesn’t is to make your world very small.[/blockquote]

Facebook wins, but so can you

What’s particularly interesting about the new tool for cross-posting and updating Facebook posts, Winer said, is that Facebook reached out to him rather than the other way around — a sign that the company is trying to become more open. The contact came from Doug Purdy, a senior manager in charge of Facebook’s API and developer relations who worked at Microsoft in the late 1990s, when Winer was collaborating closely with the software giant.

As it turned out, even Facebook wasn’t aware of how open its API actually was: Winer said that any writing and posting tool should be able to update in both places at once, and the Facebook API documentation specifically said that wasn’t possible — but when Purdy looked into it, it actually was possible, but the documentation hadn’t been updated yet to reflect that.

[blockquote person=”” attribution=””]The way I see it, I’m sort of negotiating on behalf of the open web, asking them to make some concessions… and they are already more open than you think they are. That was the purpose of the tool I produced — it’s a demo, and the point was to show people this is not as limited as people think it is. And their API is incredible, it really is a thing of beauty.[/blockquote]

Supporting the “indie web”

Winer isn’t the only web veteran who has been stressing the importance of maintaining control over one’s content and supporting the open web. Union Square Ventures partner Fred Wilson wrote recently about the power of having a personal blog — which writers like Curbed founder Lockhart Steele and Gawker founding editor Elizabeth Spiers have returned to recently, and is something very different from using third-party proprietary platforms like Medium.

Online journalism veteran Dan Gillmor has also written about the importance of defending the open web, and the efforts of a group of developers and programmers focused on tools that help support what they call the “indie web.” These tools allow content creators to distribute their work everywhere and still maintain control — including one called Bridgy that pulls comments from social networks back into a user’s blog — and the philosophy is to “publish once and syndicate elsewhere.”

Why is this so important? Because as Gillmor put it in his post: “when we use centralized services like social media sites… we are handing over ultimate control to third parties that profit from our work, material that exists on their sites only as long as they allow.” And that’s not open at all.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock / Luis Santos

Before I begin, I’m aware that what follows likely fits the definition of a “take,” as Awl writer John Herrman calls the endless series of blog posts, online think-pieces and me-too coverage that follow an event like the recent celebrity nude-selfie hack or the Delta Airlines Twitter gaffe. But I found his post fascinating — not so much because of what he said in it, but because of what the phenomenon he is describing can tell us about the disruption of the traditional media landscape.

In his post, Herrman calls the profusion of posts on such news events an “evolutionary defense against attention surplus,” as every media outlet large or small scrambles to cover whatever the trending topic of the day is — regardless of whether they have anything to add in the form of reporting, or analysis, or additional background on the story:

There were dozens more of these stories, all about a single tweet, from virtually every outlet that publishes news. And they served their purpose admirably: They left no attention on the table. They represent “we should have something on this” news impulse stripped to its barest form, left unspoken and carried out as a matter of course. Endless minimalist Takes, obviously duplicative from the producer’s side but not necessarily from the other.

Trying to meet social demand

At one point, Herrman describes the impetus for this explosion of content by saying that writers for almost every media or news site found themselves “under the spell of that horrible force that newspaper columnists feel every week, the one that eventually ruins every last one: the dreadful pull of a guaranteed audience.” In other words, everyone knew that people would be looking for information about the celebrity photo hack, so they bent over backwards to produce some.

What struck me about this description was how similar it is to the model that powered the former “content farm” known as Demand Media — which involved figuring out as quickly as possible what the most popular search terms were likely to be, and then generating or aggregating whatever content it could around those terms, whether it was how to change a snow tire or the meaning of Hanukkah.

Now, the entire internet is a content farm, and the wave everyone is trying to ride is no longer a search or SEO-driven wave but a social one, powered by Twitter and Facebook. But the rationale is the same — if your “take” on a specific event gets clicked on or shared the right way, it could become a massive traffic driver, pushing millions of eyeballs to your site. The only problem is that you have absolutely no way of knowing whether that is actually going to happen or not.

