Whether you just discovered Glitch or you're a long-time user, here's a rundown of five features everyone should have on their radar. We try to keep things simple and fun, but there's a lot of power under the 'hood that enables all kinds of creators, from beginners to experienced professionals.

You might have already discovered Rewind, Glitch’s version control system, but did you know that a Glitch project is also its own Git repo?

And it gets better - in addition to giving you a commit system, you can import/export to Github. Import a project from Github for a great starter project experience. Then export your Glitch project to Github if you need an external repository for your code.

Need console access? We’ve got you covered.

Fire up your Glitch project in the editor. Click the “Tools” button located on the left side of the editor to reveal the Tools menu. Then, click “Terminal.” Presto - a fully functional console ready for your commands.

You’ve probably discovered the Glitch editor’s built-in “Format This File.” We use the fabulous Prettier library for this, and have the default options applied. 

Want to do even more? Use a .prettierrc JSON configuration file in your project to set your own preferences.

Hosting a project with API tokens, passwords, or other sensitive information? You can (and should!) store private data securely inside the .env file. It’s a secure environment config section of your project, and only invited collaborators are able to see the contents.

If you need help using Glitch or want to see a new feature added, head to the support forum where you'll find some of the friendliest, most creative coders on the web. And after you've made something awesome, share it with us via email or tag on on Twitter @glitch. 

Get the Most out of Glitch with These Four Pro Tips

With all of the physical dance clubs closed, people are looking to emerging digital venues for entertainment and community. One of those is Club Quarantine, a queer online rave that hosts shows on Zoom every night of the week. 

On April 27th, live coder Lil Data performed a set at Club Quarantine while creative coder Cabbibo controlled the visuals through a Glitch project. They were nice enough to answer some of my questions about the performance via Twitter and email.

Have you ever done a remote live show before? What was the experience like, how does it differ and how is it similar to a show at a venue?

Lil Data: I've been doing remote works and working with themes of telematic intimacy for almost as long as Lil Data has existed since 2014. When I was at SXSW 2015 playing the first big PC Music Showcase I simultaneously had a remote interactive installation happening as part of an Algorave at Access Space, Sheffield, UK.

That piece is still online — for the audio to work you need to perform some user gestures before the page finishes loading. The page features a grid of words which when clicked turn into their opposite (good turns to evil, etc) and flip the generative music that's running on the page. It's like a jukebox but operates at the abstraction level of a track rather than a music catalogue. 

The word-music mappings came from an interactive essay I did for DIS Magazine (RIP). The mappings are mirrored across all viewers, so the webpage was projected in the venue walls in Sheffield and the audience were controlling the music via their phones. I was also viewing the live stream and the webpage from Austin, Texas, watching and hearing as people collectively played this web-based multiplayer musical instrument. Initially people tended to press all the buttons, but after a surprisingly short time a collective sensibility and stability emerged.

Lil Data x Cabbibo Live Coding @ Club Quarantine x Namasenda Dare Pre-Party 27/4/20

For me, it doesn't make sense to differentiate shows as IRL versus URL, what's important is the atmosphere created by the context and audience, and on my side the depth of flow I am able to access.

Performing to me is like being an energy conduit channeling through a membrane that varies in thickness depending on those factors I just mentioned. If I'm really in the moment that membrane disappears and everything becomes attuned, and everyone mutually senses each other's attunement, and this feeling is the same for me wherever I play.

I definitely felt attunement and transparency when playing this show for Club Quarantine, even more than I've felt at some IRL shows. Their use of Zoom as a jumbotron, and how hyped and dressed up and gorgeous everyone is, made it really intimate for me and gave me permission to express myself. 

Even more special in this case was Cabbibo live coding a website via Glitch based on a sketch by Mr.doob, where people could control little avatars on screen that you can see in the video. We first did an interactive together for my Sup EP in 2014 (also still live, buried in data.pcmusic.info), and I was supposed to be visiting Cabbibo last month but my trip got cancelled. So this was important for us to do something in spite of the pandemic.

How did you decide on what music to play? Did you make any decisions because of the virtual venue?

Lil Data: This show was celebrating Namasenda's new single Dare AM/PM on PC Music, and I was playing first, so my set was designed to welcome everyone and get them excited for Hannah Diamond who was playing after me. Namasenda and me share a love for euro trance, dance pop, nightcore, generally anything fast and bouncy with high-pitched vocals, so I did live edits of Venga Boys and Special D specially for her.

