Programmer Q&A site Stack Overflow has attracted legions of volunteer moderators (including privileged users possessing various editing capacities) with a “gamified” reputation system, but the quality of this moderation is increasingly coming under attack. A thread on Stack Overflow itself asked in April 2014, Why is Stack Overflow so negative of late? I’ve been using … Continue reading “Stack Overflow: Quality by Quantity”
Category: Media
Commercial and social media
Published Opinion Fractures
Le journalisme est un enfer, un abîme d’iniquités, de mensonges, de trahisons, que l’on ne peut traverser et d’où l’on ne peut sortir pur, que protégé comme Dante par le divin laurier de Virgile.– Honoré de Balzac, Illusions perdues (1843) Not only is journalism hell, it hardly pays anymore either. NiemanLab’s Ken Doctor recently published … Continue reading “Published Opinion Fractures”
Of Manuals & Magazines
Remember the massive printed multi-volume documentation sets for C++ compilers in the good old days? They are long gone, and Andrew Binstock bemoans the general decline of manuals for developer tools. After an abortive attempt to move traditional comprehensive manuals from print to digital formats, documentation has generally shrunk to brief online references – if … Continue reading “Of Manuals & Magazines”
Return of Patronage
Who will pay for intellectual works that are easily copied over the Internet, and why? I think the strongest component will be voluntary payment, a.k.a. patronage, and it’s already much more common than generally admitted. The core distinction is the following: People will pay after “consuming” (listening, reading, watching, playing) a work if they decide … Continue reading “Return of Patronage”
Robot Writer News
Computers still struggle to master the Turing test, but that doesn’t matter for low demands on writing quality. In today’s sampling of publishing news we learn that this includes social networks, professional journalism, and scientific conference proceedings. The Scientific Bot In February, science publishers Springer and IEEE were forced to retract over 120 papers from … Continue reading “Robot Writer News”
Twitter, Land of the Bots
A year ago, Barracuda Labs analyzed over 70,000 fake Twitter accounts and found that fake followers are cheap (only $18 per 1000) and plentiful (49k per average buyer). A more recent study by Andrea Stroppa and Carlo De Micheli examined the eight most popular seller services. They estimate there are 20 million fake followers in … Continue reading “Twitter, Land of the Bots”
Reality Check for Digital Artists
Not long after pop music’s transition from physical recordings to downloads, the latter are giving way to streaming services such as Pandora and Spotify. Consumers love the low monthly fee of $10 or less, but artists only receive about half a cent per play. By comparison, the 7-10 cents they got on a $0.99 iTunes … Continue reading “Reality Check for Digital Artists”
Google Reader Fallout Hits Keep
People won’t shut up about Google’s termination of its essential Reader service. Ed Bott’s Embrace, extend, extinguish documents Google’s successful promotion of Reader as a universal RSS back-end, eventually forcing BlogLines to shut down and NewsGator to abandon its consumer business. The promotion continued until those two significant competitors were defeated, in September 2010. Just … Continue reading “Google Reader Fallout Hits Keep”
Google Reader Shuts Down
First, let’s look at the bright side. Google’s widely covered announcement to shut down Google Reader by the end of June will raise awareness of two important facts that the Internet-using public has been happy to ignore. The first is that “free” is a bad business model, as noted for example in David Crotty’s Perils … Continue reading “Google Reader Shuts Down”
App.net Stagnates
Hopeful Twitter competitor App.net attracted a lot of attention last summer, as its initial growth spurt coincided with Twitter’s increasing hostility towards third parties. Could the service grow into a viable alternative to the big advertising-driven networks? I compiled a few snapshots of approximate user counts in two-month intervals. Month Users Growth Source 08/2012 7,600 … Continue reading “App.net Stagnates”