No guarantee of an audience

Unfortunately, Demand Media’s understanding of the new-media landscape was actually spot on: as the name of the company implied, the web has transformed the media ecosystem from a supply-driven model into a demand-driven one. Instead of newspaper editors publishing whatever they deem worthy and ignoring what they don’t (which is what Facebook now does, ironically) it has become a world in which readers flock to whatever captures their attention.

In that sense, the profusion of identical “takes” is a form of clickbait — which, as I tried to argue in a recent post, is also a result of media sites trying to give readers what they seem to want, instead of producing what they think readers should want.

The reality is that no one is guaranteed an audience any more, as Guardian editor Janine Gibson described it in an interview for the New York Times‘ internal “innovation report.” It doesn’t matter what it says on your masthead, or how many centuries you have been publishing, or how many industry accolades your columnist has. All that matters is whether people want to read it or not — and that force is as mercurial a mistress as any newspaper editor ever was, and then some.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Thinkstock / moodboard and Flickr user D. Miller

Having just written what I consider a defense of the internet’s effect on journalism and the media industry, I didn’t expect to have to do it again so soon. But just after Andrew Leonard’s short-sighted piece in Salon about how the internet has crippled journalism, David Sessions wrote on the same topic in Patrol magazine, and arguably did an even worse job of describing the current state of journalism, calling it a morass of “cynical, unnecessary, mind-numbing, time-wasting content.”

It’s not just the over-riding pessimism of both of these pieces that bothers me. It’s the failure to appreciate that the complaints they have are the same ones that have been made about journalism for decades — combined with the unrestrained longing for some mythical golden age of journalism.

In his piece, Sessions says that he used to be an optimist about the internet, that he rarely read the printed paper or magazines and always felt more at home with digital media because of its “immediacy” and freedom, and a willingness to evolve. But the promise of the web has turned sour, he argues, and the forces unleashed by the rise of Google and Facebook have turned a once-innovative marketplace into what the former writer (now doing his doctorate in modern European history) calls an undifferentiated mass of clickbait and me-too journalism:

Where once the internet media landscape was populated with publications that all had unique visual styles, traffic models, and editorial voices, each one has mission-creeped its way into a version of the same thing: everybody has to cover everything, regardless of whether not they can add any value to the story, and has to scream at you to stand out in the avalanche of “content” gushing out of your feeds.

The internet didn’t invent clickbait

Sessions’ piece has been tweeted approvingly by many online journalists, who seem to share his feeling that they are “actively making the world a dumber place” (or perhaps they just feel that everyone else is doing that). The internet is bad for writers, Sessions argues later in his essay, because it turns “qualities that should be valued — effort, reflection, revision, editing — into hindrances, and makes the resulting product worth little, both qualitatively and financially.” Good writing is difficult, takes time, and is expensive, he says.

I’m not saying the Patrol magazine co-founder or his fellow critics are wrong. Is there a lot of noise and low-quality writing on the internet? Definitely. Does much of it come from sites that claim to be doing journalism? You bet. Is any of this unique to the internet age? Not even close. Pick any time period within recent human history — especially the ones that were supposed to be a golden age for journalism — and you will find similar complaints.

Newspapers in particular have always been filled with huge quantities of “cynical, unnecessary, mind-numbing, time-wasting content.” As Annalee Nevitz of Gawker’s io9 recently described, newspapers at the turn of the century routinely indulged in shameless clickbait of the highest order, including front-page stories about violent gangs of thieves stealing people’s genitals. Headlines were salacious and in many cases flat-out wrong. Newspapers competed to see who would be the first to print a rumor or some bit of innuendo, especially if it involved a celebrity.

Technology is always seen as negative

Just as Twitter has been criticized by almost everyone (including Sessions) for encouraging a rush of speculation during events like the Boston bombing, and for overwhelming rational thought and reflection, the advent of the telegraph was also seen as a negative force for human understanding, because it transmitted the news too quickly, without giving people time to take the news in. You could quite easily read the excerpt below from an article in the New York Times from 1858 and replace the word “telegraph” with the word “internet.”

