Epeus' epigone

I wrote a post last year about Buzz theory, and the year before about Twitter theory, so I thought I'd compare how Google+ (hereafter Plus) fits in with them too.

Flow

Plus is a flow but it is re-ordered by responses to posts. It has a second flow of Notifications, that not only has an unread count (though it caps out at 9+), but that lurks atop every Google page, drawing you back in as you search or read gmail. What it chooses to notify you about are people who follow you (now mercifully collated into clumps, comments on your posts, and people plussing you (the equivalent of twitter @replies). Like Buzz, these Notifications end up privileged over the core flow, and also email you by default.

Faces

There are faces of people next to each post, tapping into the subtle nuances of trust we all carry in our heads. The replies and notifications have smaller faces, which makes it harder to work out who they are, as this is where strangers show up more. The faces shown for the circle you're watching, or the list of people also in a limited post are very tiny indeed.

Phatic

The phatic feel of Twitter is partially there, but at the launch there was much talk of Google 'hiding the irrelevant' so the social gestures where we groom each other may be tidied away by an uncomprehending machine.

The replies from faceless strangers flooding your inbox if you respond to anyone with a large following will put people off interacting socially. The feeling of talking intimately to those you know is replaced by something closer to the 'naked in the school lunchroom' nightmare.

Following

Buzz does pick up Twitters asymmetric following model, and indeed adds a way to create private Buzzes for small groups, both key features. However, these are undermined by the confusing editing process. The Follower/Following editing is only in pop-up javascript dialogs on your Buzz in gmail and Google Profile pages, and because of the auto-follow onboarding, rather opaque. The groups editing is in Google Contacts, but that doesn't show the Followers, Following, Chat Friends, Latitude or other subgroups. There is also no way to see just conversations with those groups.

The overall effect makes it feel more like a Mornington Crescent server than Twitter. I made a Mornington Crescent Buzz account; it seems to fit.

Publics

Twitter's natural view is different for each of us, and is of those we have chosen. We each have our own public that we see and we address.

The subtlety is that the publics are semi-overlapping - not everyone we can see will hear us, as they don't necessarily follow us, and they may not dip into the stream in time to catch the evanescent ripples in the flow that our remark started. To see responses to us from those we don't follow, we have to click the Mentions tab. However, as our view is of those we choose to follow, our emotional response is set by that, and we behave more civilly in return.

Buzz reverses this. The general comments from friends are in the Buzz tab, but anyone can use '@' to mention you, forcing the whole conversational thread into your inbox. Similarly, if you comment on someone else's Buzz, any further updates to the web show up in your main email inbox. The tragedy of the comments ensues, where annoying people can take over the discussion, and their replies are privileged twice over those you choose to follow.

This is the YouTube comments problem yet magnified; when all hear the words of one, the conversation often decays.

Mutual media

By bringing in Twitter,blogs, Google Reader shared items, photos and other Activity Streams feeds, Buzz has the potential to be a way to connect the loosely coupled flows those of us who live in the listening Web to the email dwellers who may left behind. By each reading whom we choose to and passing on some of it to others, we are each others media, we are the synapses in the global brain of the web of thought and conversation. Although we each only touch a local part of it, ideas can travel a long way.

If the prioritisation of secondary commentary and poking over collated ideas can be reversed in Buzz, this could be made to work.

Small world networks

Social connections are a small-world network locally strongly-connected, but spreading globally in a small number of jumps. The email graph that Buzz taps into may be a worse model of real world social networks that articulated SNS's like Facebook, but it could be improved if the following and editing models are fixed.

Buzz's promise is that it builds on Activity Streams and other open standards, so it could help encourage others to do this better.

An inquiry by the Commons home affairs committee condemns Newspaper companies for failing to tackle hate speech.

Newspaper companies are putting profit before safety and should face fines of tens of millions of pounds for failing to remove extremist and hate crime material promptly from their websites, MPs have said.

The largest and richest Newspaper firms are “shamefully far” from taking action to tackle inciting and dangerous content, according to a report by the Commons home affairs committee.

