Tag: Internet

Podcasting has been a growth area for Slate, and the site’s collection of shows now grab around 2 million downloads a month, according to Andy Bowers, Slate’s executive producer of podcasts. By going daily, the site wants to grow that audience further and continue to capitalize on a growing source of advertising for Slate.

“Slate loves podcasts,” Bowers said. “They do really well for us, and everyone wants to be involved. We want to figure out how to smartly grow without overextending ourselves, but we’re going to keep growing.”

PLAYBOY: Is it possible you set a lower value on privacy than most people do?

DENTON: I don’t think people give a fuck, actually. There was a moment when I thought some sex pictures of me were about to land. Someone claimed to have some and to be marketing them. I even thought I knew where they’d come from—I’d lost a phone. But it turned out to be a hoax.

PLAYBOY: And you weren’t freaked out?

DENTON: It would have been mortifying, but every infringement of privacy is sort of liberating. Afterward, you have less to lose; you’re a freer person. Shouldn’t we all want to own our own story?

I found two very talented editors who worked from morning Eastern time to late afternoon Pacific time. Every story went through them before being published. They were fantastic.

They also slowed the publishing process to a screeching near-halt. And, even more importantly: No. One. Cared.

Hiring them was part of a larger, and ultimately failed, experiment to bring magazine-style editing and quality control to tech blogging. We would write fewer, better stories. Our copy would gleam. Readers would swoon.

It was a train wreck. Traffic plummeted. By half. Literally, month-to-month traffic cut in half. As we tried to right the sinking ship the first thing I did was fire the copyeditors. During the eight-or-so months they worked for us no one had ever commented on our clean copy. No one told us they came to our site because we had fewer typos than TechCruch. I saw the difference. It’s not that readers didn’t, they just didn’t care.

The research, conducted by Erin Buckels of the University of Manitoba and two colleagues, sought to directly investigate whether people who engage in trolling are characterized by personality traits that fall in the so-called Dark Tetrad: Machiavellianism (willingness to manipulate and deceive others), narcissism (egotism and self-obsession), psychopathy (the lack of remorse and empathy), and sadism (pleasure in the suffering of others).

It is hard to underplay the results: The study found correlations, sometimes quite significant, between these traits and trolling behavior. What’s more, it also found a relationship between all Dark Tetrad traits (except for narcissism) and the overall time that an individual spent, per day, commenting on the Internet.

Today, Facebook announced a custom gender option with additional privacy settings for transgender people. The new feature, which GLAAD helped develop, enables users to select a custom gender option, indicate preferred pronouns and adjust privacy settings for the custom gender field. It will be available to those who use Facebook in U.S. English.

My case is being referred to a hearing. I am being taken to an immigration detention centre. Just been read rights. In washroom crying.