William Randolph Hearst, a giant in the modern media business, was a shameless publicity hound whose newspapers routinely printed half-baked theories and even outright falsehoods in an attempt to attract readers. As BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti is fond of pointing out — for obvious reasons — Henry Booth Luce’s burgeoning empire at Time Inc. started by aggregating the news posted by competitors in order to steal some of their traffic and posted every salacious bit of celebrity gossip or rumor it could get its hands on.

It’s not the worst of times

Even at the time when the Washington Post was producing what many see as the apotheosis of golden-age journalism — the Watergate investigation series by Woodward and Bernstein — it and other newspapers just like it were printing thousands of pages a day filled with trivia and ephemeral nonsense. I haven’t been able to find any, but I have no doubt that newspapers were being criticized for printing nothing but poorly-argued invective and cheap traffic-driving features when Benjamin Franklin was running the Pennsylvania Gazette in the 1700s.

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Criticizing BuzzFeed because it does listicles — or VICE News because it covers pop culture, or Gawker because it runs the occasional celebrity-bashing post, or Vox because it did an explainer on Gwyneth Paltrow — is like looking at a newspaper and complaining about the horoscopes, advice columns and comic strips. Where’s all the great journalism? The reality is that for most newspapers, those investigative stories and scoops everyone remembers are a fraction of a percent of the total output, and always have been.

Is this the best of times for journalism? No. But it’s hardly the worst of times either. The fact is that there was no “golden age of journalism.” Journalism has always been a messy and chaotic and venal undertaking in many ways — the internet didn’t invent that. All the web has done is provide us with more ways to produce and distribute both ephemeral nonsense and serious journalism in greater quantities. The good part is that it has also made it easier to find the things we care about. What we choose to do with that power, as always, is up to us.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock / Everett Collection and Thinkstock / Anya Berkut

Is the internet destroying journalism? In a piece at Salon, writer Andrew Leonard argues that it is — primarily because “the economics of news gathering in the Internet age suck,” as he puts it. And it’s easy to see why someone would be drawn to that point of view, given the rapid decline of the print newspaper business and the waves of layoffs and closures that have affected that industry. But what Leonard is actually complaining about is the failure of a specific business model for funding journalism, not the decline of journalism itself.

Obviously, those two things are fairly closely related: Newspapers have represented the front lines of journalism for a generation or more, with deep benches of talent — including foreign correspondents in dozens of countries around the world, and special investigative-reporting teams. And what has funded all of that journalism has been print-advertising revenue, which has been falling off a cliff for the past decade or two: since 2000, more than $45 billion worth of revenue has effectively disappeared from the print newspaper business.

But while journalism and the print-newspaper or print-magazine industry have close ties to one another, and have since the 1950s or so, that doesn’t mean they are synonymous, or that because one is fatally ill the other must necessarily die. In fact, by some measures, journalism has never been healthier. And there’s every reason to believe that it is actually getting stronger because of the web, not weaker — regardless of what’s happening to print.

Journalism is more than just newspapers

Even Leonard admits that surveys repeatedly show people are reading more news than they ever have before, thanks in large part to the rise of mobile devices, and he agrees that the worst of the SEO-driven content farms have been vanquished. He also notes that a lot of money has been flowing into online content over the past year, including Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos buying the Washington Post for $250 million, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar funding First Look Media for a similar amount, and close to $100 million flowing to BuzzFeed and Vox.

One thing we know for sure: People still want to read the news, and where there is demand there will always be supply. And certainly, if you are a reader, you already are flourishing in a golden age, with access to more content of all kinds than you can possibly consume.

So if readers are being well served, and news reading has never been more popular, then why should we be concerned about the future of journalism? Leonard argues that while readers are getting what they want, “a golden age for readers doesn’t necessarily translate into a golden age for writers or publishers.” For one thing, he says, writers are having a hard time making a living because too many people are willing to work for free — a complaint about the internet’s effect on the media industry that comes up from time to time.

