Subject
10 entries
Social Media
Bookmarks
Twitter is Going Great!
A running catalog of Twitter's chaos under Elon Musk's ownership, modeled after 'Web3 is Going Just Great.' Tracks layoffs, advertiser departures, policy reversals, and service incidents with a sardonic timestamp format.
An Empirical Investigation of Personalization Factors on TikTok
First empirical audit of TikTok's recommendation algorithm using sock-puppet methodology, testing how language, location, follows, likes, and watch duration shape content recommendations. Follow-behavior is the dominant personalization signal, and all tested factors contribute to filter bubble formation.
TikTok and the Sorting Hat
Eugene Wei's landmark essay arguing TikTok's algorithm is the product — not the content or creators — and that it functions as a 'sorting hat' that matches users to their taste tribes faster than any previous social network. Required reading for anyone thinking about content recommendation systems.
What a Deep Neural Network Thinks About Your Selfie
Andrej Karpathy trained a VGGNet on 2 million Instagram selfies to learn what makes a selfie 'good' — using likes-per-follower as the quality signal. Beyond the entertainment value, it's a sharp demonstration of how supervised learning can proxy for human aesthetic judgment at scale.
Twitter Turns Geotagged Tweets Into Art
The Verge on Twitter's visualization of geotagged tweet density as art — heat maps of global and city-scale tweet volume rendered as luminous data paintings. An early high-profile example of data visualization as an aesthetic object, not just an analytical tool.
Many Downloadable Twitter Archives Available for Researchers
DataScholars on downloadable Twitter archives available for academic researchers — a 2013 directory of public Twitter datasets for NLP, social network analysis, and computational social science. A snapshot of open Twitter data before the API became restrictive.
Walmart Makes Big Data Part of Its DNA
Walmart's 2013 integration of big data and social media analytics into retail operations — one of the first major brick-and-mortar retailers to make data infrastructure a competitive differentiator rather than just a reporting layer.
Twitter's Descent into the Extractive — DHH / 37signals
DHH's 2012 essay on Twitter's shift from open ecosystem to extractive platform — killing third-party clients, tightening API access, and prioritizing ad revenue over developer relationships. A clear-eyed early diagnosis of what became a pattern across social platforms.
Twitter Is Pivoting — Dalton Caldwell
Dalton Caldwell's 2012 analysis of Twitter's strategic pivot from developer platform to media company — written by the founder of App.net, which he built specifically as a paid, developer-friendly Twitter alternative after Twitter made its direction clear.
You Earn Facebook an Average of $1.21 Per Quarter
TechCrunch's 2012 analysis showing Facebook earned $1.21 per user per quarter — a baseline figure that reframed the product/user relationship. Published just before Facebook's IPO, it crystallized the 'you are the product' critique.