Tag: centralised

I saw it coming, changes to Mixcloud

Mixing live in the EMFCamp null sector

Today there was a email from Mixcloud.com

Nico here, CEO and co-founder of Mixcloud. Today we’re announcing upcoming changes to Mixcloud:
From December 1st we’re introducing a maximum allowance of 10 published shows for creators on the basic tier.

Why is this happening?

We believe DJs and producers should be rewarded for the skill and creativity that goes into their work. That’s why for over 10 years we’ve subsidized hosting costs and built tools that enable creators to grow and earn money.

We also believe artists should be paid when their music is played. That’s why every show uploaded to Mixcloud is scanned by our content ID system. This enables us to identify the tunes being played and pay royalties to the artists who made them.

Unlike other platforms, we’ve spent years securing comprehensive licensing deals with the major and independent labels to ensure this money is paid to the right artists. We have shouldered these costs in order to create a fair music ecosystem.

Until now we’ve kept our basic tier uncapped. However, as we’ve grown our royalty and hosting costs have risen and we are not profitable. To continue running and improving Mixcloud we need to become more sustainable as a business, and Pro memberships help us cover our costs.

How will you be affected?

On 1st December all of your shows will remain published and available to listeners. But, if you want to make space for a new show, you will need to manually move shows into drafts until you are within the allowance or upgrade to Pro for unlimited published shows.

Fair point but I’m not totally convinced, as it wasn’t that long ago when rewind and track listing became not possible. It was clear to me that I needed to do something ahead of this all, hence why I setup my own webmix garden. I agree it would be great to pay the creators of the music, and using webmotization considered a way to do this.

Maybe this is where I part ways with Mixcloud? Its a shame but like all the people leaving Twitter due to Elon Musk. its just not suitable for me anymore.

I would still like to try that distributed payment pointer system and also explore the notion of distributed charts using DHTs, removing the need for huge amounts of centralised storage.

Public Service Internet monthly newsletter (July 2021)

We live in incredible times with such possibilities that is clear. Although its easily dismissed seeing Amazon’s destroying unsold goods, ICO’s concerns over facial recognition and Tiktok sneakily changing there privacy policy.

To quote Buckminster Fuller “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

You are seeing aspects of this with ethical ratings for fashion brands, the introduction of the solar protocol and even Google has temporarily halted their privacy sandbox plans.

The future of the browser conference

Ian thinks: There is so much to take away from this community run conference, as I wrote in a blog. I’m sure you will find lots to take away too.

We know what you did last lock down

Ian thinks: The FT’s short black mirror like interrogation feels like drama but its all real and possible now with the cloud of always on IOT devices. Makes some seriously good points

Report those dark patterns

Ian thinks: The Electronic Frontier Foundation goes on the offensive asking you to report those dark patterns. Similar to what Mozilla and others have done too.

Vestager’s vision for the a digital Europe

Ian thinks: I highly recommend the Re:publica conference and seeing Margrethe Vestager again in her new role outlining her vision (with some tech hiccups) is good. I also recommend looking around the playlists to find other good talks including these audio essays and this talk about Silicon values.

Ian thinks: The ICO makes a big change to the EU cookie banner, interesting to hear the American tech view on this all.

When people can sit together

Ian thinks: Enabling physical public spaces with more thought and care for the community. You can’t help but smile and wish playful public spaces existed near you too.

Mozilla puts your data to use for a better society

Ian thinks: This is impressive, although not completely new there no better time to have a trusted company shepherding your data into good causes you choose.

Another internet outage, raises questions

Ian thinks: The outage of Fastly earlier this month has stoked fires about how centralised the internet is for lots of people. I personally didn’t notice much due to the decentralised services I use.

Social graph as a key to change?

Ian thinks: Every once in a while a start up makes some bold but well meaning claims. The notion of the social graph on a blockchain although not new is worth keeping an eye on to see where it goes.

Experience some fairly intelligent machine learning

Ian thinks: A.M. Darke’s piece makes all those silly harmless throw away decisions, very real by the end. There is also a Q&A hosted by the ODI well worth watching to understand more.

Find the archive here

Public Service Internet monthly newsletter (Mar 2021)

traveling with a passport and boarding pass

We live in incredible times with such possibilities that is clear. Although its easily dismissed, hearing Bill Maher rip through a bunch of websites and people looking for new ways to track users now 3rd party tracking is on its way out?

To quote Buckminster Fuller “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

You are seeing aspects of this with more nuanced privacy depth being discussed, participating in Mozilla’s #internethealth challenges moment and hearing Solana talk through the internet health report.