Whenever I write about this subject I get deluged by flame emails and Twitter responses, but I don’t see how more people writing journalism — even for free — is a problem. If what we care about is the future of journalism, then it’s actually a good thing, not a bad thing: the more people doing journalism, the better it gets. What Leonard seems concerned about is a particular economic model for producing and distributing that journalism. But who’s to say that the model whose death we are mourning was any better than a new or different model? Here’s Leonard again:

Yes, there are a handful of high-profile start-ups making waves, but it’s not at all clear that they’ve replaced the hundreds and thousands of metro and foreign desk reporter jobs that have vanished in the last decade… one 2011 study found 44.7 percent fewer reporters working in the [San Francisco] Bay area than a decade ago.

The economics have never been better

Here’s the question implied by Leonard’s argument: Should the internet, or new-media entities like BuzzFeed or Vice or Vox, be judged by whether they have been able to replace the thousands of reporter and editor jobs that have vanished in the last decade? I don’t think they should. That would be a little like judging the early years of the automotive industry based on how many horse or buggy-whip-related jobs it managed to replace. Obviously, Vice and Vox and First Look are not going to reconstruct the kind of print-based news industry that ruled the mass-media world of the 1950s and 1960s. But then why should they?

But for me, the most problematic sentence in Leonard’s piece is the one where he says that “the economics of news gathering in the internet age suck.” That couldn’t be further from the truth. As Henry Blodget of Business Insider argued in a post last year about why we are living in a golden age for journalism, the benefits of news-gathering and distribution in a digital age are numerous, and they arguably make both of those functions cheaper by orders of magnitude — to the point where many of the jobs Leonard is mourning are simply not needed any more.

Is the transition from an old model to a new one causing horrendous economic upheaval? Of course it is. And it’s not easy for editors or reporters or writers of any kind to make the transition from one way of doing things to another — but it can be done, and it will be done. And journalism will be just fine, even if print-based newspapers and magazines are not.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock / Yeko Photo Studio and Getty Images / Mario Tama

If you’ve heard of the Oculus Rift at all, you probably think of it as the off-the-charts geeky, facemask-style VR headset that’s designed for playing 3D video games. And that’s true — but virtual reality has other applications as well, including potentially journalistic ones: USC fellow and documentary filmmaker Nonny de la Peña, for example, is creating immersive experiences that give participants an inside look at a news story, such as the war in Syria, or the military prison in Guantanamo Bay.

As Wired explains, de la Peña talked about her work at a recent conference in Sweden, and how she got the idea from early versions of “documentary games” like JFK Reloaded, which put players in Dallas at the time of the president’s shooting. So much of journalism is about “capturing a moment in time,” said de la Peña, a former journalist who has written for Newsweek and the New York Times — what better way to do that than by doing it in three dimensions?

De la Peña’s first project was called “Gone Gitmo,” and it used documentary evidence about the detention center and the experiences of inmates there to create a life-like representation of what being imprisoned there would be like, including audio clips that recreated certain sounds, and diary entries that detailed the behavior of guards and other inmates. Another project de la Peña did for the World Economic Forum recreated what it was like to be a child refugee in Syria.

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What if journalists or documentarians could create realistic three-dimensional depictions of news events like the shooting of an unarmed black man by police in Ferguson, Missouri last week — would that help convey facts and impressions about the event that TV reports or newspaper stories and tweets couldn’t? Would it make it easier for those trying to understand the incident to appreciate how it happened?

One risk of using the kind of approach de la Peña is taking for current events is that there is so much about them that is in dispute: in Ferguson, for example, there is no consensus on how far away from the police officer Michael Brown was when he was shot, whether his back was turned, and whether there was a struggle before shots were fired. But at least with a Rift, those who wanted to explore the different scenarios would be able to do so in a much more realistic way.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Thinkstock / Oleksiy Mark

Late Tuesday, the terrorist group known as ISIS released a video that appeared to show members of the group beheading freelance journalist James Foley, who was kidnapped almost two years ago while reporting in Iraq. As they so often do, screenshots and links to the video circulated rapidly through social media — even as some journalists begged others to stop sharing them — while Twitter and YouTube tried to remove them as quickly as possible. But as well-meaning as their behavior might be, do we really want those platforms to be the ones deciding what content we can see or not see? It’s not an easy question.

