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 — — 193 words

Technology — Web

We are all trapped in the “Feed”

Om Malik summarises the problem with the big social media companies whose algorithms are causing us to drown in junk content.

Many have forgotten, but services like Digg helped popularize the idea of what I call intellectual spam. Headlines, followed by vapid content, meant to attract the likes. Against such a backdrop, a decade ago, we all assumed that the rise of the personal web, shaped by individual data would result in signals that will help us dampen the noise. We thought that our systems would get smarter, learning from our behavior, and we would be able to separate signal from noise. And this would allow us to focus our attention on the meaningful and essential.

Unfortunately, the reality of capitalism and turned that dream into a big giant popularity contest, shaped by crude tools – likes, hearts, retweets, and re-shares. We have created systems that boost noise and weaken signals. Every time I tune into news and all I see is noise rising to the top. Whether it is YouTube or Instagram — all you see are memes that are candy-colored candy, mean to keep us hooked.

Linknote — — 103 words

Technology — User experience

Twitter gets message order wrong

Philip Hunt on how bad Twitter’s user interface has become.

When Twitter started out, it was such a simple concept. Just straightforward status updates; no real interaction. (When I joined Twitter, @ replies didn’t even exist yet.)

Over time it has added more and more features — replies, retweets, quote retweets, threads. Seemingly it has not been thought through properly.

If you spend a lot of time on Twitter, you catch onto these user interface quirks pretty quickly. But new users must find it so intimidating. So it is little wonder Twitter struggles to attract and retain new users.

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Technology

Escaping Twitter’s self-consciousness machine

On how the experience of using Twitter is transformed by removing all metrics from the interface.

The article makes a good point about why platforms like Twitter place so much emphasis on numbers:

The type of person who tends to be a high-level coder at a top tech firm… usually got great grades, attended a premier university, and now competes for bragging rights by trying to log the longest hours of anyone at the office. These people thrive in numbers-focussed environments. Perhaps it’s predestined that their world view would infect the user interfaces they create.

It is tempting to think our obsession with metrics is part of human nature. But is it just a trait of a particular type of person?

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Digital

The significance of the Twitter archive at the Library of Congress

The Library of Congress has now stopped preserving all public tweets. In the words of Dan Cohen in this article, “The Twitter archive may not be the record of our humanity that we wanted, but it’s the record we have.”

I am amused at the idea of future historians having a highly detailed record of everything on Twitter up to the year Donald Trump got elected, and the year before Brexit is due to happen. What a cliffhanger.

See also: Future historians probably won’t understand our internet, and that’s OK

Linknote — — 110 words

Technology

One person’s history of Twitter, from beginning to end — Mike Monteiro

Ten years ago, a group of white dudes baked the DNA of the platform without thought to harassment or abuse. They built the platform with the best of intentions. I still believe this. But they were ignorant to their own blind spots. As we all are. This is the value of diverse teams by the way. When you’re building a tool with a global reach (and who isn’t these days) your team needs to look like the world it’s trying to reach. And ten years later, the abuse has proven too much to fix.