This is great advice on providing feedback on docs. This especially resonated:

Before starting, remember that the goal of providing feedback on a document is to help the author. Optimizing for anything else, even if it’s a worthy cause, discourages authors from sharing their future writing. If you prioritize something other than helping the author, you are discouraging them from sharing future work.

→ How to provide feedback on documents.

Robin Sloan discusses Substack, and platforms in general, in another excellent post:

Expect enclosure; expect a few big winners; expect advertising, with all the attention-hacking that will demand. Expect, also, that writers will con­tinue to mold their work to fit Sub­stack’s par­tic­ular ecology, rather than “merely” use the tools to pursue their inde­pen­dent visions and ambitions. We learned this about plat­forms a long time ago.

→ Platform reality

This is a lovely post by Craig Mod about the Japanese approach to garbage, and what that means for other things in our lives…

This obsession with the immediate “unburdening” of a thing you created is common in non-Japanese contexts, but I posit: The Japanese way is the correct way. Be an adult. Own your garbage. […]

Personally, I don’t love carrying my garbage around with me, but I recognize that it wouldn’t exist without my intervention. Nobody ran up and asked me to hold an empty cup. I thoughtlessly bought something. Thoughtlessly consumed it, and now I have to hold onto the detritus for a little while? Great. It’s easy. Easy to embrace that modicum of responsibility for your own waste. This is my protest song, the world’s lamest: I will attend to my garbage without complaint.

I love this deep-dive on the little interjections we use in everyday speech. One example:

Other interjections serve as what some linguists call ‘continuers,’ such as ‘mm-hmm’—signals from the listener that they’re paying attention and the speaker should keep going. The form of the word is well suited to its function: Because ‘mm-hmm’ is made with a closed mouth, it’s clear that the signaler does not intend to speak.

When Andrew Liptak writes about Lord of the Rings, I pay attention. This is one of his best yet, drawing a line from Tolkien to our present-day world in an incredible way:

A critical theme throughout Tolkien’s work is the decline of a once-great people, with weak men failing to live up to the lives and stories of their predecessors.

But we should not despair:

Tolkien isn’t throwing up his hands and pointing out that the world is terrible: he’s explaining that there are ways to avoid falling into despair: sticking to one’s morals, distinguishing the things that are objectively good and bad in the world, and recognizing how to move on those instincts to do good in the world. It’s an inherently optimistic story that serves as an excellent guide for us in the dark times ahead of us.

Also see his piece Corruptibility for more thoughts in the same vein:

The core thing that I take away from Tolkien’s work is that power is dangerous to work with, and that very few who encounter it come away unscathed.

I love the Murderbot books, and this interview with author Martha Wells is a delight:

Of all her characters, Wells has said, Murderbot is the one she’s put the most of herself into. It’s a surprising claim, until it’s not. It’s obvious that Wells feels a distance from other humans, even as she’s spent a life trying to relate to them, to understand them.

I love everything Mandy Brown writes, but Coming home hit extra hard. I have been becoming increasingly disillusioned with social media to a point where I wish I could just leave it all behind, but I had this idea in my head that because of the work I do, that’s not an option. Mandy managed to articulate my feelings about it so well:

To step into the stream of any social network, to become immersed in the news, reactions, rage and hopes, the marketing and psyops, the funny jokes and clever memes, the earnest requests for mutual aid, for sign ups, for jobs, the clap backs and the call outs, the warnings and invitations—it can feel like a kind of madness. It’s unsettling, in the way that sediment is unsettled by water, lifted up and tossed around, scattered about. A pebble goes wherever the river sends it, worn down and smoothed day after day until all that’s left is sand.

I’ve been particularly disappointed with how Mastodon just isn’t the replacement I hoped it would be, and on that point I feel validated as well:

As much as the Fediverse is different (the governing structures, the incentives, the moderation, the absence of ads and engagement tricks), so much of it is also unsettlingly familiar—the same small boxes, the same few buttons, the same mechanics of following and being followed. The same babbling, tumbling, rushing stream of thoughts. I can’t tell if we’re stuck with this design because it’s familiar, or if it’s familiar because we’re stuck. Very likely it’s me that’s stuck, fixed in place while everything rushes around me, hoping for a gap, a break, a warm rock to rest awhile on. Longing for a mode of communication that lifts me up instead of wiping me out.

Her conclusion about writing on your own site has always been important to me as well, but her point that it’s about more than just “owning your content” is excellent:

While one of the reasons oft declared for using POSSE is the ability to own your content, I’m less interested in ownership than I am in context. Writing on my own site has very different affordances: I’m not typing into a little box, but writing in a text file. I’m not surrounded by other people’s thinking, but located within my own body of work. As I played with setting this up, I could immediately feel how that would change the kinds of things I would say, and it felt good. Really good. Like putting on a favorite t-shirt, or coming home to my solid, quiet house after a long time away.

15 years into writing this site, what Mandy says here feels good to me. I think I will continue to post here until I have nothing left to say—and the words will remain here long after that day has passed. I’ll dip into social media when I must, but this will always be home.

I love this sentiment from Austin Kleon:

I am big on being a “curious elder”—and one way, I think, to expand the curious elder idea is to not just be curious about what young people are into, but to also share your curiosity about the world in a way that is generous but without expectation. To point out the things you think are good… just in case somebody, maybe even somebody younger, is looking for them.

I’ll go ahead and keep sharing the things I like, and I hope everyone else does too.

I am a big believer in “moving at the speed of trust” with teams. You cannot shortcut the work to build strong relationships—and I’m afraid there is no roadmap or deadline for that. Sometimes it’s easy, sometimes it takes longer. But don’t skip this work. Move at the speed of trust.

Ben Kuhn shares some good tips around this in Trust as a bottleneck to growing teams quickly. I particularly like these two:

• Overcommunicate status. This helps in two ways: first, it gives stakeholders more confidence that if something goes off the rails they’ll know quickly. And second, it gives them more data and helps them build a higher-fidelity model of how you operate.
• Proactively own up when something isn’t going well. Arguably a special case of overcommunicating, but one that’s especially important to get right: if you can be relied on to ask for help when you need it, it’s a lot less risky for people to “try you out” on stuff at the edge of what they trust you on.

And speaking of communication… Also see Arne Kittler’s Part 4: Clear Communication, part of a series on “Clarity for Product Managers”:

Lengthy texts dilute your message or even discourage your counterparts to deal with them in the first place. Focus on the main points you want to make and provide the context that’s necessary to understand them as quickly as possible. When asking for information or a decision, be clear about what’s unclear.