First Monday is one of the first openly accessible, peer–reviewed journals solely devoted to resarch about the Internet. First Monday has published 1,888 papers in 281 issues, written by 2,648 different authors, over the past 23 years. No subscription fees, no submission fees, no advertisements, no fundraisers, no walls.
 | This month: October 2019 Change by default: Exploring the effects of a sudden influx of newcomers on the discourse of r/TwoXChromosomes Sudden influxes of new contributors to online communities can cause apprehension and resentment among existing members, potentially leading to the displacement of existing members by newcomers. This paper analyzes the impact of a sudden influx of new contributors to r/TwoXChromosomes, an online community in which the experiences and perspectives of female-identified individuals are discussed. Though there is evidence of a small displacement effect, other factors, such as the passage of time and the 2016 U.S. presidential election, have far larger effects on the retention of existing contributors. After the influx, discussion topics shifted temporarily toward general statements about women and men, followed by a lasting shift away from appearance-related topics toward those relating to motherhood. |
 | Also this month Automated and/or authentic intimacy: What can we learn about contemporary intimacy from the case of Ashley Madison’s bots? In July 2015 the well-known affairs Web site, Ashley Madison, was hacked and both customer details and internal company correspondence were stolen, and later dumped online for public access. In the analysis of the data, it became clear that the site had extensively used bots to attract customers. This paper brings together these bots with a short story by Candas Jane Dorsey about the discomfiting potential of human-machine intimacies. There is an inbuilt and little discussed expectation/requirement of “authentic” intimacy: humanness. |