Another edit I did was of GAIKA whose music I adore, plus edits of Charli XCX's new singles Forever and Claws which are both really amazing, along with a re-edit of my Vroom Vroom edit which is a crowd pleaser. I had to put this set together really fast but was quite pleased with it in the end, had a couple of hiccups so only uploaded about half to YouTube in the end. This was my first live stream since the pandemic began and it was great so I'm up for doing more, although I really want to go beyond video streaming and explore ways of streaming computation itself.

What kind of changes did you make during the show?

Cabbibo: Part of the show, for example, it was just emojis on a white background, but then I would push something that would make it so the background would clear [and] everyone’s movements turned into drawings. 

Then [I] would push a change so it would glitch the background while people were moving around or change the background color and pattern, or make it so everyone’s emojis were different sizes or whatever.

How did you decide what to do for the visuals? Did emojis, glitches, etc. come to mind immediately or was there a lot of experimentation?

Cabbibo: [We] tried a few different things, sort of starting with Mr. doob’s multiplayer sketchpad. The more we did it the more we a) wanted it to feel like a party and b) wanted to fit as many people as possible, but also didn’t know if it would work at all, so [we] wanted to make it fun even if no one was there. 

From there it was just like “what set of emojis should we use?” and “what will make people get excited for what’s next?” For me it was also like “how the heck do I use the Canvas API?” so I sort of coded up a few things to parameterize beforehand, but ended up making the glitch effect for the first time during the show.

Check out Lil Data, Cabbibo and Club Quarantine to keep up with their upcoming projects and shows.

Virtual Dance Clubs Are Creating New, Thriving Communities

In early March, Tonei Glavinic, the Director of Operations for the Dangerous Speech Project, was filing a report on hate speech when they were greeted with an unusual message in the reporting interface. The message read: “We have fewer people to review reports because of the coronavirus (Covid-19) outbreak.” 

Other users and researchers—including Data & Society’s Robyn Caplan—noticed these reporting flags as well. Facebook had sent its content moderators home, it appeared and were relying on AI to help manage content and harassment reports. 

Content moderators do a very important, and often unacknowledged job, from having to look at extremely violent content to having to decipher what harassment is (or is not). Content moderators are, effectively, the cleaners of the internet. 

This critical, human workforce reviews and moderates some of the worst content on the web. But if every data point of harassment is a real person’s experience, there is a person looking at that report. Recently, Facebook was ordered to pay a total of $52 million to content moderators suffering from PTSD, a real risk that comes from the job.

Content moderators are exposed to harm even as they provide a necessary service 

Social networks need this human workforce because AI isn’t up to the job yet, especially when it comes to its understanding of the extreme nuances of harassment and abuse. What content moderators do really does require human skill. Artificial intelligence has an extremely difficult time deciphering context and harm in speech and has a well known, recorded history of amplifying societal bias. Even recent forays into understanding abusive online language can be fraught with bias; for example, DeepText (a variation of which is used by Instagram) was originally and accidentally taught that the word ‘Mexican’ is negative and harmful. 

The deeper issues surrounding content moderation as a workforce are really starting to show. How do companies outsource work, and who do companies consider ‘actual employees’ versus contract workers? Content moderators are a mix of full-time employees and contracted, third-party workers. 

Acknowledging the dichotomy here is important: full-time employees at tech companies can have better pay, full-time healthcare, better access to internal resources, support, and documents needed to work at the frontlines of the internet, harm, and policy. Contracted workers don’t have access to most of those things, and additionally, it’s been reported that the places that employ contracted workers can have extremely poor working conditions and grueling hours. 

This brings into question how content moderators are able to work from home. Can contract employees bring their laptops with them? How is Facebook, or any platform,  determining safety, not just for moderators, but the security of the content is being seen? 

Suddenly, a work from home order has a lot of challenges, especially when dealing with abusive content and users’ data 

Sarah Roberts is a professor at UCLA and one of the major forces looking at content moderation. She has been studying content moderation and online systems for a decade. 

“Where we are today, with the example of Facebook, is a grossly reduced workforce that tends to frontline, generalist content moderation in a product environment. So that really changes the landscape of what is possible. And users have encountered that change when they’ve perhaps gone to report content on various platforms, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, at least have had notices up acknowledging the reduced workforce,” Roberts shared during our phone interview.

Roberts added that “every platform has its own apparatus for dealing with this [and] there is going to be variance from platform to platform. In the case of Facebook, on March 16, they did announce they would be sending mods home. It was unclear to me in those releases if that was globally or the ones in the United States. It’s important to understand it’s not the flipping of a switch, with the people or AI. A lot of the responses have probably been graduated with those factors.” But this further reliance on AI has created a myriad of challenges. Roberts described AI as being a broad and blunt tool, but also working in a ‘proactive’ way meaning it was catching content before people reported it, which can lead to content that didn’t actually break any violation standards of being removed. 