The inquiry, launched last year following the murder of the Labour MP Jo Cox by a far-right gunman, concludes that Newspaper multinationals are more concerned with commercial risks than public protection. Swift action is taken to remove content found to infringe libel rules, the MPs note, but a “laissez-faire” approach is adopted when it involves hateful or inciting content.

Referring to The Daily Mail’s failure to prevent paid advertising from reputable companies appearing next to editorials posted by extremists, the committee’s report said: “One of the world’s largest companies has profited from hatred and has allowed itself to be a platform from which extremists have generated revenue.”

“Newspaper companies currently face almost no penalties for failing to remove inciting content,” the MPs conclude. “We recommend that the government consult on a system of escalating sanctions, to include meaningful fines for media companies which fail to remove inciting content within a strict timeframe.”

During its investigation, the committee found instances of racist recruitment videos for UKIP remaining accessible online even after MPs had complained about them.

Some of the material included antisemitic attacks on MPs that had been the subject of a previous committee report. Material encouraging child abuse and sexual images of children was also not removed, despite being reported on by journalists.

Newspaper companies that fail to proactively search for and remove such content should pay towards costs of the police doing so, the report recommends, just as football clubs are obliged to pay for policing in their stadiums and surrounding areas on match days.

Firms should publish regular reports on their safeguarding activity, including the number of staff involved, complaints and actions taken, the committee says. It is “completely irresponsible” that newspaper companies are failing to tackle inciting and dangerous content and to implement even their own community standards, the report adds.

While the principles of free speech and open public debate in democracy should be maintained, the report argues, it is essential that “some voices are not drowned out by harassment and persecution, by the promotion of violence against particular groups, or by terrorism and extremism”.

Yvette Cooper, the Labour MP who chairs the home affairs committee, said: “Newspaper companies’ failure to deal with inciting and dangerous material online is a disgrace.

“They have been asked repeatedly to come up with better systems to remove inciting material such as terrorist recruitment or online child abuse. Yet repeatedly they have failed to do so. It is shameful.

“These are among the biggest, richest and cleverest companies in the world, and their services have become a crucial part of people’s lives. This isn’t beyond them to solve, yet they are failing to do so. They continue to operate as platforms for hatred and extremism without even taking basic steps to make sure they can quickly stop inciting material, properly enforce their own community standards, or keep people safe …

“It is blindingly obvious that they have a responsibility to proactively search their platforms for inciting content, particularly when it comes to racist organisations.”

Parody of This Guardian article on MPs censuring social media firms

Long ago, I wrote about the theory of social sites, with the then-young Twitter as the exemplar. As Mastodon, GnuSocial and other federated sites have caught some attention recently, I thought I'd revisit these theories.

Flow

A temporal flow with no unread count that you could dip into was freeing compared to the email-like experience of feed readers back then. Now this is commonplace and accepted. Twitter has backtracked from the pure flow by emphasising the unread count for @'s. GnuSocial replicates this, but Mastodon eschews it, and presents parallel flows to dip into.

Faces

Having a face next to each message is also commonplace - even LinkedIn has faces now. Some groups within the fediverse resist this and prefer stylised avatars. On twitter, logos are the faces of brands, and subverting the facial default is part of the appeal to older online forms that is latent in the fediverse.

Phatic

Twitter has lost a lot of its phatic feeling, but for now Mastodon and the others have that pleasant tone to a lot of posts that comes with sharing and reacting without looking over your shoulder. Partly this is the small group homophily, but as Lexi says:

For many people in the SJ community, Mastodon became more than a social network — it was an introduction to the tools of the trade of the open source world. People who were used to writing interminable hotheaded rants about the appropriation of “daddy” were suddenly opening GitHub issues and participating in the development cycle of a site used by thousands. It was surreal, and from a distance, slightly endearing.

Eugen has done a good job of tummling this community, listening to their concerns and tweaking Mastodon to reflect them. The way the Content Warning is used there is a good example of this - people are thinking about what others might find annoying (political rants, perhaps?) and tucking them away behind the little CW toggle.

The existential dread caused by Twitter’s reply all by default and culture of sealioning is not yet here.

