Posts tagged “social media”

8 February 2024

Taylor Swift and the Good Girl Trap

You know an essay is going to be good when this is the preamble:

I am writing this piece in good faith (that you, as a reader, like to think more about the culture that surrounds you, whether it’s culture you love or hate or are ambivalent about) and that you are in turn reading in good faith (that I do not hate Taylor Swift, that this is not a takedown, that we’re talking about Swift’s image but we’re also talking about people’s reaction to that image).

But yes, this is a really timely and poignant piece by Anne Helen Peterson about Taylor Swift and the impossible trajectory of celebrity:

But sometimes, when you keep on winning — awards, sure, but also in your career — it doesn’t matter who you are or how hard you worked for those achievements. People are going to find it harder to root for you. It’s when domination turns into over-saturation: when honest missteps become weaponized, when the interpersonal comes to feel emblematic, when every move becomes overdetermined.

29 January 2024

How platforms killed Pitchfork

This is such a good point about music discovery and the abundance of choice:

Before Spotify, when presented with a new album, we would ask: why listen to this? After Spotify, we asked: why not?

I also like this sentiment:

On one level it’s impressive that Spotify can perfectly capture my musical taste in a series of data points, and regurgitate it to me in a series of weekly playlists. But as good as it has gotten, I can’t remember the last time it pointed me to something I never expected I would like, but ultimately fell totally in love with.

For that you needed someone who could go beyond the data to tell you the story: of the artist, of the genre, of the music they made. For that you needed criticism.

3 December 2023

Building community out of strangers

I love Tracy Durnell’s blog—it’s been in my RSS reader for a long time. In Building community out of strangers she makes a case for personal sites to be more… personal.

I like hearing about the trials and triumphs of other normal people’s lives, seeing what goals they pursue and what they care about enough to write about. I gather book recommendations from others’ reviews, sample others’ taste in music, and delight in the daily wonders of others’ worlds: the cat luxuriating in a strip of sunshine, the stream in the dappled light of an open forest, the neat-looking conjunction of lines on the wall they passed on their morning walk. While social media emphasizes the show-off stuff—the vacation in Puerto Vallarta, the full kitchen remodel, the night out on the town—on blogs it still seems that people are sharing more than signalling. These small pleasures seem to be offered in a spirit of generosity—this is too beautiful not to share.

I love that perspective—and this is exactly why I follow so many personal blogs. And yet I’ve always been a little scared to go there on this site. I’m supposed to be a professional! This is work!

Well, I think that 20 years into doing this tech thing for a living it’s time to start sharing a bit more about all my interests, not just the product stuff. So I guess this is your fair warning that you might start to see more of that here!

PS. Tracy also updated her blog roll (remember those!?) and I am definitely going to add one here as well.

24 November 2023

Algorithms Hijacked My Generation. I Fear For Gen Alpha.

This is a bleak take, but I have to admit that I am also concerned.

I believe we have some personal agency. I also believe that a 12-year-old’s mind is no match for a giant corporation using the most advanced AI to manipulate her behavior. Gen Z were the first generation to have our vulnerabilities and insecurities fed into a machine that magnified and refracted them back at us before we had any sense of who we were.

26 July 2023

Dear Alt-Twitter Designers: It's about the network!

Excellent post by danah boyd, reminding us that with social networks it all comes down to nurturing the network dynamics, not the technical features.

That’s the thing about social media. For people to devote their time and energy to helping enable vibrancy, they have to gain something from it. Something that makes them feel enriched and whole, something that gives them pleasure (even if at someone else’s pain). Social media doesn’t come to life through military tactics. It comes to life because people devote their energies into making it vibrant for those that are around them. And this ripples through networks.

12 July 2023

Threads isn’t depressing, it’s just not for you

I don’t think that Threads—the new Twitter-like service from Meta—is above critique. It’s noisy, it lacks a lot of features, and there seems to be a lot of desperate land-grabbing going on by various celebrities and brands. You might even say the whole thing feels off—and there is even a fairly academic reason for that feeling. In It’s Not Cancel Culture—It’s A Platform Failure Charlie Warzel reminds us about “context collapse”:

Context collapse occurs when a surfeit of different audiences occupy the same space, and a piece of information intended for one audience finds its way to another—usually an uncharitable one—which then reads said information in the worst possible faith.

We’ve probably all experienced this to some degree—you say something and it gets misunderstood or misconstrued (sometimes understandably!) by an audience that doesn’t have all the context. Anne Helen Petersen uses that concept to explain exactly why The Thread Vibes Are Off:

Twitter was for thoughts, and Instagram is for vibes—and Threads is trying to pull your Instagram feed into a Twitter format. And I’m here to tell you: THE VIBES ARE OFF. […]

What’s happening early on with Threads is that influencers are experiencing their own kind of context collapse, where their vague, sometimes vapid messages are traveling toward a different type of audience. This is pretty much what Threads feels like to me now: a place that’s ostensibly interesting (look, so many people are already here!) but is actually totally boring. It’s “fun,” but definitely not funny.