Platforms are removing content that creates misinformation about Covid-19. Facebook across its newsroom sites are updating blog posts with information about Covid-19 misinformation patterns, and what they are doing to keep users safe in regards to content moderation. Platforms, like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram even have removed posts by Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro that contained misleading or false information related to Covid-19. 

Roberts recounted an experience of someone reaching out to her that had reported abusive hate speech. A reporting system operates almost like a phone tree for users: users select a general what kind of harm or content reporting issue it is, and then they select the specific kind of harm be it hate speech, targeted harassment, something including personal information, violence, etc. It’s a triage for ordering and labeling content to be given to a content moderator. The user who reached out to Roberts got to the end of the flow and was told the content they had reported was ‘deprioritized.’ 

Roberts emphasizes that to this user, and to others, this kind of content is urgent, serious and important. “We are seeing users posting and responding [about] this reduced workforce in a way we haven’t seen before- articulating their feelings, frustrations and their experiences in seeing this content.” 

When there’s a reduced workforce, harms like suicide and violence to others take precedent. It becomes this disturbing “hierarchy of bad things” and of what to prioritize, and when. 

Roberts stressed: “This might be the first time that users, even users who have reported content before through these various systems on the platforms, have really encountered the fact that it’s a human workforce on the other side for those reports, and when they are gone, there is no one to pick up the slack.” 

Right now, platforms are making a concerted effort to take down Covid-19 misinformation and disinformation but as Dia Kayyali, program manager of Tech and Advocacy at Witness pointed to over Zoom, lots of previous content have had offline, real-world effects, too. "We’ll hear people say if you could put this much resources into this where people’s lives are threatened, why can't you put more resources in Myanmar or India where people’s lives are also threatened?” As Kayyali highlighted, these online harms, like Hindu extremist posts on Twitter currently, result in offline harm, too, just like corona misinformation.

Kayyali suggested focusing on content moderators and their needs, during this moment and beyond it. “[The platforms] should make content moderators full-time employees, they shouldn’t be contracting out.” More importantly, Kayyali explained, “I really hope they look at what are the different error rates between full-time employees and contracted content moderators, what are the self-reported mental health repercussions, what’s the difference between what full-time employees have access to and the contractors have access to.” 

All employees, right now more than ever, need the support of the companies they work for or have been contracted out to. Content moderators, especially in this time, and once this time is over, need support, full-time employment, healthcare, mental health access, and good tools to do their job, otherwise the safety of the internet could be at stake. 

The Workers Who Keep the Web Safe in an Unsafe World

Have you ever started writing a post on your favorite social network, and then paused before sending it, worried about who might see it? You might think about how a certain friend might react or how it might affect your chances at a job in the future. If you know about how much social networks track you, you might think about which ads you're going to start seeing after making that post. You might worry about how parents, teachers, or your community might see what you wrote — especially if you're discussing something they don't accept.

The apprehension we feel before making a social media post is an important instinct. In the real world, whether speaking to a friend or close group or large room, we're used to having control over who hears our words. We naturally modify it by moving around or changing how we speak in our physical environment. But using the internet today means giving up a lot of that control. We rarely speak over neutral “phone lines” anymore; instead, our voices travel through complex digital services, with ads along the way, and algorithmic filtering at the other end.

Today, we frame these issues in many ways — from a loss “privacy” or “control,” to “data” and how it's collected. Each of these is a large and nuanced topic, but I'm most interested in a very specific aspect of privacy: how crucial it is for creative expression, and how we can make the web a more human place by building more privacy-centric platforms.

First, it's important to remember that apprehension you might've felt before making a post online. That gut feeling is the “chilling effect” we get from being watched. When we're speaking from deeper places within us, we're vulnerable. Whether we’re writing our first piece of poetry or a deeply personal story, early ideas can instantly whither away if we have to worry about something larger at stake, like other people’s perceptions, or our past reputation.

This need to protect ourselves doesn’t change when we go online — it’s even more important as we connect to a global network. That network, the web, has grown into more than a place where we connect with each other. We build projects, start businesses, and over time, we can form our identity there. This makes a nurturing creative environment even more important, so new projects can come to life and new experiences can be shared, without fear of failure or ridicule. One of the best ways to create this environment is by building platforms that put privacy and anonymity first.

Of course, anonymity without basic social counterweights can lend itself to abuse. Privacy liberates indiscriminately, whether it’s new work that benefits and connects people across the world, or antisocial behavior that harms others. So we need a world that respects personal privacy, but we also need shared respect among each other. Digital communities that enable privacy should spend just as much time building a culture that harnesses that privacy toward positive ends.

