Linknote — — 65 words

Media — Technology

15 months of fresh hell inside Facebook — Nicholas Thompson and Fred Vogelstein — Wired

Mark Zuckerberg surrounded by Facebook icons

I enjoy Wired’s periodic long articles about Facebook. They avoid the shrillness that most media outlets exhibit when writing or talking about Facebook. This article is all the more powerful for it. And unlike many self-publicists who spend a lot of time writing basic stuff about Facebook and acting as though they’ve discovered the story of the decade, this contains genuine insights and new information.

Linknote — — 184 words

Economics — Technology — Web

Typewriter

On blogs in the social media age — Cal Newport, Study Hacks

Putting into economic terms the distinction between blogging and social media, and articulating what we have lost through the decline of blogging.

If you want attention for your blog you have to earn it through a combination of quality, in the sense that you’re producing something valuable for your readers, and trust, in the sense that you’ve produced enough good stuff over time to establish a good reputation with the fellow bloggers whose links will help grow your audience.

I first realised this about blogging when it became clear that comments sections on major websites were almost always cesspits. People in comments sections are generally attempting to freeride on the quality of the website they are posting on.

Bloggers, on the other hand, really need to be high-quality to get any sort of audience at all. That makes blogs generally good.

Social media is quite the opposite. To start getting traction on social media, the threshold is rather low. In fact, often, lower quality works better.

Link via Khürt Williams

Linknote — — 78 words

Technology

Facebook is giving advertisers access to your shadow contact information

Facebook is not content to use the contact information you willingly put into your Facebook profile for advertising. It is also using contact information you handed over for security purposes and contact information you didn’t hand over at all, but that was collected from other people’s contact books, a hidden layer of details Facebook has about you that I’ve come to call “shadow contact information.”

Linknote — — 197 words

Technology

It’s time to say goodbye to Twitter

sonniesedge on taking a break from Twitter.

That cross-pollination of views that you might never have heard before is still Twitter’s amazing core feature. I learned so much about intersectional justice from the people on it. I heard disabled people’s voices. I saw the world from the point of view of women of colour. I saw political issues that I’d never been aware of before.

But lurking behind those vitally interesting points of view is a host of people ready to push the kindness of humanity through the mincer with their keyboards.

When I decided to reduce my use of social media, I expected that I wouldn’t miss Twitter. Its tendency to generate more heat than light is a great detriment.

But even while I don’t post so often on Twitter, I found that I still get some enjoyment from reading Twitter, and I still turn to it a few times a day. In comparison, giving up posting to Facebook has been a piece of cake, and I don’t remotely miss having Instagram on my phone. But Twitter still seems to bring me value, despite its problems.

Linknote — — 153 words

Current affairs — Technology

Everything bad about Facebook is bad for the same reason

How Facebook’s focus on the connections between users, rather than the humans who use it, is its core problem.

Underlying all of Facebook’s screw-ups is a bumbling obliviousness to real humans. The company’s singular focus on “connecting people” has allowed it to conquer the world, making possible the creation of a vast network of human relationships, a source of insights and eyeballs that makes advertisers and investors drool.

But the imperative to “connect people” lacks the one ingredient essential for being a good citizen: Treating individual human beings as sacrosanct. To Facebook, the world is not made up of individuals, but of connections between them. The billions of Facebook accounts belong not to “people” but to “users,” collections of data points connected to other collections of data points on a vast Social Network, to be targeted and monetized by computer programs.