Manuel Riess (@hutaffe) recently wrote a bit about returning from Apple Music to Spotify. His dissatisfaction centers around music discovery, hearing new material from artists that the system already should know he likes, and the New Music playlist.

I have had some of the same frustrations. The New Music playlist, which is updated every Friday, used to be something to which I looked forward, at the end of the week. Lately, though, it almost seems like artists (or labels) have been paying to have their music featured on the lists of listeners. How else could you explain Apple Music putting Mariah Carey in the pole position on one of my playlists? There are a few such examples of deep pocket artists showing up on my lists for no discernible reason. Ever since this started occurring, I can’t trust much of the content on the list. If it’s not by a band with which I’m already familiar, I’m reticent to spend my time checking it out.

With the New Music playlist, Apple should definitely be showing me new tunes by bands that I listen to a lot. That would be low hanging fruit, an easy thing for them to accomplish with the data they have on my listening habits. Instead, I’m not guaranteed to see new releases by my favorite bands. The service just simply doesn’t do a good job of discovery in that space.

Federico Viticci had a recent piece in Macstories pondering some of the same issues with music discovery in the Apple Music service.

The ‘New Music Mix’ playlist is not terrible, but it often comes loaded with stale data – songs I’ve already listened to multiple times and which shouldn’t qualify as “new” weeks after their original release date. Furthermore, I’ve found notifications for new releases for artists in my library unreliable at best: I occasionally get notifications for new albums, but never for new singles or EPs.

Ticci’s solution is Music Harbor, an app that keeps you up-to-date with new releases by artists you like. His assessment, as well as the reviews of the app, make it look very promising. However, I just can’t get past the fact that I would need a separate app to do the things Apple Music should be able to do with my existing data.

The header image is of the Mighty music player that plays music from your Spotify account and doesn’t involve a screen, much like an iPod shuffle. Great concept.

Next week, Instagram is set to begin hiding like counts on posts in the US, according to this TechCrunch piece. The move is expected to hurt influencers on the platform, as initial tests in other countries showed that likes on posts went down when the counts were not displayed. The influencer economy is supposed to be a big part of what drives the platform. The speculation is that anything that hurts those influencers and their ability to use Instagram to build their businesses too badly will be rolled back.

I’m not completely bought into the idea that influencers are as strong a driver of engagement on Instagram as they are assumed to be, but to be fair, I haven’t looked deeply at the data. However, I know that the move will be good for teenagers who view posts as popularity contests and delete photos when they don’t achieve a certain like count, for fear of embarrassment. I appreciate the fact that those who are steering the Instagram ship are taking steps that account for the mental health of its users.

It has never been a better time to quit Facebook, after the company recently revealed a policy that formalized the ability of politicians to lie in ads on the platform. Techcrunch writer Josh Costine called the move a disgorgement of responsibility. The web publication has another piece by Costine, calling on Facebook, and other tech companies, to ban political ads altogether. The ban would hold until they can come up with a coherent policy that doesn’t erode democratic freedoms by inundating the populace with misinformation.

No one wants historically untrustworthy social networks becoming the honesty police, deciding what’s factual enough to fly. But the alternative of allowing deception to run rampant is unacceptable. Until voter-elected officials can implement reasonable policies to preserve truth in campaign ads, the tech giants should go a step further and refuse to run them.

The formalization of the policy accepting misinformation in ads came after the campaign of Joe Biden called on Facebook to remove ads promoting false claims about him that were made by the Trump campaign. Facebook refused to take the ads down, abdicating any responsibility for their veracity.

In response, the campaign of Elizabeth Warren posted an ad blatantly lying about Mark Zuckerberg endorsing Donald Trump.

We intentionally made a Facebook ad with false claims and submitted it to Facebook’s ad platform to see if it’d be approved. It got approved quickly and the ad is now running on Facebook. Take a look: pic.twitter.com/7NQyThWHgO

— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) October 12, 2019

Costine writes, in the TechCrunch piece, that “It’s easy to imagine campaign ads escalating into an arms race of dishonesty.”

I’ve always stayed away from Facebook, watching from the sidelines as the company has made a series of bad decisions, every one seemingly worse than the previous. However, I did go back to Instagram a couple of years ago after quitting when they were originally purchased by Facebook. Now, I am now rethinking my relationship with that platform, especially after my recent push to consolidate my web presence at my own site. I am under no illusions that as many people would go to my personal site to see my photos as see them on Instagram, but more limited exposure seems a reasonable price to pay for principles. After all, I’m not selling anything.