We spend a lot of effort on this at Write.as, a privacy-centric writing platform. Primarily, we get there by giving you anonymity by default, then introducing social friction as you look to reach more people.

At first, you don’t even need to create an account if you want to publish a one-off article, like a long tweet or essay. In this way, you’re anonymous — we haven’t collected any personal data about you, and readers won’t know who wrote the article unless you sign your name.

If you decide to create an account, you can start building a public blog, but you still don’t need to give an email address or other personal information. At this point, you become pseudonymous, and can still express yourself freely, with only your collective posts forming your identity. However, you’re still responsible for promoting your writing. This gives you real privacy if you want it, like for a personal journal, but also keeps abuse on our platform low — the proverbial tree falling in the forest.

Finally, if you want to reach that wide audience on Write.as, we introduce higher social expectations. You can choose to share your work publicly in our community space, Read Write.as, after a few roadblocks: either human moderation, or upgrading to a paid plan. Free users can submit their work anonymously, which we’ll publish or reject after vetting. Otherwise, users who upgrade can automatically publish to Read Write.as, with the explicit agreement that they’ll abide by some basic community guidelines (which we enforce).

With these hurdles, we’ve found that many people self-select on whether or not to join the community, which saves us time and effort on moderation. Combined with a small entry fee and an established culture of respect for each other, we’ve been able to create a warm social space that still puts privacy first.

This has been our approach to building a privacy-centric writing platform — but we're not the only ones doing this. There are services like Glitch that let you create projects without signing up, and have chosen a business model that doesn't cost you your privacy. Open source social platforms like Mastodon, Pixelfed, and our own WriteFreely help you create communities that aren’t built on ads and runaway data collection. We need more of these platforms, and more business models that aren’t built on mass surveillance. 

Ultimately, the beauty of the web is that we can all have a part in building it. We can all work to make it a diverse, vibrant city created by its inhabitants, instead of some creepy panopticon invented by a few tech giants. We don't need to wait for a better web to simply emerge from them. We already have the right tools and ideas. With a little effort, we can build the web in our own image, starting with a concern for privacy and the human behind every screen — and starting today.

Try out anonymous publishing on Write.as with this Glitch app. Write a letter to a friend, press “Create Message,” and then send them the secret link you get. When they’re finished reading, they can delete the message — all without signing up!

Building a More Privacy-Centric Web

The .env file in your project is a secure place to keep API keys or other credentials for your app. It’s only visible to you and your project collaborators, and it isn’t duplicated if someone remixes your project.

Now, the Glitch editor is introducing a brand new way to edit your .env. Never again do you need to worry about syntax mistakes causing invalid .env files, and if you miss the plaintext view it’s only a click away.

Open a project and try out the new editor!

Secure your secrets with new .env editor

“When the page first goes off, I think maybe the most uncomfortable experience is if you're getting woken up three in the morning,” Emmett Walsh, Site Reliability Engineer at Glitch, explains what it’s like to get a technical incident page in this week’s Shift Shift Forward. “I would say, my first response is just pure confusion. I don't know what's happening.”

“When you don't know what's going on and everybody's affected... that is fear-inducing and stress-inducing. Panic-inducing maybe is the right phrase, at least for me,” Cori Schlegel, Senior Site Reliability Engineer said.

While incident response, the actions taken to investigate, fix, prevent and provide communication about a function that is not working as expected, is a team effort, Tasha Hewett, Senior Support Engineer at Glitch explains that it’s more specifically like an orchestra. “Everybody has their own part to play,” Tasha said, “and while we all know what each other's role is, we might not necessarily know  how they physically play their part. So we have to sit back and let everyone play their own instrument.”

As a Support Engineer, Tasha shares with the community news about outages. In her words, she feels like the gong player of the Glitch orchestra. “I don't play much, but when I do, it's very important and the audience is going to hear it,” Tasha elaborated. “So I have to sit and wait and wait. And when is it my turn? Okay, here's my turn. I'm going to do a status update, or I'm going to post on Twitter. And it has to be at the right time and it has to be accurate. So it can be a lot of pressure, but it's an important role.”

And when Glitch service is restored, the job still isn’t done. “We go through an instant retrospective. We first try as best we can to understand what happened… then we get together everyone involved or [those] who might have domain expertise [and] we'll discuss what happened,” Emmett said. “We'll try and pick out things that went well in how we dealt with the incident. Be that from how we noticed it to how we dealt with it in the moment to how we communicated about it.”