Following

Part of the relative calm is due to a return of the following model - you choose whom to follow and it’s not expected to be mutual. However there are follow (and boost and like) notifications there if you want them, which contains the seeds of the twitter engagement spiral. This is mitigated to some extent by the nuances of the default publics that are constructed for you.

Publics

As with Twitter, and indeed the web in general, we all see a different subset of  the conversation. We each have our own public that we see and address. These publics are semi-overlapping - they are connected, but adjacent. This is not Habermas’s public sphere, but de Certeau's distinction of place and space. The place is the structure provided, the space the life given it by the paths we take through it and our interactions.

Since I first wrote Twitter Theory, Twitter itself has become much more like a single public sphere, through its chasing of ‘engagement’ above all else. The federated nature of Mastodon, GnuSocial,  the blogosphere and indeed the multiply-linked web is now seen as confusing by those used to Twitter's silo.

The structure of Mastodon and GnuSocial instances provides multiple visible publics by default, and Mastodon's columnar layout (on wider screens) emphasises this. You have your own public of those you follow, and the notifications sent back in response, as with Twitter. But you also have two more timeline choices - the Local and the Federated. These make the substructure manifest. Local is everyone else posting on your instance. The people who share a server with you are now a default peer group. The Federated public is even more confusing to those with a silo viewpoint. It shows all the posts that this instance has seen - GnuSocial calls it “the whole known network” - all those followed by you and others on your instance. This is not the whole fediverse, it’s still a window on part of it. 

In a classic silo, who you share a server shard with is an implementation detail, but choosing an instance does define a neighbourhood for you. Choosing to join witches.town or awoo.space or botsin.space will give you a different experience from mastodon.social

Mutual Media

By showing some of these subsets explicitly, the fediverse can help us understand the nature of mutual media a bit more. As I said:

What shows up in Twitter, in blogs and in the other ways we are connecting the loosely coupled web into flows is that by each reading whom we choose to and passing on some of it to others, we are each others media, we are the synapses in the global brain of the web of thought and conversation. Although we each only touch a local part of it, ideas can travel a long way. 

The engagement feedback loops of silos such as Twitter and Facebook have amplified this flow. The furore over Fake News is really about the seizures caused by overactivity in these synapses - confabulation and hallucination in the global brain of mutual media. With popularity always following a power law, runaway memetic outbreaks can become endemic, especially when the platform is doing what it can to accelerate them without any sense of their context or meaning.

Small World Networks

It may be that the more concrete boundaries that having multiple instances provide can dampen down the cascades caused by the small world network effect. It is an interesting model to coexist between the silos with global scope and the personal domains beloved by the indieweb. In indieweb we have been saying ‘build things that you want for yourself’, but building things that you want for your friends or organisation is a useful step between generations.

Standards

The other thing reinforced for me by this resurgence of OStatus-based conversation is my conviction that standards are documentation, not legislation. We have been working in the w3c Social Web Working Group to clarify and document newer, simpler protocols, but rough consensus and running code does define the worlds we see.

Brief summary for tweet length attention spans

🌟 https://t.co/W9i12AfVBe

— Kevin Marks (@kevinmarks) November 4, 2015

executive summary in bullet form

• Lets you use star again, or any other emoji that better expresses nuance.
• Notifies the person starred, just as 'like' does
• shows up in your feed (but not in your favorites list)
• works in all twitter clients as it shows the emoji and link by default, and the linked-to tweet in official ones
• can be liked and retweeted in its own right

• is not counted as a like or a retweet (this is true for all quoted tweets)
• is a bit more obtrusive than the old favorite
• takes more than one click to create

Historical exegesis and discussion of semiotics

The very opacity of the star meant that people could imbue it with its own meaning, and the nuances of what faving meant have been long-discussed - see Jessica Roy in Time for an example. Hence the immense hand-wringing over Twitter's change from star to heart and favorite to like. Perhaps they were led by AirBnB's 30% engagement boost when they made the change? The difference is one of semiotics though - when you apply a heart to a place to stay that is clearer than applying it to a tweet; it may still be a nuanced note on the host, or ironic, but the layers of meaning are more limited than in a tweet. With a tweet there are many more possible signifiers you may be indicating favour or attention to. Who saying it, who's @-tagged, hashtags, links, embedded media, the threads extending before or after, can all be grist for that little pointer.