The background story of Tony Abbotts boarding pass

Ian thinks: We all heard the story about the former Australian minster who was hacked after posting his boarding pass on instagram but here is the incredible background story, told by the hacker.

Vaccine passports are not as simple as the media are suggesting

Ian thinks: Heather gives plain and clear reasons why vaccine passports are not the panacea its being made out to be. Its also great to hear Lillian Edwards framework mentioned (May 2020 newsletter) as a way forward.

Gamestop? Rethinking the whole rigged system

Ian thinks: Douglas Rushkoff’s monologue about gamestop needs a listen for a different view, but stay around for the interview with Yaël, previous head of political advertising at Facebook. She tells all and I like the approach of trying to fix it before criticising.

Lets talk about Sharenting

Ian thinks: Shareting is when parents share their kids photos and private information without their consent. Its become a real problem now the millennials are growing up with a digital footprint without knowing.

How Facebook joined the splinter-net while Google throw the open web under the bus?

Ian thinks: Hearing about the absolute mess over news in Australia, its easy to point fingers. But its important to look deeper at whats really happening for the sake of profits not people. I’m with Shoshana Zuboff and others, but I know many people get their news from these massive corps.

A big step for gigworkers, but lets be diligent of next steps

Ian thinks: The Uber case is great news but in a similar legal play to Facebook & Google with Australia, there might be more going on that most are reporting? We got to look a little deeper as monopoly is Uber’s end game.

Ian thinks: This is a devious way to force a take-down of a live stream or any recorded footage. Theres got to be a better way and I think its related to using alternative platforms or self hosting with syndication.

The centralisation of power is the problem

Ian thinks: I like this summary of so many of the problems with Facebook, but it misses the important point of centralisation. It also highlights Noam Cohen’s quote “Mark Zuckerberg is deluded by his own faith in Facebook’s ability to be a force for good in the world”

Public value and purpose into the future

Ian thinks: Mariana is on fire and this summary of work around the BBC puts value under a microscope. I love this line “Value is not just the income generated at the end of the innovation chain–– it is also the creative input at the upstream end, the vital investment in talent, content creation, digital innovation and R&D at the early stages”

Google fires another outspoken AI research, who will be next?

Ian thinks: Margaret Mitchell and Timnit Gebru show there is something going on with Google AI research. It doesn’t take a lot to guess what is actually going on behind close doors.

Find the archive here

Decentralisation an important step forward

Its easy to think decentralisation is a new fanged thing the savvy technorati talk about while drinking their double macha latte. But the importance of decentralised networks is made very clear in this VOX piece and the video.

Zuckerberg is so full of it?

Mark Zuckerberg points into space
Look this is where you will be if you use decentralised tech. Outside, cold and no one will care, believe me I have  money and power to make it so!

Mark Zuckerberg started posting his personal challenge/new years resolutions a while ago. He’s got a long way to go to catch up with myself and others, but regardless…

This year he said a bunch of things including this pile of nonsense.

This time, Zuckerberg talked about the importance of “centralization vs decentralization” in tech — in other words, who is benefitting from tech’s tremendous power.

“A lot of us got into technology because we believe it can be a decentralizing force that puts more power in people’s hands,” he wrote. “But today, many people have lost faith in that promise. With the rise of a small number of big tech companies — and governments using technology to watch their citizens — many people now believe technology only centralizes power rather than decentralizes it.”

Oh how observant you are Zuckerberg. Yawn!

OKCupid starts screwing around with messages

Stop Screwing with okcupid

I proposed a few times in the past that dating sites may not necessary showing your messages to certain people because of a number of reasons (maybe you are sending too many messages, maybe you are deemed no beautiful enough!)

Well OKcupid quietly announced this change over the holiday season.

Hi! We’ve made some exciting changes to how messaging on OkCupid works. You see, from member feedback we found that our messaging system needed some help: members were getting too many unwanted messages, which was distracting them from the messages they actually wanted to respond to. After all, the conversations that end up leading to something are between people who actually like each other, so we wanted to make it easy for you to focus on just those messages. So now, although you can still send a message to anyone, you’ll only see messages in your Conversations from people you’ve liked. People who have messaged you but whom you haven’t liked yet will be highlighted in DoubleTake (and everywhere else, too) — just visit their profile to see the message. And if you’ve already liked someone, their message will automatically show up in your Conversations. Easy! And now for the best part — after testing these changes for weeks, we’ve found that this new way of messaging increases matches by over 30%! So thanks to your feedback, we’ve been able to make some pretty exciting improvements in time for the new year.

It sounds like a reasonable change, but I do wonder how much further they will go with this? It wouldn’t be hard to not show messages because of x reasons.