Outages and incidents are the best learning experience, adds Anil Dash, Glitch’s CEO. “You learn more about your systems when they're broke then when they're working just fine. I think that part is really fun and can be very rewarding. Finally, once you've gone through the whole incident and you figure out what's actually wrong with the systems and you fix it, then you're done. That can be extremely fulfilling.”

Check out Shift Shift Forward on iTunes or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Managing Chaos: Incident Response Edition

The news business is battered and bleeding, and some people in it now want Google to pay. That is, the dominant search engine should compensate the publishers whose work it indexes and makes searchable. The notion that one site should pay other sites to which it links conflicts with the Web’s founding principles of openness, but it keeps coming up in Google’s case—and, increasingly, in Facebook’s. 

First, the two make most of the money in the online ad market, accounting for 60.9% of U.S. digital advertising spending last year by the research firm eMarketers’ estimate. Second, business keeps getting worse for news publishers--and the novel-coronavirus pandemic has both made their work more necessary and incinerated much of their advertising revenues. 

That’s undercut Google’s traditional defense: “Google helps publishers and journalists by helping people find news content and sending them to news sites,” as Google News head Richard Gingras wrote in a September 2019 post. 

David Chavern, president of News Media Alliance, flicked the traffic-always-helps argument aside in an email: “That is impossible in a world where digital advertising is dominated by Google and Facebook, and that domination is growing by the day.” That Arlington, Va., trade group represents news publishers and supports requiring compensation from Google and Facebook. 

A news-royalty system would require deciding which sites produce journalism versus words, images and video. 

So a campaign that had previously been limited to other countries is now picking up in the U.S. with calls for Google and perhaps Facebook to follow the recent examples of Australia and France by mandating compensation for publishers. 

At the same time, Google is quietly testing a new experiment that would enable it to act as a sort of assignment editor for news sites by conveying Google searchers’ unanswered questions to them.

Google can make for a tempting punching bag, while today’s ink- or pixel-stained wretches ought to warrant some sympathy. But a rush to stick Google and Facebook with the bill for a broken journalism business model risks cementing current inequalities in the news ecosystem while leaving cancerous flaws in digital advertising untreated.

“I think anything that allows local and niche news organizations better realize the value of their journalism is a win—but I'm highly skeptical that a search-snippet tax is realistic for the U.S. any time soon,” emailed Amanda Zamora, co-founder and publisher of The 19th News, a nonprofit site covering politics and policy from a female perspective that’s due to launch this summer. “Publishers have already ceded so much to platforms -- and when they have had a seat at the table, it's been the same big publishers time and again.”

As in, Google and other search sites already neglect local publishers in their rankings. “They're dwarfed by the domain authority of big publishers when they decide to swoop in on a trend or story,” Zamora said. 

“Even if [Google] was going to pay, it’s going to benefit the people who always benefit from platform plays—the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal,” said Damon Kiesow, a professor at the University of Missouri’s school of journalism. Kiesow also pointed to the practical difficulty of getting money to the right places: “If I were the product manager, how would I even account for that and get people checks?”

Chavern, with the News Media Alliance, suggested that the music industry offered a template in how hip-hop artists must license the samples that they use. But individual musicians have to negotiate those agreements; there’s no “compulsory license” regime like the one that lets cover bands play who they want and then make the appropriate payments through a rights clearinghouse like ASCAP. 

“There have been other circumstances where people have worked out complex licensing arrangements around content—and, contrary to many tech complaints, it’s certainly not impossible,” Chavern said. 

A news-royalty system would also require deciding which sites produce journalism versus words, images and video. 

“What will count as news and who gets to be considered a publisher?,” asked Adam Engst, publisher of TidBITS, an Apple news site that touts itself as the oldest online-only tech publication. Engst, however, would still like Google to give back to the sites that make its existence possible and profitable: “If Google were to pay some non-trivial amount for the value that our content brings to its search results, I’d be very interested in that.”

Assigning value to what Google takes from a news site to list it in Google News or its general search raises other problems, in that there isn’t much taken. Google News only shows headlines and thumbnail previews of photos, while regular Google results also include brief snippets. 

Is it a problem if a story’s headline alone spares the reader a click? 

“Most people only consume the summary or snippet,” said Chavern. “The ‘free’ item often tells them all they need to know and provides the consumer value.”

Engst dismissed that concern, saying “Our articles are way too long for that to matter.” 

Dan Pacheco, a journalism professor at Syracuse University, noted that news sites can always block Google from indexing or displaying their content if they want—and yet they don’t. 