When I asked that question on Twitter, Nu Wexler — a member of Twitter’s public policy team — said the company removed screenshots from the video at the request of Foley’s relatives, in accordance with a new company policy, which states that the company will remove images at the request of the family, although it “will consider public interest factors such as the newsworthiness of the content.” A number of people had their accounts suspended after they shared the images, including Zaid Benjamin of Radio Sawa, but media outlets that posted photos did not.

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It’s easy to understand why the victim’s family and friends wouldn’t want the video or screenshots circulating, just as the family of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl — who was beheaded on video by Al-Qaeda in 2002 — or businessman Nick Berg didn’t want their sons’ deaths broadcast across the internet. And it’s not surprising that many of those who knew Foley, including a number of journalists, would implore others not to share those images, especially since doing so could be seen as promoting (even involuntarily) the interests of ISIS.

Who decides what qualifies as violence?

For whatever it’s worth, I think we owe it to Foley — and others who risk their lives to report the news — to watch the video, out of respect for their commitment. But regardless, shouldn’t that be our choice to make? Should Twitter and YouTube be so quick to remove content because it happens to be violent? And who defines what violence is? What if it was a photo of a young Vietnamese girl who had burned by napalm, or a man being shot by police?

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Some of those who responded to my question argued that removing images of someone being beheaded is a fairly obvious case where censorship should be required, if only because they are shocking and repulsive — and because Twitter in particular shows users photos and videos automatically now, unlike in the past when you had to click on a link (a change Twitter ironically made to increase engagement with multimedia content). TV networks don’t show violent or graphic images, the argument goes, so why should Twitter or YouTube?

The difference, of course, is that while Twitter may seem more and more like TV all the time — as Zach Seward at Quartz describes it — it’s supposed to be a channel that we control, not one that is moderated by unseen editors somewhere. Twitter has become a global force in part because it is a source of real-time information about conflicts like the Arab Spring in Egypt or the police action in Ferguson, and the company has repeatedly staked its reputation on being the “free-speech wing of the free-speech party.”

Sad that after a year+ of incitement to genocide, jihadi stuff is now being mass scrubbed from Twitter/FB because an American was killed.

Twitter management have been struggling for some time to find a happy medium between censorship and free speech when it comes to ISIS, a group that is renowned for its use of social media to promote its cause — accounts associated with the group have been suspended a number of times, but more keep appearing. Some, including conservative commentator Ronan Farrow, have argued that the company and other social platforms should do a lot more to keep terrorist propaganda and other content out of their networks.

How does Twitter define free speech?

A source at Twitter said that ISIS is especially difficult, because the group is on a U.S. government list of terrorist organizations, and it’s considered a criminal offence to provide “aid or comfort” to such groups — something that could theoretically cover providing them with a platform on social media. But then the Palestinian group Hamas is defined by many as a terrorist group, and it posts on Twitter regularly, including an infamous exchange with the official Twitter account for the Israeli army in 2012.

I deleted the link to the Foley video, but what is the logic? We have been linking to hundreds of ISIS videos beheading FSA & other Syrians

After Ronan Farrow compared ISIS content to the radio broadcasts in Rwanda that many believe helped fuel a genocide in that country in the 1990s, sociologist Zeynep Tufekci argued that in some cases social platforms probably should remove violent content, because of the risk that distributing it will help fuel similar behavior. But others, including First Look Media’s Glenn Greenwald, said leaving those decisions up to corporations like Twitter or YouTube is the last thing that a free society should want to promote.

In some ways, it’s a lot easier to let Twitter or YouTube or Facebook decide what content we should see and not see, since it protects us from being exposed to violent imagery and repulsive behavior. But in some cases it can also prevent us from knowing things that need to be known, as investigative blogger Brown Moses says Facebook does when it removes content posted by dissident groups in Syria. Shouldn’t that be our decision as users?

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Thinkstock / Yuriz

While Twitter has been alive with breaking news about the events in Ferguson, Mo. after the shooting of an unarmed black man — video clips posted by participants, live-tweeting the arrest of journalists, and so on — many users say Facebook has been largely silent on the topic, with more info about ice-bucket challenges by various celebrities. Is this a sign of a fundamental difference between the two platforms? In a sense, yes. But it’s also a testament to the power of the algorithms that Facebook uses to filter what we see in our newsfeeds, and that has some potentially serious social implications.

