Austin Hill wrote what is so far the best critique I’ve seen of apps like Whisper and Secret. Here’s the general point from his essay On your permanent record:

When a participant in iterative prisoners’ dilemma has no identity or feels free from the responsibility of their actions in social interactions communities quickly degenerate into a race to the bottom. This is when trolls, abusers and the worst part of our humanity starts to become a strategic advantage in seeing your actions get more attention by continuing to push the envelope of acceptable behaviour.

And about those apps specifically:

Out of all the problems on our planet that need our skills as entrepreneurs, out of all the incredible opportunities to improve the lives of our customers or fellow human beings — we need to fund & waste engineering talent to build a better TMZ?

I do not doubt that voyeurism and rumour mongering are popular leading to profitability. It’s the reason why every grocery store check-out isle is packed with tabloid magazines and not Popular Science or The Economist. But really?

This point led me to tweet this the other day in response to a question about the VCs who fund these apps:

@flyosity Investing in the worst of human nature is easy money. Investing in meaningful work takes courage & a purpose beyond getting rich.

— Rian van der Merwe (@RianVDM) March 18, 2014

Mark Suster added his voice in another good article called How do I Really Feel About Anonymous Apps Like Secret?:

My general instinct is that most anonymity apps breed car-like behavior. Intolerance. For all the terrible things people have said over the years about me on Hacker News simply because they didn’t agree with my opinion on some topic I feel certain that if most spent an afternoon with me they would feel very differently. It’s like racism or prejudice. It’s very easy to hate a group with whom you never interact and when you live in a big city where there are many ethnicities and sexualities you realize we are all just human. Same wants. Same needs. Same goals. Even VCs.

I’ll leave the final word to Tim Fernholz in When it comes to secrets, Wall Street titans and Silicon Valley VCs see eye-to-eye:

So if you’re an ardent believer in anonymity, be careful: If you reveal something important enough to be legally protected on one of these platforms, your anonymity might not be secure. The only secrets you can safely reveal on these platforms (and even then, only as long as they’re not crimes) are your own.

Gary Graham writes about some of the dangers of the smart city movement in Too-smart cities? Why these visions of utopia need an urgent reality check:

Ideally a future city will have inner-city areas that are sustainably created through private, for-profit initiatives, and investment based on genuine competitive advantage — not through artificial inducements, charity or government mandates.

The people living in cities far outnumber the people making decisions about what those cities should look like in the future. They are disconnected from the plans being made by companies and even governments on their behalf.

We need to start working with everyday citizens to find the right questions — and then work with them towards developing solutions to the problems they raise.

The article also mentions the city of Brasília as an example of a failed experiment because it didn’t take the needs of its citizens into consideration. That’s a topic that’s near and dear to me:

Together, we can avoid building digital Brasílias — projects that generate buzz, but don’t meet the needs of the people who live there.

Tim Wu brings up some interesting points in Why Making Technology Easier to Use Isn’t Always Good:

We make ourselves into what we, as a species, will become, mainly through our choices as consumers. If you accept these premises, our choice of technological tools becomes all-important; by the logic of biological atrophy, our unused skills and capacities tend to melt away, like the tail of an ape. It may sound overly dramatic, but the use of demanding technologies may actually be important to the future of the human race.

Wu explains that if everything is easy, we’ll simply stop learning things. So what are these “demanding technologies” like?

Three elements are defining: it is technology that takes time to master, whose usage is highly occupying, and whose operation includes some real risk of failure. By this measure, a piano is a demanding technology, as is a frying pan, a programming language, or a paintbrush. So-called convenience technologies, in contrast — like instant mashed potatoes or automatic transmissions — usually require little concentrated effort and yield predictable results.

danah boyd wrote an interesting op-ed for TIME called Let Kids Run Wild Online. She argues that restrictive monitoring software is not the way to go to keep teens safe online:

The key to helping youth navigate contemporary digital life isn’t more restrictions. It’s freedom plus communication. Famed urban theorist Jane Jacobs used to argue that the safest neighborhoods were those where communities collectively took interest in and paid attention to what happened on the streets. Safety didn’t come from surveillance cameras or keeping everyone indoors but from a collective willingness to watch out for one another and be present as people struggled. The same is true online.

Take care of the people you love, and try to make yourself known and understood. Dial it down, work with your hands, keep it quiet, and share what you know.

— Frank Chimero, This One’s for Me

In 16 days our family will walk out of an empty house in Cape Town and get on a plane to Portland, OR. It will be a one-way journey. I’ve been searching for the words to write about it, but I haven’t quite found the right ones. So I guess these ones will have to do.

I started my first blog in 2004. It was hosted on Windows Live Spaces, and it was terrible. I called it Leave The Great Indoors (yes, because of the John Mayer song and we just moved countries and just roll with it ok?). I have no idea what I wrote about back then, but I must have felt that there was something to this writing thing, because a year later I moved it to Blogger (because more features!). It still exists, but please don’t tell anyone.