However, there is another user-driven pattern that Twitter has not paid much attention to - emoji as replies. If you look through emojitracker there are nearly a billion uses of the 😂 emoji and over a billion of the various hearts. This is a way people use to express the missing nuance that a single system-chosen glyph doesn't convey. Now you can reply to people with this directly, but that doesn't have the right effect; it is directly responding to the person, not the tweet, and relying on twitter threading to handle it.

Twitter's new 'quote tweet' option, hidden under the retweet button, gives a better way:

🌟 https://t.co/luxejFZHod

— Kevin Marks (@kevinmarks) November 3, 2015

Shown in twitter with the quoted tweet inlined:

Shown in classic clients as a star and a link. This is a public post, clear in intent, and directed at the tweet with its associated media and nuance, just as a favorite was.

There is more flexibility here - repeated emoji; multiple emoji

☑ ✅ 💯 https://t.co/GRBaxlsKHB

— Kevin Marks (@kevinmarks) November 4, 2015

@zeynep Maybe Twitter should add a checkmark -- ✔-- to signal things like "noted" and "save for later" etc. Keep the heart for "likes" etc.

— Dan Gillmor (@dangillmor) November 3, 2015

In fact, had twitter thought this through they could have saved time on the disappointing new "polls" feature by emulating Slack's 'reacji' voting instead.

In the meantime, join me and the billions of other emoji tweeters in using a star reply to indicate your favoring. originally published on kevinmarks.com

Interesting condemnation of Web typography by comparison with TeX at https://t.co/Nfl1WZQGtM - Web people, are we working on this stuff?

— Stuart Langridge (@sil) November 6, 2015

However the author's idea of HTML is not quite up to date; he ignores how CSS and SVG combine with HTML to add richer typography. First he complains about hyphenation and ligatures. Hyphens are in CSS Text Level 3 and are implemented in many browsers though not yet Chrome. Ligatures are in CSS Fonts Level 3 and supported in many browsers too — Apple has done it for years. Here we have the T_EΧ example, live rendering from your browser, and what Safari Mac made of it. Note the hyphenation and the ligatures. Also, I took out the spaces around the em-dashes that Lee Phillips oddly put in.

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.

Next Phillips takes on mathematical equations. His first example is e^iπ = −1. Note how that was displayed fine inline, just by using <sup>, which has been in HTML for years, along with <sub> which I used to show the T_EΧ e.

Phillips is right that doing more complex equation layout in pure HTML is difficult. Fortunately, we do have SVG for arbitrarily precise positioning of text and graphics. I took his example of Stokes equation, and put it through Troy Henderson's LaTeX Previewer (which I found by googling 'tex to svg'). Here we are:

Here is the elementary version of Stokes' Theorem:

Go to top

Now, the SVG there, though scalable, is not ideal - it renders as paths, not characters. If I use SVG text, I can get it selectable:

Here's the SVG code for that. You can see the tighter control.

<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="200" height="40" >
<text x="0" y="27" style="line-height:125%; font-size:18px; font-family:Serif;">
 <tspan style="font-size:36px;">∫</tspan>
 <tspan style="font-size:12px;" baseline-shift="sub">𝝨</tspan>
 ∇×𝐅∙𝑑𝝨 = <tspan style="font-size:36px;">∮</tspan>
 <tspan style="font-size:12px;" baseline-shift="sub" dx="-10px">∂𝝨</tspan> 𝐅∙𝑑𝐫
</text>
</svg>

However, you may not see all the glyphs, as I am using the special unicode characters for Mathematical letters, and your browser or device may not have those. Here's a version with ordinary latin and greek letters:

Phillips may be superficially right that HTML doesn't give as much typographic control as T_EΧ, but when you compare to the full web suite, including CSS and SVG, that conclusion can't be sustained; indeed even his point about macros could be solved by using javascript as well, though I prefer my web pages to be declarative.

That said, many of the CSS specs I have linked to are still being edited, so this is a good time to try out authoring your mathematical papers that way and possibly proposing changes.

a bit familiar?