#44: Algorithms don't show us anything new

💩 Cool shit

Xbox Museum - A cool virtual walk through the history of Xbox, including things like Halo and the Red Ring of Death. Log in and see your personal achievements too.

Skittish - Skittish is a new app reimagining virtual meetings. This is NOT a promotion, but I was impressed by a web app having a free, interactive demo.

The Fry Universe 🍟 - 3D models of different types of fries to determine the most superior version.

Historic Borders - See how state borders have changed throughout human history with an atlas timeline.

Museum of the World - A different, albeit equally fascinating, timeline of world history. This one visualizes how different historical moments are connected across continents.

A Musical Planet - A fun interactive world music quiz (using your Spotify account). Hear a song and guess which country it is from.

Random Gifts - If you’re struggling with picking gifts this site has some really random suggestions.

💎 Word gems

Yesterday Once More: Algorithms are changing how we experience nostalgia (Real Life Mag / Grafton Tanner)

A look at how algorithms have changed our relationship with new. By building taste profiles, algorithmic recommendations only serve up similar things and nothing new, explaining why music was becoming increasingly the same.

Before there were Echo Nest parameters, the 20th century music industry relied on other kinds of data to try to make hits. So-called “merchants of cool” hit the streets to hunt for the next big trend, conducting studies on teenage desire that generated tons of data, which was then consulted to market the next hit sensation. This kind of data collection is now built into the apparatus for listening itself. Once a user has listened to enough music through Spotify to establish a taste profile (which can be reduced to data like songs themselves, in terms of the same variables), the recommendation systems simply get to work. The more you use Spotify, the more Spotify can affirm or try to predict your interests. (Are you ready for some more acousticness?)

How Facebook and Google fund global misinformation (Technology Review / Karen Haoarchive)

The takeaway: the business model of engagement algorithms incentivizes misinformation.

MIT Technology Review has found that the problem is now happening on a global scale. Thousands of clickbait operations have sprung up, primarily in countries where Facebook’s payouts provide a larger and steadier source of income than other forms of available work. Some are teams of people while others are individuals, abetted by cheap automated tools that help them create and distribute articles at mass scale. They’re no longer limited to publishing articles, either. They push out Live videos and run Instagram accounts, which they monetize directly or use to drive more traffic to their sites.

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