dammIT

A rantbox by Michiel Scholten

#social Articles


Reading challenge: a start

I have a problem. I have too many hobbies. Thankfully, that's actually a pretty good problem to have, and it is not even the actual issue. The matter at hand is the limited time in a typical day. This is nothing new, but it provides certain... challenges when wanting to …
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Twenty years of blogging

Twenty years ago - not long after the turn of the century - I was tinkering with some PHP code to replace a static HTML page I had been experimenting with. It was becoming my private website, in the classic sense of the word: where I put stuff I am interested in …
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Tiktok's enshittification

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a …
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Why Everyone Needs a Blog

The easiest way to see how much you need a blog is to do this thought exercise. Imagine going back in time to a 21-year-old in 1952 and asking them what their opinions are, and where you could find a book of those opinions. Here’s what they would say …
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How Facebook got addicted to spreading misinformation

When I described the Responsible AI team’s work to other experts on AI ethics and human rights, they noted the incongruity between the problems it was tackling and those, like misinformation, for which Facebook is most notorious. “This seems to be so oddly removed from Facebook as a product …
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