“Due to how information is atomized online with the article being more valuable than the front page, having deep links from search and social is almost a requirement for relevance in the digital landscape,” he said. “If the tech giants are forced by law to pay for news in certain countries, I think they are more likely to just stop indexing there. The very publishers that are supposedly being protected will be the first to beg Google and Facebook to list them again.”

Scott Brodbeck, publisher of ARLNow, a news site covering Arlington, Va., said in an email that getting new readers mattered more: “I want Google to highlight our articles and send us traffic, I don't have any expectation that they'll pay me for the privilege of sending me readers.”

Other search sites already offer a deeper preview of stories—see, for example, Microsoft’s Bing News, a better news-search site in many respects. But Google’s outsized weight makes it different from other search engines. It shapes the market in ways that other search sites can’t.

Journalists and their editors have obsessed for years over SEO—search engine optimization—to get their stories ranked higher in Google. 

A new Google product would give the company a more direct influence over what stories appear online

Question Hub, a feature Google launched in India, Indonesia, and Nigeria and is now quietly testing in the U.S., can surface when Google’s algorithms decide search results don’t adequately answer a user’s query. They may invite the user to submit a question to be relayed to unnamed publishers: “Get the answer you’re looking for added to the web.”  

Google began testing this in the States weeks ago on COVID-19 topics, but Question Hub prompts now surface on unrelated pop-culture and tech queries.

“The question collection box can appear on topics not COVID-related, but currently we're only sharing COVID-related questions with health organizations,” emailed Google spokeswoman Lara Levin. “In this pilot phase, this isn't available to publishers.”

It remains unclear which U.S. publishers will be eligible for this closer look into Google search curiosity (that is, beyond the insights long available from Google Trends). Question Hub also risks passing on personal information from Google to third parties, although its prompts warn against sharing anything too close to home. Wrote Levin: “We do have systems trained to detect when personally identifiable information may have been input and we filter that out.” 

Google essentially telling sites what information they should publish would represent a step forward in its shaping of the Web--which is already Google’s world, and we just live in it. That gets to the philosophical aspect of calls to make Google compensate the Web’s creators: It’s made the Web searchable for everyone but profitable for few besides itself. 

As Pacheo put it: “Facing the possibility of having no quality journalism to link to in the future, could tech giants be compelled in some other way to pay as a form of good will for the value they’re getting?”

But Google (and Facebook) might do more good for news publishers by looking at aspects of their businesses that they can fix without creating new intellectual-property obligations. Zamora’s recommendations: “more transparent algorithms that reward credibility, accuracy and relevance of a news brand apart from its sheer size and influence as the standard across platforms.”

Engst said he’d like to see Google not leave so many results frozen in amber: “Even with Google’s normal search, it seems that Google anoints a particular page as the top hit, and there’s no way to dislodge it, even with better or more current content.”

But those ads that are supposed to reward traffic—and don’t require readers to break out credit cards to pay directly via subscription or membership, often a significant hurdle for the smaller publishers that already struggle for Google search relevance—offer the biggest potential for improvement. Today, that business ecosystem is outright toxic. A disturbing amount of the money spent on digital ads doesn’t reach publishers: 32.7% in an eMarketer study released last summer, 49% in a PwC study done for the Incorporated Society of British Advertisers and announced in May.

That newer report found that 15% of digital ad spend could not be traced to anybody, as if it fell off a truck somewhere. “The place you really need to fix is digital advertising,” said Kiesow. 

Readers suffer from the results too, in the form of tacky “around the Web” ads pushing the same old schlock and “forced-redirect” ads that hijack their browsers and push malware or fraud. Oh, and all the tracking of their online habits required to target ads against their behavior.

ARLNow’s Brodbeck pointed back to Google’s domination of display ads. “It has conveniently avoided doing much of any innovating, thus making programmatic banner ads weak competition for its search ads,” he said. “Google should be compelled, via antitrust action or otherwise, to spin out the display ad side of its business.” 

Without some sustainable way to make money, news sites may be left with two unsavory sources of support, Chavern warned: “the government and rich people.”

Have you seen the Question Hub prompt appear in your search results? If you're comfortable sharing it publicly, tweet a screenshot to @Glimmer.

Google Searches For What It Can't Find

Around the third day of social distancing, my apartment started to feel suffocating. All of a sudden everyone who had ever made a stupid joke about cramped New York apartments was getting the last laugh. It was clear that, in order to keep sane, I needed to make a change, but unfortunately, Brooklyn apartments leave little room for change — literally. All I could manage was to get rid of one shelf and move around another, but to my surprise, this little change actually improved my emotional health. It felt substantial to have even a semblance of control during a time where control seemed impossible.

