Software and Other Shenanigans

Chelsea Troy wrote a fantastic article last September titled “What do we do with the Twitter-shaped hole in the internet?” While I don’t subscribe to the premise that Twitter is “crashing,” there were about 2 articles worth of good reading in 1 URL, so it bears a lot of consideration (It’s worth noting that I have a much smaller follower count, get less activity on my tweets, and generally tweet less original stuff vs. just retweeting, so my mileage clearly varies). Troy does a good job of discussing the things Twitter does well, areas where it’s historically been weak from a fundamental “this is how the app was intended to run” perspective, as well as good comparisons and contrasts with other communications apps, and their designed limitations. She follows up with a great post walking through a potential design for a hypothetical new social application that would be very appealing. But in the process of designing her hypothetical application was a great discussion on identifying and promoting quality that is the part that really sticks out as particularly interesting.

The term “exit” always irritated me when people write about startups. Especially because it only happens when a company is either bought or IPOs. I’m not saying that startups don’t use acquisition (or IPOs if you’re Twitter – never X) as an exit strategy to avoid actually making money, but a lot of times companies do this after they’ve become a profitable, self-sustaining business. Despite that, we still don’t have a clear definition of when non-retail companies stop being startups and start being plain old businesses (even if they’re small), and it needs to be fixed.

Continue reading »

If you see any sort of headlines about CEOs and remote work, then you likely heard that Malcolm Gladwell does not like remote work. I had some thoughts on why I think his position (and others like it) is stupid. My position is hardly uncommon – most of the arguments for returning to the office revolve around saying either a) people can’t collaborate unless they’re in the same room (the fact that team-based jobs kept up just fine since Covid happened thoroughly disproved that), b) we need it for the “culture” (“culture” has nothing to do with physical proximity, and isn’t as valued as some people think it is – although looking at that meme makes me miss the days when we at least got cubicles), or c) people aren’t productive working from home (they weren’t productive in the office either, you just thought they were because you saw them sitting at a desk). In my tweet thread, I brought up a personal hypothesis that you can group most people into 1 of 2 groups, “true believers” and “mercenaries,” that I thought warranted more details than you can get on Twitter.

Continue reading »

Something broke with our approach to disagreements. We went from simply arguing with people who were wrong on the Internet to to demands that people be deplatformed because they’re wrong, according to people who seem to be right equally rarely. Thanks to the aggregation of content onto a few major platforms, a few people have the arbitrary ability to make other people vanish from public discourse. At this point, it’s impossible to tell who’s right, who’s wrong, and who’s been disappeared for having views deemed “unacceptable” by people who have no business making that determination. It’s starting to seem like the reason you can’t trust just anything you see online has moved from “anybody can post anything on the Internet” to “because publishing anything too contrarian will get you kicked off.” That’s not good.

Continue reading »