Monday, September 19, 2022

Human Meat Restaurant


Unpaid social media moderators perform labor worth $3.4 million a year on Reddit alone
Jun 2022, phys.org

"2.8% of Reddit's 2019 revenue"

"Putting a price tag on the labor that people—in this case, content moderators on Reddit—have subsidized is leverage those moderators could wield when asking platforms for better resources and tools to help them monitor more effectively," Li said.

People, Space and Algorithms (PSA) Research Group at Northwestern. The group's overall mission is to "identify and address societal problems that are created or exacerbated by advances in computer science."

Li said a key part of the PSA Group's work involves re-framing user contributions to sites like Google, Facebook, Twitter and Reddit as "work"—not passive participation in online space—because companies use data and time that users provide to generate profit: to train their algorithms, better target advertising, recruit new users and ultimately earn more revenue.

This reframing led them to coin the term "data labor subsidy" when placing a dollar value on the contributions of tech platform users.

Not only do the users offer their data for free, but they also do the work of maintaining the platform for free; clever business model.

via People, Space and Algorithms Research Group at Northwestern: Hanlin Li, Brent Hecht, Stevie Chancellor, Measuring the Monetary Value of Online Volunteer Work. arXiv:2205.14528v1 [cs.HC], arxiv.org/abs/2205.14528

Also: Hanlin Li, Brent Hecht, Stevie Chancellor, All That's Happening behind the Scenes: Putting the Spotlight on Volunteer Moderator Labor in Reddit. arXiv:2205.14529v1 [cs.HC], arxiv.org/abs/2205.14529

Image credit: AI Art - Human Meat Restaurant, 2022
Prompt: human meat restaurant, horror, nightmare, cook, food, cooking. https://lexica.art/prompt/0a5b4f3f-f3e5-41b5-8942-d374325546e3


Human-like features in robot behavior: Response time variability can be perceived as human-like
Jul 2022, phys.org

Features of human behavior, namely response timing, can be translated into the robot in a way that humans cannot distinguish whether they are interacting with a person or a machine.

The human brain has sensitivity to extremely subtle behavior which manifests humanness," says Agnieszka Wykowska. "In our non-verbal Turing test, human participants had to judge whether they were interacting with a machine or a person, by considering only the timing of button presses during a joint action task."

The results showed that people interacting with the robot were not able to tell whether the robot was human-controlled or pre-programmed in the condition when the robot was in fact pre-programmed. This suggests that the robot passed this version of the non-verbal Turing test in this specific task.

via Italian Institute of Technology: F. Ciardo et al, Human-like behavioral variability blurs the distinction between a human and a machine in a nonverbal Turing test, Science Robotics (2022). DOI: 10.1126/scirobotics.abo1241.


How Facebook clickbait draws users into engaging with posts
Jul 2022, phys.org
  • The team collected 4,000 posts from seven consecutive days in late 2017 from ten U.S. and U.K. news outlets' Facebook pages, including "reputable" and "tabloid" sources. 
  • User engagement as measured by shares, comments and reactions
Results:
  • Unusual punctuation in the headline got 2.5 times more engagement.
  • Unusual punctuation in the text, however, got a decrease in engagement.
  • Questions in either the headline or the text did not get increased engagement.
  • Longer words in headlines got reduced engagement. 
  • The opposite was true for text.
  • Doubling the number of headline words led to 23.7% fewer comments, but no difference in reactions or shares.
  • The opposite for text, where all engagement increased with a doubling of the word count.
  • Common clickbait phrases in headlines — like "this will blow your mind" — were associated with a loss of around a quarter of engagement in comparison to those without such phrases.
  • In the sentiment analysis, negative wording in posts can increase comments
  • But for headlines, positive tone increases comments.
In other words, make sure your headlines have unusual punctuation and positive wording sentiment, and your text has longer words, more words, and negative wording sentiment.

And make sure your headlines DO NOT have questions, longer words, more words, or phrases "this will blow your mind", and that your text DOES NOT have unusual punctuation or questions.

via University of Duisburg-Essen: Click me…! The influence of clickbait on user engagement in social media and the role of digital nudging, PLoS ONE (2022). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0266743

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