A Minority of Users Account for Majority of Online Comments

In July, NPR.org recorded nearly 33 million unique users, and 491,000 comments. But those comments came from just 19,400 commenters, Montgomery said. That's 0.06 percent of users who are commenting, a number that has stayed steady through 2016. When NPR analyzed the number of people who left at least one comment in both June and July, the numbers showed an even more interesting pattern: Just 4,300 users posted about 145 comments apiece, or 67 percent of all NPR.org comments for the two month...

 How the Internet's Consensus of Information Undermines Au...

Heretofore, the technological advance that most altered the course of modern history was the invention of the printing press in the 15th century, which allowed the search for empirical knowledge to supplant liturgical doctrine, and the Age of Reason to gradually supersede the Age of Religion. Individual insight and scientific knowledge replaced faith as the principal criterion of human consciousness. Information was stored and systematized in expanding libraries. The Age of Reason originated ...

 How Literacy Impacts Reading and Gaming

For Ellie, that charade contributed to her waning interest in computer games and simulations fi-om its highpoint in middle childhood. Reasonably versed in computer technologies and a fan of emerging online forums such as Tumblr, she agreed to talk about her play in virtual worlds not as an enthusiast, but as something of a philistine. She enjoyed Second Life—but only up to a point. "The imaginative part stopped for me when I stopped designing my avatar," she told me. Further opportunities...

 Outsourcing our Thinking to Algorithms and Those Who Engi...

...even as an algorithm mindlessly implements its procedures – and even as it learns to see new patterns in the data – it reflects the minds of its creators, the motives of its trainers. Amazon and Netflix use algorithms to make recommendations about books and films. (One-third of purchases on Amazon come from these recommendations.) These algorithms seek to understand our tastes, and the tastes of like-minded consumers of culture. Yet the algorithms make fundamentally different recommend...

 The Sense of Wonder is More Viral Than Anger

In many cases, these flare-ups triggered a chain reaction of anger, with User A influencing Users B and C, and outward in a widening circle of hostility, until it seemed all of Sina Weibo was burning. The users, according to the study’s authors, passed along these messages not only to “express their anger” but to instill a similar sense of outrage among other members of their online community on Sina Weibo—one of the only venues where the Chinese can circumvent government restrictions...

 Stanford d.school Design Thinking Process

Step 1: Empathy = Really get to know your user Use human-centered design process, which puts the user squarely at the center of the process. When designing, you start with identifying who you want to design for (your user) and really get to know them. 3 ways to get to know our user: Observation (what we observe them doing, in the environment we want to design for as well as in other similar and different environments, so we really get to know how they live and work, what they value, etc., ...

 MySpace Destroyed History

MySpace, in a rush to relaunch and rebrand itself, made inaccessible the blogs of all of its users. There could be no movement to preserve this record of the past, as it happened so suddenly. Millions of contributions, critical records of events of a decade or so ago, lost in the blink of an eye. It’s similar to the destruction of something like Penn station: a website that was run by user-generated content, that was a central hub of Internet traffic, and that meant something to multiple mi...

 Reason: A Fictional Software

Reason allows users to specify in advance the decision they want it to reach, and only then to input all the facts. The program's task was to construct a plausible series of logical-sounding steps to connect the premises with the conclusion. The only copy was sold to the US Government for an undisclosed fee.

 Consumers of Alternative News are More Likely to Fall for...

Most of the online activism Facebook pages contain claims that mainstream media is manipulated by higher entities (and thus the information is be not neutral or reliable). Such an antagonism makes any kind of persuasion process, even if based on more solid information, very dicult. As a response to partisan debates, the emergent groups of trolls began to provide parodistic imitations of a wide range of online partisan topics. Despite the evident parodistic (and sometimes paradoxical) contents...

 Programmers Get Better with Age

This kind of data is hard to come by, but thanks to almighty Stackoverflow ands their wise decision (thanks Joel), to make this data publicly available we can mine this data to our collective benefit. With a simple bash script to download the data, a small Java program to extract the stats and Google Docs to make the graphs, I was able to produce some interesting stats. I pulled in data of about 70.000 developers whose Stackoverflow reputation is over 100. On average 53% of them have their ...