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In a break from my normal habit of avoiding hot takes and only sticking to what is room temperature or below, I wanted to write a bit about the uproar of the week. Specifically, the NBA, that proud bastion of social justice rebellion in recent times, ceding their moral high ground for the irresistible attraction of oodles of Chinese yuan.

Part of the name of this weblog has to do with my intention of capturing ideas being echoed around the blogosphere and there have been many people weighing in on this subject on their blogs. @ayjay took on the subject is several blog posts, like this one.

If nothing else, this whole shameful display should put an end, once and for all, to the ridiculous idea that there is some natural and intrinsic connection between democracy and capitalism. There very obviously ain’t. When shareholders and the bottom line are not benefitted by democracy, then democracy gets flushed down the toilet. American big business has firmly decided for a totalitarian regime and against people who want democratic freedoms. The business of America really is business after all.

The quote, and the piece, are not just centered on the NBA, but also around ESPN/Disney and Apple, as well. After all, many corporations that are making grand gestures for social justice are also heavily entrenched in a totalitarian state that has over a million people in concentration camps.

Along with the increased scrutiny over where these companies choose to exercise their influence come some pretty fair questions about proportionality. Jason Morehead has a nice round up of opinion pieces about how many companies have fought hard for progressive causes domestically suddenly grow mute when much larger human rights abuses are committed in countries in which they do big business.

It’s almost like trusting American corporations to do what’s morally right, not just when it’s easy and results in good PR but also when it’s inconvenient, unpopular, and they risk losing lots of money, is a bad idea. Who knew?

Apple has no problem filing an amicus brief against a cake maker, but don’t expect them to risk a kink in their massive supply chain anytime soon, no matter how righteous the cause.

This issue isn’t even limited to private corporations, though. The state of New York joined the NBA in boycotting North Carolina over bathroom provisioning, while also almost simultaneously making is just short of illegal to boycott other countries for human rights violations. How one state can reconcile boycotting another state over bathrooms while seriously restricting the right to protest, say, people’s houses being bulldozed in another country, I’m not sure I will ever understand. This all happening under the auspices of a constitution that guarantees the right to free speech makes everything even more ridiculous.

Taking a bite out of Apple

Returning to the issue of uneven corporate activism, it starts to get difficult to determine exactly what a conscientious consumer is to make of his or her options. Picking up with Alan Jacobs again, who has a post that wrestles with how to handle the ethical implications of Apple’s decisions.

The other axis, that of ethics, is even more difficult. Apple’s Chinese entanglements massive compromise the ethical status of the company, and in more than one way. (Which is worse, obedience to the demands of the Chinese government or the exploitation of Chinese labor?) But Apple also deserves some praise for its commitment to privacy and its truly wonderful work in making its computers accessible to a wide range of users. I don’t know how to make an ethics spreadsheet, as it were, that assembles all the relevant factors — including comparisons to the available alternatives — and gives them proper weighting.

I believe that Apple is a particularly tough case here, because in so many areas (tablets, for example), there are simply no credible competitors. That’s not meant to be a commentary simply on the Apple products themselves, but also upon the ecosystem that exists around them. There is a very real paucity of third party software on other platforms, mostly because people using Android and Windows don’t tend to be software enthusiasts, who are willing to pay for well done products by independent shops.

My wife asked a good question regarding Apple, as we shopped for a new tablet that she can use for work: “How do you hold them to account, when your power is your purchasing power?”

In Light Phone 2: the high hopes of the low-tech phone, Michael Zelenko writes about how hope for the minimalist phones like the Light Phone and the Punkt phone should probably be tempered by limited target customers.

There may not be a mass market for minimalist phones — they’re expensive, they’re superfluous, they’re extra — but there could be niche markets for the Light Phone: well-to-do campers, weekend warriors, the hyper-wired looking for relief. That could also include, as one friend put it, “people who shouldn’t be trusted with smartphones”: children, old people, and bad teens.

I like how “bad teens” are included in those who may be in need of a really expensive phone that doesn’t do much. What about “bad old people?”

I do love those e-ink screens, though…

The NY Public Library has just joined Unsplash. NOAA is there as well. This leaves me wondering if Unsplash for Education is essentially building an equivalent of Flickr Commons.