If you think about it also, OKCupid is slowly pushing people towards the ways it prefers to connect with people. No longer can you browse, read peoples profiles and send a message hoping to connect that way. I understand why but once again where does it lead us?
Update

After a little discussion with the amazing Lydia about this. I do think it’s good that okcupid is listening to it’s audience, but we do agree they may only be doing this due to falling numbers to the likes of tinder (owned by the same company) and bumble (match group tried to buy recently).

The skeptical me (anything okcupid does right now I am very skeptical about) thinks there might be a better way to educate users about their poor inbox filling messages. But it’s clear from okcupids founders own book Dataclysm, the mass produced non-personal messages seem to get conversations started (much to my dismay of humanity when reading this). Its also clear men are the biggest culprit of sending these and although a 2nd inbox (similar to Facebook?) to sorted by liked unliked people is a good for women. Maybe okcupid could educate the men before the message is even sent?

We seen (we see everything!) you copied and pasted this same message over and over again (5x times in 24hours), we are not going to send it till you think of something more original or read the profile!

Okcupid is a safe place for ALL its users…

Now that would be bold, helpful and move the emphasis from the victim to the culprits.

You could even quota the sent messages which resets when there is a reply and reduces further on blocks? But this all needs to be transparent and educational otherwise the user will just setup another account out of spite or frustration?

I joined mastodon microbloging service, not the rock band!

mastodonI have always been a big fan of Jabber, Laconi.ca and Status.net. All are federated services which go well beyond the centralised and even decentralised ideas. But they all were second fiddle to the centralised services like Twitter mainly down to user experience.

So I’m wondering if Mastondon will be any different? Of course theres only one way to find out, and thats to try it out.

So I am… but what is it?

Mastodon is a fast-growing Twitter-like social network that seeks to re-create the service’s best parts while eliminating its whale-sized problems. The distributed, open-source platform offers better tools for privacy and fighting harassment than Twitter does, but it also comes with a learning curve. Mastodon’s federated nature means there’s no single website to use, and learning how to wade through its timeline of tweets (which it calls toots) takes some time to adjust to.

But for anyone who misses “the old Twitter” — the days of purely chronological timelines, no ads, and an inescapable flood of harassment — Mastodon can feel like a haven

Old twitter was great I’ll be honest but its not that I long for the old days of twitter. Its just I can feel the their business model imposed from their backers/investors infringing on why I originally used twitter. There is a blog drafted which is all about how business models imposed by VC/backers/etc ruins services/products. For example Pebble, Evernote, Twitter, etc.

So I’m cubicgarden on mastodon.cloud, which should federate across to other Mastondon server instances. Feel free to say hi…

Redecentralize this…

Nurri-network

Adewale once said  (I wouldn’t be surprised if he gives me a kick next time he sees me, but I think this quote sums up so much. And its only the start of the smart things he thinks and talks about)

People’s enthusiasm for federated decentralised $WHATEVER seems inversely proportional to the practicality of their plan for achieving it

However a share I recently was tagged on to revealed Jon Udells post and a giant list of projects trying to solve the problem decentralised social networking.

Going under the notion of the Alternative Internet, there are some quite interesting projects including…

Ampify is an open source, decentralised, social platform. It is intended as a successor to the Open Web and as a replacement for closed platforms like iOS and Facebook by providing a web application framework to create social apps on top of a secure, decentralised core.

ClearSkies is a peer-to-peer file sync program. It is inspired by BitTorrent Sync, but has an open and fully-documented protocol. ClearSkies is a sync program similar to DropBox, The protocol is layered in such a way that other applications can take advantage of it for purposes other than file sync.

Movim is a decentralized open source social network based on XMPP.

Peerm Anonymous P2P inside browsers, no installation, encrypted and secure. The browsers are talking the Tor protocol extended to P2P and are connecting to the nodes using WebSockets, multi-sources and streaming are supported.

Trovebox community edition. Wrote about this many times but didn’t know there was a community edition too.

Twister is a secure and fully-decentralized P2P microblogging platform based on concepts and code from Bitcoin and Libtorrent (as described in this whitepaper).

pump.io Self described as “a stream server that does most of what people really want from a social network”. It’s a social stream with support for federated comunication.

trsst looks and feels like twitter but encrypted and anonymized and decentralized and only you hold the keys.

Plenty of cool projects but very little traction unfortunately, however theres quite a few which can be used to connect to the centralised networks. Looking at the list, I’m left wondering if Diaspora*, Wave and  Tent has gone through the trough of disillusion and might be coming out the other end? A while ago I thought WordPress was going to make moves in this area of decentralised social networking.