Recent Articles

Cale Guthrie Weissman:

It’s true that ad-based digital media is unsustainable, but bringing on journalists and editors and then killing their revenue in the name of a business pivot hardly seems like the appropriate fix. As one person impacted by Medium’s business changes in 2015 told me, the company is “throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks.”

That’s probably the most accurate take on Medium I’ve seen.

Paywalls are not sustainable, but he’s got everything else in this post wrong. The notion that article size in kbs bloat means there’s a greater cost, is bullshit. Content is the expense, not the hosting. What’s changed is that no one believes any longer that if you put in the sweat equity that you’ll cash out later.

Turns out, you need to pay rent, and rents are going up everywhere. Turns out, sweat equity isn’t very liquid, wait it technically is, never mind.

Look at podcasting or the App Store, both more recent and over a shorter timelines hit the same wall. When these were small places it was easy to make money, and thus you didn’t need to charge people. But when there are now 5,000 podcasts which are essentially two white guys talking about tech, it’s pretty hard to demand money for that content. When there’s 3 clones of your app in the store, and 15 competitors which are slightly different, it’s hard to to convince people to pay for your app.

The bottom line is that just as paywalls don’t scale, neither does advertising. At least not if you want to afford rent. If money is to be had from ads then competition for that money increases and the shares to most are diluted to the point of not mattering. With paywalls, no one can afford them all. The audience is, the patron pool, is smaller. What’s the ideal? No clue, if I knew I’d be doing it.

Martin Evans:

Researchers, who analysed the Facebook activities of a thousand Isil supporters in 96 countries, discovered users with radical Islamist sympathies were routinely introduced to one another through the popular ‘suggested friends’ feature.

Move fast and break things?

Robinson Meyer:

And blame for this problem cannot be laid with our robotic brethren. From 2006 to 2016, Twitter bots amplified true stories as much as they amplified false ones, the study found. Fake news prospers, the authors write, “because humans, not robots, are more likely to spread it.”

The conclusion is essentially that social networks cater to, amplify, and rapidly spread disinformation and there’s no obvious way to solve it because it’s really a human problem made worse by these networks.

Unless, of course, we agree social networks are terrible and get rid of them. That seems rather obvious.

Over on Everyday Wear, I posted a review of a new short sleeved merino wool Henley that is likely to be a staple this summer.

Eitan Chitayat:

There were six individuals sitting down. One on his laptop, the other five all staring at their smartphones. Not one person had their head up. What’s the point of weaning me off this thing so I can enjoy looking around me when all I see are other addicts all looking into their iPhones? It’s a bloody epidemic. All I could think about was what are kids who come in with their parents thinking about all these people? I mean, young kids who are three, four, five, 10 years old even—this is the world they’re inheriting. No one really looks at each other anymore. They think that’s normal.

Great read.

It’s hard for me to fathom why people can’t give up Facebook, since I’ve been off of it most of my post-college life. So I found this post eye opening, and sad.

Selina Wang:

Twitter Inc. sold data access to the Cambridge University academic who also obtained millions of Facebook Inc. users’ information that was later passed to a political consulting firm without the users’ consent.

Not shocking, and I suspect this shit to keep coming out.

This update to Overcast isn’t fucking around on privacy. More of this please.

Ridiculous headline aside, Mohit Kumar:

Checkmarx reported the issue to Amazon, and the company has already addressed the problem by regularly scanning for malicious skills that “silent prompts or that listen for unusual lengths of time” and kicking them out of their official store.

I’d personally just assume that all Alexa-type devices can and will be compromised at some point to eavesdrop on you. What I don’t get is that this reporting makes it sound like Amazon is combatting the issue not by making a software patch for this loophole, but rather by policing to make sure bad actors are kicked out of the store. Which is not how this should be handled.

John Voorhees:

Although I wouldn’t suggest purchasing an app based on the promise of future features, it’s also worth noting that the 1Blocker X team says partial site whitelisting is coming soon. When implemented, the feature will allow you to do things like unblock comments and ads for a site, but leave trackers and other content blocked adding further flexibility to the app.

Great app, you should buy it. Ads are a shady business, and I strongly recommend you use a content blocker until better sets of regulations are in place to protect visitors of websites.

Nathan Toups on how to make your smart phone less addicting without going back to a feature phone has this closing thought:

This setup will cause you to be less responsive on chats and email, but that’s sort of the point. Your phone shouldn’t dictate to you what you focus your attention on, and the behavior it cultivates in keeping you “always ready” is unhealthy and spills over into parts of our lives that aren’t serving us well.

I’ve largely been doing this for the past 8 months now as well. The best tip I can give with the largest immediate impact is the notifications tips he gives. I mostly only allow app badges. Be careful though, you’ll want to turn off “sounds” as well, otherwise a notification comes in, makes a sound, but you see nothing and get really confused about what the fuck is going on. Anyways, I encourage you to give this a shot.

I’ve been trying to figure out how I am going to phase out Instagram and delete that account. Sunlit is a strong contender so I took a bunch of random shots and created a “story” of sorts with them using Sunlit and my micro blog site. The results are interesting.

Using Sunlit to create the post was dead simple. The gallery view is create. But the experience of viewing the full size photos leaves a lot to be desired (I’d love to just have a Fancyzoom.js type of thing happen).

Good overview of what’s new in 1Blocker X. When I first installed the beta, I was confused by where there were so many extensions for just one app, this post explains the challenge the app faced.

I’ve not kept a close eye on the content blocker race, but it sure seems to me that the team at 1Blocker cares quite deeply about this app, and that’s a big win for everyone else.