The writing thing kept growing on me, and a couple of months later I started a UX-focused blog called UX-SA (because User Experience, and I’m from South Africa, and yes it’s a stupid name for a blog). That one also still exists, but again, please don’t tell anyone.

It was only in late 2009 that I got serious about it, bought a domain name (I don’t know what I was thinking — no one can pronounce Elezea), installed WordPress, and got stuck in. I proceeded to go through several identity crises, which included a move from Silicon Valley to Cape Town, 2 kids, and realizing that I’ll never learn how to deal with angry comments so I should probably turn those off.

One day I wrote a post that got mildly popular, and Jim Dalrymple linked to it from The Loop. He also must have subscribed to my RSS feed, because he has linked to the site a few times since then — something I’m still surprised by and incredibly grateful for every time it happens.

Some time after that a guy I’d never met, who lives in Portland, started following me on Twitter. He’s a regular reader of The Loop, and he decided to check out this guy who has the same last name as he does (let’s call him Rudolph, because that’s his name). We started chatting a bit, and when he came to visit his extended family in Cape Town we caught up for coffee. We kept in touch, as like-minded people are prone to do.

Last August my wife and I went to San Diego for a family reunion. I also set up some interviews because we were strongly considering moving there. But we took one look at California and realized we won’t be able to live there again (Cape Town kind of gets you addicted to leafy mountain beauty, and well, California). On a whim I gave Rudolph a call, and asked him if he thinks we should move to Portland. I’d been following him on Instagram for a while, and it looked like a nice place.

So this random guy I met on the Internet went to work and helped us figure out if Portland might be the city for us. A few months later I started looking for jobs there. Since I’d never been to Oregon I took a one-week trip to check it out and speak to some people in person. Of course I stayed with Rudolph and his lovely family.

I talked to several companies in Portland, but the conversations that kept sticking in my mind were the ones I had with HealthSparq, a healthcare transparency company that’s part of Cambia Health Solutions. I never thought I’d work in the healthcare field, but the team’s passion and vision won me over. So on April 13th I’m starting at Healthsparq as a Director of Product. Healthsparq’s president, Scott Decker, wrote a post the other day that’s a pretty good summary of why I decided to join them. From Health Care Transparency: Opening Up the Market:

It’s important that these new transparency tools provide robust information that people want to know in a way they can make actionable. While more and more health care data is being generated and released — from personal tracking devices to government and payer data — the information won’t be useful unless it is understandable and easy to navigate. These new transparency tools should provide as complete a picture as possible of price and quality, from the moment a person begins receiving care for a specific condition to the time when they no longer require treatment.

That’s a tough UX problem, and a vision I can get behind. I’m excited about the move to a new city with new beginnings and new things to explore — and a product I can believe in.

Anyway, I’m telling you the strange story of how this all happened because I’m worried that we don’t always appreciate how cool the internet can be. My decision to start a crappy blog in 2004 eventually led to a bunch of connections with fantastic people who decided to give me a shot (remind me to tell you about the day that Francisco sent me a DM to ask if I’d like to write for Smashing Magazine). This move wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t met Jim and Rudolph online, and if they weren’t such nice people, and I can’t quite get my brain around how great that is.

We give the internet a lot of crap, and yes, it can be a vile place sometimes. But we’re moving to Portland because of relationships that were started and cemented on the internet, so I’m going to remain in awe of this technology that has the power to help us make each other’s lives so much better.

Lee Hutchinson, who was a system administrator at Boeing at the time of the space shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003, looks back at that tumultuous time in a long but absolutely fascinating article for Ars Technica:

In August 2003, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) issued its final report. Behind the direct cause of the foam strike, the report leveled damning critiques at NASA’s pre- and post-launch decision-making, painting a picture of an agency dominated by milestone-obsessed middle management1. That focus on narrow, group-specific work and reporting, without a complementary focus on cross-department integration and communication2, contributed at least as much to the loss of the shuttle as did the foam impact. Those accusations held a faint echo of familiarity—many of them had been raised 17 years earlier by the Rogers Commission investigating Challenger’s destruction.

The report also asked a team at NASA to figure out what a rescue plan might have looked like:

To put the decisions made during the flight of STS-107 into perspective, the Board asked NASA to determine if there were options for the safe return of the STS-107 crew.

The rest of the article explains the possible rescue plan in detail. If you have any interest in science or space exploration this is a must-read.

I found the article particularly interesting because I had just finished reading my favorite novel of the year so far: The Martian by Andy Weir. The article echoed a lot of the concepts mentioned in the novel, which gave me a new appreciation for the story. I highly recommend this surprisingly plausible and funny book as well.

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1. See, this is a problem everywhere, not just in software development… ↩

2. This too. ↩

Evie Nagy did a fascinating interview with danah boyd about her new book, It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens. On how teens use Facebook and Twitter:

They’re also more likely to have protected accounts, and use it to talk to a small group of their actual friends. To them Facebook is everyone they ever knew, and Twitter is something they’ve locked down to just a handful of people they care about — which is often the opposite of how adults use them.