This is also why Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Nintendo’s most recent major release for the Switch, came out at the perfect time. In Animal Crossing, you play as a community planner of sorts helping to develop the playful deserted island you inhabit into a thriving town filled with adorable cartoon animal neighbors. The world is open and no two days of play are the same: one day you might gather fish and fossils to donate to your museum and another day you might sell fruit and other items to pay for a bigger home, your time is your own. 

While social distancing has impacted my relationship with my physical environment, Animal Crossing lets me create my own relationship to a digital environment. Almost everything in the game is decided by the player. You get to place all the buildings and bridges in town, and at a certain point, you can add roads and terraform the environment altogether, altering the rivers and land as you see fit. For eager players, it’s possible to make towns that look completely different than the island you started on.

Even among other Nintendo games marketed towards kids, the Animal Crossing series is pretty unusual in that there’s no harm, violence or even tension. Everything happens at your pace and your neighbors are just excited by you being there. I believe the overall calmness of the game is part of the reason people who aren’t familiar with the series are so confused by its popularity.

When people tell me the game seems boring, it’s hard to explain why it isn’t. There isn’t just one big show stopping selling point like you might look for in a shooter or fantasy title. The joy of Animal Crossing isn’t big and flashy, it’s in the quiet moments. You feel it as you try on clothing in your wardrobe, which can be a refrigerator by the way, and your character does stylish diva poses into the mirror. You feel it when you’re about to catch a rare fish and your controller vibrates slightly differently. You feel it when it’s raining out and your villagers carry around umbrellas and put on cute raincoats. Surrounded by a real world that’s overbearing and obnoxious, the game comes to life in its details.

There are obviously many ways to spend the hours at home that we’ve recently been thrust into, plenty of things to distract you. However, what’s unique about Animal Crossing: New Horizons coming out during the quarantine is that it doesn’t quite feel like a distraction from the physical world, it feels like a new way to engage with it.

In fact, the game clock moves in real time and always matches your own clock, so you’re never truly separated. But unlike real life, my friends can visit me on Animal Crossing as much as they want and I’ve been able to use these visits as a genuine surrogate for the interactions I can’t have right now. Just last week, I knew my coworker had a stressful week at work, so I sent her a cute beret in the mail. When I went to visit my boyfriend, I brought him a new outfit that I picked out at the clothing store. As strange as it might sound, giving those virtual gifts felt just as good as giving physical ones, because although the result is just pixels, the love and care behind those relationships are still very real. 

My favorite moment in Animal Crossing so far was a few seconds when, while I was visiting his island, my boyfriend and I just sat on a bench next to each other, looking out at the river. I couldn’t tell you what was so compelling about that moment, but it’s stuck with me for the last week. We’re currently in a long distance relationship and because of the limited travel right now, we have no way of seeing each other for a long time. I don’t know when I’ll be able to sit next to him again in the physical world, so for now, I’ll just have to take what I can get.

Animal Crossing Helped Me Get Back to Real Life

Journalist and author Kaitlin Ugolik Phillips' book Future of Feeling was published in February, just prior to the global spread of Covid-19. The book covers key subjects and shared research and insights about managing digital communication, empathy, and healthy habits—matters which are all the more important now that digital connections have become essential to protecting health for other reasons. Below is our brief conversation. 

How have you reflected on your research as you observe and try to understand what impacts physical distancing will have on societies and business, in the short and long term? 

Kaitlin: Well, I did not expect there to be a global social experiment in what the “future of feeling” might be like, but here we are! I have been thinking a lot about how research shows we struggle to empathize when we’re upset, and/or when we feel our basic needs aren’t being met. Pretty much everyone is in that state right now, and a lot of us are spending a lot more time using social tech, so the issues I researched and wrote about - trolling, gamification of conversation, the flattening of context - are amplified. I see people lashing out at each other, and it’s really distressing. 

We have seen a lot of schools, businesses, and cultural institutions move online and start to adopt new technology, from basic streaming to virtual reality. There have been some positive moves that I hope will continue, like more accessible telehealth (especially for mental health), but there are some developments (spying software on work and school computers, for one) that are pretty scary in terms of trying to preserve an empathetic future. 

When it comes to social tech - since that’s what most people are familiar with - I have a feeling this experience might push innovation to move more quickly in the direction of empathy, privacy, and quality over quantity. I’ve heard whisperings about a shift from the newsfeed-dominant platforms we have now to smaller digital social groups where context (and empathy) can thrive. We’ll see!

What unexpected challenges have surprised you since Covid-19 has spread more widely? 