Part of the reason why Twitter is more news-focused than Facebook has to do with the underlying mechanics of both sites, and the way user behavior has evolved as a result. Because of its brevity, and the ease with which updates can be shared, Twitter is a much more rapid-fire experience than Facebook, and that makes it well suited for quick blasts of information during a breaking-news event like Ferguson.

Flaws in the symmetrical follow model

Facebook has tried to emulate some of those aspects of Twitter, with the real-time activity feed that sits off to the right of the main newsfeed and shows you when someone has liked a post, or what they are listening to on Spotify, etc.. But even with that, it’s more difficult to follow a quickly-evolving news story easily. And while Twitter has added embedded images and other Facebook-style features over the past year or so, Facebook is still filled with a lot more content that makes it difficult to process a lot of information quickly.

https://twitter.com/7im/status/501242535360995328

Then there’s the nature of the community: although Facebook has tried to embrace Twitter-style following, which allows users to see updates from others even if they aren’t friends, in most cases people still use the platform the way it was originally designed — in other words, with a symmetrical follow model that requires two people to agree that they are friends before they can see each others’ updates. On Twitter, users decide to follow whomever they wish, and in most cases don’t have to ask for permission (unless someone has protected their account).

As tech-blogger Robert Scoble argued during a debate with Anthony De Rosa of Circa, there are ways to fine-tune your Facebook feed so that it becomes more of a news platform. Like Twitter, Facebook allows users to create topic-driven lists, but the site doesn’t spend much time promoting them, and they are difficult to manage (to be fair, Twitter doesn’t make its lists very prominent or easy to use either). Facebook has also tried to become more of a news source via the Newswire it launched along with Storyful earlier this year, and product manager Mike Hudack says the site is working on other ways of surfacing news better.

Better for friendships than news

In the end, Facebook’s model may be better suited for creating a network of actual friends and close relationships, and for keeping the conversation civil, but it isn’t nearly as conducive to following a breaking-news story like Ferguson, unless you have taken the time to construct lists of sources you follow for just such an occasion. And then there’s the other aspect of the Facebook environment that makes it more problematic as a news source: namely, the fact that Facebook’s newsfeed is filtered by the site’s powerful ranking algorithms.

As University of North Carolina sociologist Zeynep Tufekci pointed out in a recent piece on Medium, the Facebook algorithm makes it less likely we will see news like Ferguson, for a number of reasons. One is that the newsfeed is filtered based on our past activity — the things we have clicked “like” on, the things we have chosen to comment on or share, and so on. That keeps the newsfeed more relevant (or so Facebook would no doubt argue) but it makes it substantially less likely that a sudden or surprising event like Ferguson will make its way past the filters:

“I wonder: what if Ferguson had started to bubble, but there was no Twitter to catch on nationally? Would it ever make it through the algorithmic filtering on Facebook? Maybe, but with no transparency to the decisions, I cannot be sure. Would Ferguson be buried in algorithmic censorship?”

A technical issue but also a social one

As the term “algorithmic censorship” implies, Tufekci sees this kind of filtering as a societal issue as well as a technical one, since it helps determine which topics we see as important and which we ignore — and David Holmes at Pando Daily has pointed out that if Twitter implements a similar kind of algorithm-driven filtering, which it is rumored to be considering as a way of improving user engagement, Twitter may also lose some of its strength as a news source.

In a sense, Facebook has become like a digital version of a newspaper, an information gatekeeper that dispenses the news it believes users or readers need to know, rather than allowing those readers to decide for themselves. Instead of a team of little-known editors who decide which uprisings to pay attention to and which to ignore, Facebook uses an algorithm whose inner-workings are a mystery. Theoretically, the newsfeed ranking is determined according to the desires of its users, but there’s no real way to confirm that this is true.

In the end, we all have to choose the news sources that we trust and the ones that work for us in whatever way we decide is important. And if we choose Facebook, that means we will likely miss certain things as a result of the filtering algorithm — things we may not even realize we are missing — unless the network changes the way it handles breaking news events like Ferguson.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Thinkstock / Oleksiy Mark