So, like I said: Threads isn’t above criticism and there’s a lot of work to be done to improve it. But I also think it’s important for the complainers to realize that it’s possible that maybe—just maybe—Threads isn’t for us. And that’s ok. One example is the constant complaints I see (and I have as well!) about the lack of a “following-only” feed, and a lot of “how could they launch without it” incredulousness. However, to that point, Sara Morrison makes this observation in TikTok is confusing by design:

TikTok is the ultimate example of how our digital world is shifting from seemingly limitless possibilities and choice—the internet of my formative years—into a controlled experience that’s optimized to know or decide what we want and then deliver it to us. And TikTok is one of the best examples of this change.

That piece is worth reading in full, but it explains how the chronological feed might be a thing of the past—and not because companies want it, but because user data shows that they want it. This is why posts like Facebook’s Threads is so depressing—which I’ve seen quoted and mentioned a lot in my various feeds—really rubs me the wrong way. It is one big wall of snark about how bad Threads is, how it should die, and how it has no redeeming qualities at all. What’s worse is that I’ve seen lots of product people quote that piece and praise it, which I find really confusing.

Yes, Threads has lots of room for improvement. I find it too chaotic (right now) for what I want in a social network. But if you scroll just a little bit it’s clear to see that people on there are having a blast—so how about we don’t judge anyone and everyone who gets on there! Isn’t having empathy for users and curiosity around certain behaviors everything in product? Shouldn’t we be impressed and interested in what we can learn from how Meta built that product to scale to 10 million users in 24 hours without a hitch?

It’s natural to get riled up about products that mean something to us, but we have to guard against blind spots when it comes to how people who are not like us use the web. It’s ok to not like Threads, but it’s not ok to negate and mock the experience of millions of people who are clearly enjoying the product immensely. Not just because it’s unkind and unnecessary, but also because we’d be losing out on a huge opportunity to learn from how that team executes.

P.S. If you are more of a visual person, here’s a 16-second Youtube video summarizing this post.

14 June 2023

MrBeast and product management (sorry)

This is a fascinating profile of MrBeast and his YouTube empire (NYT Gift Article). It’s extensively researched and presented with a steady hand. The reason I link to it here is I think he would be a pretty good product manager, albeit a litte bit on the obsessive side:

Donaldson stands out for his dedication to understanding how YouTube works. For most of his teenage years, “I woke up, I studied YouTube, I studied videos, I studied filmmaking, I went to bed and that was my life,” Donaldson once told Bloomberg. “I hardly had any friends because I was so obsessed with YouTube,” he said on “The Joe Rogan Experience” last year.

After high school, he hooked up with a gang of similarly obsessed “lunatics” and planned out a program of study. He and his friends “did nothing but just hyperstudy what makes a good video, what makes a good thumbnail, what’s good pacing, how to go viral,” he told Rogan. “We’d do things like take a thousand thumbnails and see if there’s correlation to the brightness of the thumbnail to how many views it got. Videos that got over 10 million views, how often do they cut the camera angles? Things like that.”

That reminds me of the famous 41 shades of blue testing at Google. Also, one thing I never realized about the whole thing is that MrBeast’s pitch is basically “Hey, you do charity just by watching me because I use the money I get for charity, so the more you watch me the more charitable you are.” That is a bit disturbing but also pretty clever.

28 May 2023

How technology changed the world

Noah Smith’s rumination on how technology has changed the world since he was young really resonated with me:

When I look back on the world I lived in when I was a kid in 1990, it absolutely stuns me how different things are now. The technological changes I’ve already lived through may not have changed what my kitchen looks like, but they have radically altered both my life and the society around me. Almost all of these changes came from information technology — computers, the internet, social media, and smartphones.

He goes through several examples, and comes to this conclusion:

Sometimes technology grows the economy, but more fundamentally, it always weirds the world. By that I mean that technology changes the nature of what humans do and how we live, so that people living decades ago would think our modern lives bizarre, even if we find them perfectly normal.

Like him, when I think about it all and compare it to life in 1990, “I can’t help but feel a little overwhelmed by how far we’ve come.” And yes, I miss some of the things Noah mentions in his post—I have fond memories of “getting lost” with my wife in European cities. But for the most part I am much more in line with Clive Thompson’s thinking in his book Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better:

Today we have something that works in the same way, but for everyday people: the Internet, which encourages public thinking and resolves multiples on a much larger scale and at a pace more dementedly rapid. It’s now the world’s most powerful engine for putting heads together. Failed networks kill ideas, but successful ones trigger them.

His book is a wonderful perspective on all that we’ve been living through.

2 April 2023

Link roundup for April 2, 2023

No image posts today, but it’s a blockbuster edition of the link roundup this week! I hope you find something interesting in here…

1 → LinkedIn power users are turning to ghostwriters (Vox)

LinkedIn remains a complete mystery to me.