I did not expect some of the negative effects of so much Zooming, but I’m feeling them. It’s truly not the same as being in a room with someone in terms of presence and body language; you are stuck looking at your own face for far longer than you’re used to, and you have zero privacy to yawn or look away or tend to something that comes up (which is happening a lot these days)! 

One of the hardest things for me has been accepting that one of the best, most empathetic actions I can take is to do nothing." 

What aspects of management culture are leaders being forced to address now that they might have gotten away with putting off before the crisis?



Two main things that are related: expectation of constant work/productivity, and lack of family flexibility. For the latter, I don’t even mean paid time off, I mean flexibility throughout the average workday. I think it’s becoming a lot clearer just how difficult it is to juggle work, life, and family, and with everyone (for the most part) in this together, I hope some changes will be made to address that. Productivity has taken on a whole new meaning, whether you’re working from home or not. It would be nice to believe we would all walk away from this realizing we’ve been pushing ourselves and our employees too hard, but that may be too much to hope for… At the very least, though, we’re being forced to confront the burnout culture many of us have been living in, and it’s going to be hard to ignore going forward.

Many have called for a bigger public role to support the safety and work of “essential workers.” For example, neighborhoods around the world have voluntarily organized collective applause events. Are there fundamental steps you’ve been reminded of that anyone can take to express empathy for those who are at risk?  



One of the hardest things for me has been accepting that one of the best, most empathetic actions I can take is to do nothing. To stay home or go out as little as possible. Beyond that, this concept of thanking those who work to keep us healthy, happy, and alive, from the mailman to the ICU nurse, should continue, but this crisis is also a reminder of how much more is needed. This is an opportunity, if we are lucky enough to be safe and healthy, to put ourselves in the shoes of those who are on the front lines, and ask what they need from a policy perspective to do their jobs and stay well, pandemic or not. Similarly, as we read and listen to stories about the hardest hit demographics, and put ourselves in their shoes regarding COVID, now we have a spot to come back to when this is over, to imagine how else we could address the broader systems that impact them in a disproportionately negative way. To spell it out: this crisis illuminates long-simmering problems like structural racism and poverty that can’t be fixed by a vaccine, but that we have always had - and will continue to have - the ability to speak/write/lobby our representatives about.

What expressions of connection have given you hope or joy in the past month, as people around the world respond to the global crisis?


I’m gonna admit to being one of the millennials who has invaded TikTok… but I’m not posting! I just truly love watching people take on dance challenges, especially with family members they’re quarantined with who might not otherwise be cajoled into doing something like that. Any video of cooped-up people dancing together brings me joy, right now. 

Given the limitations of empathetic technology—but the clear need to express and share emotions during this time—how can people express empathy online without being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information? 

My usual answer to this question is to take a deep breath, count to three, and see if the benefit of you posting what you’re thinking of posting outweighs any potential harm it might do (intentional or not). These days, though, my answer is: take some time off. I think it can sometimes feel like we have to be online all the time to be participants in society (especially now, when we can’t literally go out and participate in real life). But it is okay - in fact, necessary - to give yourself a break, if not to prevent your own burnout, then to prevent lashing out at others. When you do go online, I suggest just trying to be a little more gentle right now, with yourself and everyone else. Assume everyone is even more anxious than you are, because there’s a good chance that’s true. 

Working with Empathy: Q&A with Kaitlin Ugolik Phillips

He also serves on the boards of Stack Overflow and the Data & Society Research Institute, and was formerly a contributing editor of WIRED. He’s been blogging since 1999 and won’t stop telling people about that one time he was on the Desus and Mero late-night show.

Incidents

New Rules of the Classroom: Remote Teaching in the Age of Covid-19

Better Tech: Why We Need Calm Technology Now More Than Ever

Function with Anil Dash

Open World is a fiction anthology podcast about how science and technology serve as a backdrop for imagining a better future, helping us envision the positive influence that science and tech can play in a real future. 

Open World is produced by Keisha "TK" Dutes and hosted by critically-acclaimed podcaster Rose Eveleth, for Glitch. By speaking to the pressing concerns of our times through love, friendship, community, compassion, and sustainability, the host will help listeners imagine new ways forward into a future that is less scary and more positive, and something we can start working on constructively.  

Open World launches weekly episodes in Spring 2020. Want to contact the show? Email youropenworld@glitch.com.

Open World

Shift Shift Forward is a podcast that showcases everything that makes Glitch the best place to create on the web. We’ll talk to some of our top creators, explore cool apps, and even hear from the people who work at Glitch!

Shift Shift Forward

From idea to code in seconds, build and learn alongside the most creative coders on the Web

Recent Posts