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Matt Birchler on wanting a delay tweet button: People sometimes act like outrage and fake news is only a problem for Twitter and Facebook, but it’s a problem for any form of social media, as these services live and breath on those quick dopamine hits you get from posting some witty rejoinder or boosting something that supports your worldview. After all, on social media we can all be experts in whatever we want. -
Karen Hao on Facebooks misinformation addiction: The algorithms that underpin Facebook’s business weren’t created to filter out what was false or inflammatory; they were designed to make people share and engage with as much content as possible by showing them things they were most likely to be outraged or titillated by I know I keep bleating on about this but it’s easy to forget this, so it’s important to remind people that you come across that don’t understand. -
I don’t remember the first time I thought about killing myself. It has to have been too long ago for my mind to recall, or it’s blocked from my conscious thought. I do remember the ups and downs of earlier life. For the longest time I thought what I felt was just how everyone else felt. There wasn’t an even level of happiness, nowhere near. It was a constant wave of highs and lows that was impossible to predict. -
We’ve all seen or heard of someone being ‘de platformed’ and loosing access to a service. Usually because they’ve done something stupid, or heinous and the powers that be no longer want them on their platform. It happens thousands of times a day, but it never fails to hit the news when someone popular gets the boot. When this happens, there are always some people who don’t agree. Followers and fans unite to collectively shake their fists at the service for a time, but soon enough things return to normal. -
DHH on old school tracking: How bizarre it would have seemed back then to learn that in the future your reading habits would not only be tracked forever by Big Tech, and thus available to any agent with a subpoena, but broadcast to the world in a variety of uncomfortable ways. I am sure you all know my thoughts on tracking things. I hate it, unless it has a clear and transparent reason. -
In recent weeks I have been a bit of a restless soul. Moving things around despite my insistence that you didn’t need to do it. It’s been part of a long-running plan for me to straighten everything out and stop spreading myself too thin in projects, but I digress. I’ve moved my hosting from Ghost to WordPress, and now to Micro.blog. Despite a few hiccups and me not being 100% happy there is a certain freedom that is felt by just posting everything to one place. -
To steal some inspiration from Gabz I wanted to write about my favourite Apple device I own. For which I own loads of them — Apple Watch, iPhone 12 Pro, iPad Pro, iMac Pro, MacBook Pro (Pro all the things) — but these pale in comparison to my absolute favourite AirPods Pro.
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DHH wanting less platforms Everything from everyone all the time is too much. It’s unnatural and it’s unhealthy. We weren’t built to listen to hundreds if not thousands of people every day. Sometimes regular things to everyone else are overwhelming to others. Every time I try and explain how I feel to others they pooh-Pooh what I am saying because they don’t see an issue. That’s great to hear, but something has changed in me and I don’t want more of anything. -
Yes. Unless you can’t tell I have moved my blog, again. It’s now firmly rooted into micro.blog, and I’d like to say it’s made me happier. But you know me, I worry about almost everything at the minute and one of the biggest things I think abut is you! Yep, you read that correctly. Readers. I can’t quite achieve where I want to get to with my micro.blog hosting, but I can get 90% of the way there. -
Make me smart with Kai and Molly: Facebook is cigarettes… It’s Big Tobacco… They know its product causes harm and they keep minimizing the harm to keep selling product. As Mario pointed out, who brought this to me attention, there are 2 billion people addicted. This is a perfect analogy. We know it’s bad for not only us personally, but also to society as a whole. Yet the addiction runs deep through the world.