online influence

A one-hour documentary on XBAND, the 1994 modem network for the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis. It covers matchmaking, chat, email, leaderboards and how games were patched at runtime to cope with lag.

Psychologist Robert Epstein presents a Stanford EE380 colloquium on how internet algorithms such as search rankings can manipulate opinions, purchases and votes at massive scale. He also describes a new monitoring system for tracking such influence.

A 2018 GDC panel where Raph Koster, Starr Long, Richard Garriott and Rich Vogel look back on what went right and wrong building and running Ultima Online. They share candid stories from the early days, including player behavior and server architecture.

The first part of Innuendo Studios' six-part video essay series on the online hostility around Anita Sarkeesian and GamerGate. It lays out the history and the motivations of the people involved.

An Ars Technica War Stories episode in which Richard Garriott and Starr Long describe Ultima Online's planned virtual ecology and how players wrecked it. Players slaughtered the animals and also broke the in-game economy.

A three-minute video from Derek Sivers, based on his book Anything You Want, about remembering that the people you deal with online are real people. It contrasts how we treat people face to face with how we treat them online.

MegaLag investigates PayPal's Honey browser extension, showing how it swaps affiliate attribution and was promoted by large YouTube influencers. It includes technical demonstrations of the affiliate tag replacement in browser dev tools.

Jon Ronson's TED talk on public shaming on Twitter, centered on Justine Sacco and others whose lives were upended by online mobs. He argues we have become a baying crowd and should rethink how we treat each other online.

Luis von Ahn, creator of CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA, explains how small contributions from many people online can digitize books. He then introduces Duolingo as a way to translate the web while people learn languages.

The introduction to Innuendo Studios' video essay series on the rhetorical tactics of the alt-right. It examines how bad-faith debate and harassment work online.

Serpentza, a Westerner living in China, describes Chinese influence efforts abroad and the cultural conflict between Shen Yun and Confucius Institutes. It is a commentary from his personal perspective.

Huygens Optics explores the idea that space is a non-linear elastic medium, and uses simulations to show how wave energy might be confined locally into particle-like objects. It touches on inertia, the Schwinger limit and the vacuum as a medium.

An Innuendo Studios video essay from the Alt-Right Playbook series that uses the Seinfeld 'the card says moops' scene to explain bad-faith argument tactics. It describes how reactionaries use sincerity and irony as shields in online debate.

A UCTV panel with endocrinologist Robert Lustig, dentist Cristen Kearns and health policy expert Laura Schmidt on how the US food system and sugar industry influence diet and health, including industry efforts to shape the science.

A Belgian bank-safety campaign video in which a supposed clairvoyant stuns people by revealing personal financial details, then shows he found them all online. It warns viewers to be careful about what they share and about online banking security.

An Adult Swim parody infomercial for a for-profit online university that promises to let you print your own degree. It is absurdist comedy in the style of Tim and Eric.

Innuendo Studios uses Phil Fish, creator of the game Fez, as a case study in internet celebrity. The essay argues that fame online works differently from traditional fame, and shows how audiences turn on the people they have elevated.

Dan Olson's long Folding Ideas video on the GameStop meme stock phenomenon, its online community and the conspiracy thinking around it. It runs over two hours.

Evan Czaplicki, creator of Elm, discusses the hard parts of running an open source project: online community conflict, why its patterns arise, and a cultural history of open source. He offers ideas for more civil, productive communication.

Innuendo Studios' video from the Alt-Right Playbook series on how bad-faith actors control the conversation through debate tactics and moving goalposts.

The Map Men explain why British place names are so hard to pronounce, tracing it to layers of Viking, Anglo-Saxon, Celtic and Norman influence, with a pronunciation guide.

MrBtongue argues that modern theme-park MMOs lost what made earlier sandbox online games compelling, and that MMOs could be saved by returning to sandbox design.

A documentary from Swan Bitcoin exploring Bitcoin's relationship with energy, featuring Lyn Alden and others, and arguing that mining is a net positive for the environment and not wasteful.

A Kurzgesagt video arguing that social media's problem is information flooding and tribal polarization. It suggests a return to smaller online communities and more in-person interaction.

Eli Pariser's TED talk argues that personalized web services trap users in filter bubbles, limiting exposure to challenging information. He says this is bad for individuals and for democracy.

A 2018 tutorial explaining uBlock Origin's advanced user mode, including how to block scripts and use the dynamic filtering settings. It positions the extension as a replacement for tools like uMatrix.

Tom 7 (suckerpinch) delivers a long, comedic digression on gradient descent and floating-point imprecision. He shows how rounding behavior can supply the nonlinearity needed to build a neural network.

Josh Wardle, later the creator of Wordle, talks at SF Tech Poetics about why April Fools' Day in Silicon Valley is often lame. He shares lessons from building The Button and Place at Reddit.

NonCompete's video examines the alt-right pipeline and a 'pyramid of violence' running from implicit bias through edgy racist humor to real violence. It uses the PewDiePie controversy and Charlottesville as case studies.

A short news segment from Arutz Sheva about a course on pro-Israel editing of Wikipedia.

A 60 Minutes segment on how German prosecutors and police go after online hate speech and insults, which are crimes there. It contrasts this with the broad First Amendment protection of online speech in the US.

The official music video for Rammstein's 2004 song Amerika, a satirical take on American cultural dominance and its export around the world. It was shot in the ruins of a former chemical site near Berlin.

An h3h3Productions video on the CSGO gambling scandal involving the YouTubers ProSyndicate and TmarTn, who promoted a gambling site they owned without disclosing it.

A fireside chat at TNW Conference where Reddit CEO Steve Huffman discusses Reddit's growth, user engagement and monetisation plans.

A short video of five people carrying a live, running web server across the city by public transport to a new datacenter. It stayed powered and connected to the internet the whole way, so there was no downtime.

A short Harvard Online animated lesson on how the mitochondrial electron transport chain works. It shows proton pumping and the machinery that drives ATP synthesis.

A short Harvard Online animation, narrated by Professor Rob Lue, showing how ATP synthase works inside mitochondria. It comes from the HarvardX Cell Biology: Mitochondria course.

Tom Scott writes a more honest VPN ad, with the sponsor's name redacted, and explains why the typical claims in VPN advertising are misleading. He notes the sponsor was not happy about it.

Dan Olson of Folding Ideas investigates the Mikkelsen Twins and the ghostwritten-audiobook passive-income course industry, even playing along with the scheme. It is a long video essay on get-rich-quick publishing grifts.

ContraPoints' 35-minute video essay on incels, examining the community, its worldview and how people get radicalized. It is delivered with theatrical style and an empathetic tone.