A lot of the teens I talk to, they’ll have like 30 followers. It’s a small world for them, as opposed to trying to grow large followings. There are teens who are themselves microcelebrities, which is a different game. There are also a lot of teens who use Twitter around interests. An obsession with One Direction, and just talking to other One Direction people. That becomes Twitter, and then they’ll use Instagram with another group of friends. This one girl I talked to said, ‘Yeah, if you’re not into the things that I’m into, don’t follow me on Twitter.’

I’ve long been a fan of danah’s work, so I just bought the book and can’t wait to read it.

Related, Kayleigh Roberts wrote a very interesting article on how teens try to get celebrities to follow them on Twitter. From The Psychology of Begging to Be Followed on Twitter:

It’s not rare for a teen who is spamming to reach what is known as the tweet limit, something that the average user of the site might not even know exists. The tweet limit is 1,000 tweets per day, and many teens reach it regularly, especially when seeking the attention of a celebrity. It may seem excessive, but celebrities with millions of followers receive so many tweets, that it’s easy for even 1,000 to go unnoticed. Reaching the tweet limit can happen by accident, but it’s often a premeditated decision.

This is a world I didn’t even knew existed. I feel pretty old right now.

Great article by Zach Holman on startup growth, hiring, and culture:

I think a number of startups end up reaching some type of blindness as they grow and reach success. They are the same companies whose founders are college dropouts, but now that they’re a hundred employees they decide to follow Google’s model and recruit exclusively from top five-ranked schools. They are the same companies that hire a monoculture, not realizing that their success stemmed in part from the oddball founding crew that came together in the initial years. They are the same companies that miss out on the clever-but-unknown hacker because they’ve been in the spotlight themselves for so long.

Flappy Bird — that insufferable iOS game — has been in the news quite a bit recently. One of the more incensed “reviews” comes from Paul Tassi’s Winged Fury:

Flappy Bird is not a game. It’s an addictive collection of pixels you don’t win, you simply play until you’re frustrated enough to delete it. And yet, it’s tapped into some primal sense of accomplishment for this, the attention-deficit world we live in. Have nothing to do for more than a few moments? Whip out your phone and flap your way through some pipes. You’ll be dead in seconds with each attempt, and therefore the game can kill any span of time from half a minute to hours. […]

The time spent there is lost forever. The skill required to achieve high scores is wasted potential with no benefit whatsoever to the player. To brag about a score here is to boast to a friend how many times you managed to punch a brick wall before stopping.

Ian Bogost’s The Squalid Grace of Flappy Bird starts like this:

Games are grotesque.

And it he only gets angrier from there:

Flappy Bird is a perversely, oppressively difficult game. […] Flappy Bird is not difficult to challenge you, nor even to teach the institution of videogames a thing or two. Rather, Flappy Bird is difficult because that’s how it is. It is a game that is indifferent, like an iron gate rusted shut, like the ice that shuts down a city. It’s not hard for the sake of your experience; it’s just hard because that’s the way it is. Where masocore games want nothing more than to please their players with pain and humiliation (thus their appropriation of the term “masochism”), Flappy Bird just exists. It wants nothing and expects even less.

Look, way too much time has been wasted discussing how much time people are wasting on Flappy Bird. Still, it’s just so exactly like the internet to latch onto a phenomenon like this and then blow it completely out of proportion — and in the case of Forbes and The Atlantic, turn it into some highbrow existential reflection. It’s why I hate the internet, and it’s why I love the internet, all wrapped up into one silly little game.

But perhaps the last word should go to Bogost:

For no matter how stupid it is to be a game, it is no less stupid to be a man who plays one.

I’ve been thinking about this whole “being online” thing quite a bit over the past week or so, so James Shelley’s The Overinflated Currency of Personal Brands struck quite a chord:

What happens when the fame contagion infects an entire society? [American historian Daniel Boorstin] speculated that “The quest for celebrity, the pressure for well-knownness, everywhere makes the worker overshadow the work.” Increasingly we will go about our lives and work not actually concerned with the living and working itself, but with being known for our lives and work. Our lives and work become nothing but source material for the promotion of our personalities. Ultimately, achievement and accomplishment come to mean nothing, if they are not mechanisms for propagating our individual cult stories.

I see this more and more online, and it’s a worrisome trend — this tendency to measure the value of our work by the number of people who see it and comment on it. Our search for meaningful work should always outweigh our search for recognition. This idea of individual stories and meaning remind me of Donald Miller’s words in one of my favorite books, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years:

If [it’s true about] a good story being a condensed version of life — that is, if story is just life without the meaningless scenes — I wondered if life could be lived more like a good story in the first place. I wondered if a person could plan a story for his life and live it intentionally.

Planning a good story for our lives has nothing to do with “well-knownness” and everything to do with the amount of meaning we pack into each day. I know I’m being a bit sentimental today, but it’s because our family is on the verge of a very big change, and much of it is driven by a renewed appreciation for living life with greater intention. Over the past few years I’ve seen my decisions increasingly being influenced by a desire for my daughters to one day say to their friends, “My Dad wasn’t afraid to take risks.” So that’s what we’re doing…