Friday Five: Apr 15, 2016
1. The Secret Rules of the Internet
The Verge goes deep into the gross/dark/violent/racist underbelly of the internet and the history of moderation. Tracing it’s roots to a small team at a young startup called YouTube, to the outsourced moderation farms who look at gross content so we don’t have to.
2. A Glitch Made This Farm The Center of the Internet in the USA
Ok, what’s the big deal, right? So what if you mask your IP (think scammers, hackers, blackmailers) so it can’t be traced to a local source, but generally just comes up saying United States. Well, when it does, it points to GPS coordinates in Kansas. But there isn’t anything in the northern middle part of Kansas (because it’s Kansas) so it then centers in on the nearest internet connection, which just so happens to be this poor old lady’s farm.
3. Facebook Live: Now You Can Never Leave
Facebook continues on their warpath towards total internet domination. Okay, a little hyperbolic, but still, Facebook is quite transparent in their efforts to make sure you never have to go to any other website (or property they don’t own) to get your internet fix. See also: Why did Facebook pay Buzzfeed?
4. The Minecraft Generation
A weirdly long article on how Minecraft, which when it started was mostly programmers/engineers/older male gamers, got adopted by kids. The game is unforgiving, has no tutorial, and runs contradictory towards the general attitude towards the “future of gaming” (it’s blocky and pixelated, not HD or VR), but is now the 3rd best selling game of all time. In a time when a lot of political leaders are yelling from the rooftops that we need to teach coding, Minecraft is already planting that seed.