“It’s cliché, but it’s true that people want to work with people, people buy from people, people want to see the human side of who you are before they decide to work with you,” says Tara Horstmeyer, an Atlanta-based ghostwriter who offers packages for 12 LinkedIn posts for anywhere between $2,000 and $3,000.

2 → How the Great Recession paved the way for the influencer industry (Vox)

It’s worth reading this fascinating interview with a curious mind. Especially if you, like me, are “of a certain age” and feel like you just don’t get it…

Influencers are neither ‘a flash in the pan’ nor ‘a bubble about to burst,’ but indicators of a paradigm shift in the way we think about each other and ourselves.

3 → On Place (Alica Kennedy)

This is a lovely, rich essay on the difference between “destination” and “place” when we travel, how digital nomadism displaces locals, the pursuit of a “decent meal” abroad, and more.

Continued economic dependence upon tourism leads inevitably to brain drain, when a labor force no longer wishes to work only service jobs. What does ‘local’ as an experience mean when it’s not in service to those who are literally local?

4 → The Life I Refused to Surrender (The Free Press)

This short essay from Amanda Knox packs a huge punch and really got to me. All we have is now…

No matter how small, cruel, sad, and unfair this life was, it was my life. Mine to make meaning out of, mine to live to the best of my ability. There was no more waiting. There was only now.

5 → The Streaming Market Is Fundamentally Broken. It’s Time To Fix It. (Public Knowledge)

There is just so much wrong with the music streaming industry.

Artists aren’t allowed to see the deals that set their streaming payment rates; indie labels aren’t allowed to see the deals distributors cut with labels on their behalf . And in many cases, artists aren’t even allowed to compare notes and talk about their own contracts.

6 → People Started Buying Crocs During the Pandemic. They Can’t Stop. (NYT Gift Article)

I have no pithy comment for this one.

“I roll into the gym with my Crocs on and everything, and people ask, ‘Aren’t you going to change shoes?’” Mr. Ndugga said. “No, this is how I’m going to live life for now.”

7 → Free Bird (Substack)

A top-to-bottom excellent post about Twitter from Ed Zitron. Read the whole thing!

Twitter can create an incredible sense of both intellectual invincibility and vulnerability that can drive someone quite mad.

8 → The Counterintuitive Thing About Trust That Explains Why So Many Teams Have Issues With It (LinkedIn)

This is an insightful post on the leader qualities that really build trust. In short, it’s about showing that you really, truly care.

Studies indicate that conveying benevolence is much more likely to earn you trust than conveying how competent you are. […] That’s why all things being equal, a person who is charismatic and kind will gain more trust than a person who is seen has having good ability.

9 → The Dangers Of Highly Centralized AI (Medium)

I agree with this take from Clive. It’s like we’ve learned nothing from social media.

The field of large language models is becoming dangerously centralized. A huge amount of power resides in the hands of a tiny number of firms.

10 → The Stories That Bind Us (NYT Gift Link)

This is a wonderful essay about the things that ensure happy and enduring families.

The bottom line: if you want a happier family, create, refine and retell the story of your family’s positive moments and your ability to bounce back from the difficult ones. That act alone may increase the odds that your family will thrive for many generations to come.

10 March 2023

Link roundup for March 10, 2023

The World Nature Photography Awards 2022 winners have been announced.

What Does Workplace TikTok Look Like During Layoffs? It Gets Weird. Always Be Contenting, I guess. “It’s uncanny to watch clips of boisterous lunch buffets next to teary videos about being exiled from them—sometimes from the very same creators just months apart. You come to see how workday and layoff TikToks are mutually intelligible, odd sides of the same coin. No matter what happens, they say, workers will post through it. Work will be forged into content, no matter what.” (NYT gift link)

How to Take Back Control of What You Read on the Internet. Even The Atlantic is getting in on the RSS love! Could 2023 really, actually be the year? “But despite the syndication format’s cult following, most internet users have never heard of it. That’s unfortunate, because RSS provides everyday internet users with an easy way to organize all of their online-content consumption in one place, curated by the user, not an algorithm.”

I doubled-down on RSS. More RSS content! Here are a lot of words about the good and the bad of it. And some interesting observations too… “If you judge someone solely from the content they blog about, most folk will seem stodgy and humorless. I’m painfully aware that I’m no exception. The problem is that if you position yourself as irreverent, you’re likely to be dismissed.”

How The Last of Us re-created a 2003 arcade with the help of true enthusiasts. This article is so great. “We’re stupidly proud of this. All of it. We knew that anything less wouldn’t cut it and we’re nothing shy of grateful that HBO and the rest of the production encouraged us to go to these lengths.”

How the ring got good. A wonderful reflection on how Tolkien stumbled his way to what became Lord of the Rings. There’s some strong words of encouragement for all of us: “If Tolkien can find his way to the One Ring in the middle of the fifth draft, so can I, and so can you.”

De La Soul Is Streaming. A very important public service announcement on where you should start listening.