It’s far from the worst thing, but the rise of influencer culture is certainly a lamentable part of today’s internet. This post, by a college student and artist who uses Instagram to promote her online store, details how the algorithms actually work to force influencers to maximize what platforms want from them.

They like it when you post a combination of normal posts, reels, IGTV, stories, shoppable posts, etc etc. You know those little events they do in stories like the “I Voted” sticker? participate in that school spirit kinda junk. The algorithm likes it when you use the in app camera and filters, geolocation tagging, messaging, story buttons, all that stuff. use app more. have many different thing to offer you :) sell your soul :)

The influencer game certainly works for some once they hit a certain threshold, but it’s also clearly a set of shifting goal posts for the vast majority of people. It’s clear that Instagram has optimized their discovery/recommendation algorithm for people who treat Instagram like a full time job — even if that’s only a fraction of a percent, that’s still hundreds of thousands if not millions of people!

Adam “Apeland” Koford — a brilliant, hilarious, and genuinely unique cartoonist — reminds us big tech doesn’t really love you. And Jeff Eaton on the lie that algorithms were ever helpful arbiters.

Taylor Lorenz, who writes about internet culture for The New York Times, is almost certainly the definitive source of further reporting from this world.

Mike Fannin, the president and editor of The Kansas City Star, in a letter from the editor about a six-part package on the paper reporting on its own history of racism:

Today we are telling the story of a powerful local business that has done wrong.

For 140 years, it has been one of the most influential forces in shaping Kansas City and the region. And yet for much of its early history — through sins of both commission and omission — it disenfranchised, ignored and scorned generations of Black Kansas Citians. It reinforced Jim Crow laws and redlining. Decade after early decade it robbed an entire community of opportunity, dignity, justice and recognition.

That business is The Kansas City Star.

That is one hell of a lede. Reporters and editors dug through their own archives, looking head on at their reporting, and comparing their coverage to the same stories in Black-owned papers. Obviously, an institution like The Star can’t change the past but owning up to it is crucial for making progress going forward. I hope more publications will do this kind of work.

In a similar vein, in 2018 The New York Times began publishing the obituaries of women who’d been forgotten in their Overlooked section.

A wonderful meditation on the “living, temporal spaces” of the web, by Laurel Schwulst:

My favorite aspect of websites is their duality: they’re both subject and object at once. In other words, a website creator becomes both author and architect simultaneously. There are endless possibilities as to what a website could be. What kind of room is a website? Or is a website more like a house? A boat? A cloud? A garden? A puddle? Whatever it is, there’s potential for a self-reflexive feedback loop: when you put energy into a website, in turn the website helps form your own identity.

Schwulst captures a lot of the modern web, the complexity, the imperfect metaphors we use for this liminal space, the tensions presented by tech platforms, the possibility for building new worlds.

Jeremy Keith considers the possibility of a website as a forever project.

Following up the recent release of their non-tracking analytics tool, Cloudflare Pages is a new hosting platform for building websites that doesn’t require having to fuss with all of the particulars of cloud hosting.

I use (and am quite happy with!) Netlify to host Flicker Fusion and dig the JAMstack approach. Once your site is in a git repo, deploying it is simple, and you get all of the built-in benefits of using git. I spent the last few months chipping away at a site redesign and when I was ready to deploy, it was a matter of merging the beta branch to main and pushing. And because everything is a static file that lives on a global CDN, I don’t have to worry about getting Fireballed.

Like I said, I’m very happy with Netlify and have no intention of moving over to Cloudflare but I’m happy to see more providers embracing the approach. Cloudflare is also integrating their serverless functions framework, which will make fully dynamic web apps possible. There’s never been a better time to build a website that doesn’t rely on the perverse incentives of the big platforms.

Ken laid the foundation for a lot of what we know as internet media today and then turned his back on it to self produce a magazine and a radio show in the desert.

Simon Willison is just the absolute best kind of nerd and Datasette is such a prime example of why: a rigorous set of tools that makes it easy — especially for data journalists but really anyone — to make sense of a bunch of un- (or barely) structuresd data.

This is a class of problem that needs better tools, to be honest; we’re all so awash in data these days and we really have no control over any of it. At best this leaves us feeling confused, at worst exploited.

Earlier this year, working on a personal project, I ended up with a big set of data about schools across a bunch of different states, scraped from state and county and even individual school district websites. This isn’t a Big Data class of problem, but it’s also unwieldy in a spreadsheet. The data was a gnarled, unstructured mess and Datasette handled it all brilliantly.

Datsette is also extensible through plugins and Willison has built a personal data tracking tool called Dogsheep on top of Datasette. The basic idea behind Dogsheep is it lets you export the data about you that gets warehoused by various tech companies, either to glean something useful about yourself or simply to have control over it.

Willison built a single, faceted search engine that works across all the various projects and docs and plugins. The details get fairly technical but there’s plenty about this kind of project that leaves me feeling pretty hopeful. All too often it’s easy to feel powerless in the face of how much control Big Tech exerts over our daily lives. It’s wonderful to be reminded this isn’t destiny.

This story is over a year old — which becomes obvious, as it’s about air travel in a time when such a thing seems utterly fantastic — but it’s popped up in my feeds a few times this week.

Beyond the nostalgia for travel and even flying right now, it’s a poignant piece about families and loss.

Mike Isaac and Kellen Browning, reporting on the — and I believe this is perhaps the most appropriate way to use this phrase — epic fail that is Cyberpunk 2077:

In July 2018, as anticipation for the game neared a crescendo across Twitter, one user tweeted at the official Cyberpunk 2077 account: “Will there be memes in the game?” The account responded: “Whole game is going to be a meme.”

The tweet was somewhat prescient — but not in the way developers had hoped.

Mike is one of the best tech reporters we’ve got, his beat has covered Uber (including writing the definitive book on the catastrophic failure of leadership that was Travis Kalanick’s tenure) and Facebook. When he sets his sights on you, you know you’ve royally screwed up.

Apparently, the computerized system they devised to determine who should get vaccinated first left out many of the people who are interacting with patients — and prioritized administrators who work from home. This could have happened anywhere, and almost certainly will again, but the fact that it’s at the university most associated with the rise of algorithmic-driven inequality is, as they say, not a good look.

Lenny Bernstein, Lateshia Beachum and Hannah Knowles writing at The Washington Post:

The “residents” — medical school graduates who staff the hospital for several years as they learn specialties such as emergency medicine, internal medicine and family medicine — were furious when it became clear that just seven of the more than 1,300 at the medical center were in the first round for vaccinations. Also affected were “fellows,” who work in the hospital as they train further in sub-specialties, nurses and other staff.

Residents across specialties had just been asked to volunteer for extra intensive care unit work in preparation for a surge in covid-19 patients.

An email to pediatrics residents and fellows obtained by The Washington Post said that “the Stanford vaccine algorithm failed to prioritize house staff,” as the early year doctors are known collectively.

This story really does have it all, when it comes to the abysmal state of American healthcare. First there’s the “failed algorithm” that was developed without consideration of the frontline workers in need of the vaccine most. These frontline workers, including resident physicians, aren’t considered full-time employees, so they fall into this gray zone of labor protection, despite being asked to volunteer to deal with hospitals being overwhelmed due to the ongoing failed government response.

The vaccine has only started becoming available and we’re already seeing how our failed healthcare system is completely unprepared. It’s going to get worse — the superrich are already figuring out how to game the system. This story has made headlines, eventually it will simply become normalized.