As part of The 19th’s non-denominational end-of-year celebration, we were asked what we were leaving behind in 2022. I gave an answer about corporate social media and Instagram in particular, but on reflection, there’s a lot more I want to leave behind.
Year ends are both arbitrary and not: a day ...
December 31, 2022
I’m not exactly sure why we celebrate Christmas rather than Hanukkah: we’re a secular family with roots in both traditions. It’s possible that being in Northern Europe (and for my parents, North America before that) just made Christmas the easy default. Christian hegemony is another reason why defaults really matter: ...
December 26, 2022
I have a piece in Nieman Lab’s Predictions for Journalism 2023:
The current landscape makes clear what has always been true: On the internet, nothing lasts forever. The most resilient choice is always the one that allows you to own your relationships with your audience and directly build community with the ...
December 21, 2022
I’ve decided to stop writing about Twitter as of tonight. I’ll pour one out if the site dies or if it changes hands to a stable, ethical custodian, but for now, my commitment to not posting on the platform extends to not posting about the platform.
It’s clear that Musk is ...
December 19, 2022
Hours after enacting a policy to prevent users from linking to outside platforms, Twitter has reversed it and deleted the page from the policy website.
Among other laws this policy broke, it fell afoul of the European Union Digital Markets Act, which went into force in November. The fines for breaking ...
December 19, 2022
Updated: Twitter rescinded the policy the same day.
Twitter has banned linking to your profile on other social networks. What a completely pathetic, counterproductive policy.
Twitter can’t ban linking to any external website, so here’s the simple workaround:
Make a page on your personal website with all your social profiles
Link to that instead ...
December 18, 2022
I strongly agree with Isaac Schlueter’s thoughts on funding open source software:
There are a few pitfalls that I see many of these ideas fall into, all of which seem reasonable, but lead to failure:
A focus on "donations" and "community" as the ideological framing.
A focus on getting newcomers introduced to OSS ...
December 14, 2022
The Guardian on the future of TV:
The plan, after years of rumour, is for all TV output to be available online only within the next 10 years or so. Broadcast channels, with their daily line-up of shows, are doomed. Programmes (originally so-called because they were “programmed”) will come into our ...
December 14, 2022
This guy:
Musk’s tweet was published just after he was booed off stage at a Dave Chappelle gig. Chappelle’s transphobic material is hardly on the social justice end of the rhetorical spectrum, so it’s more about hurt feelings than substance.
Anyway. “Woke” was originally about being aware of racial subjugation, and its ...
December 12, 2022
Thinking through a “share with Mastodon” button that anyone could embed on a website. It’s a harder problem than a “share with Twitter” button, because there’s no one central host, and it would be ideal to avoid creating a central location to handle these requests. (Mastodon is decentralized, after all.)
As ...
December 12, 2022
In the grand tradition of tech people barely doing something and then turning around and giving advice as if they’re experts, I thought I’d write up some of the things I’ve learned being the parent of a three-and-a-half-month-old baby. If you’re about to be a parent, you might find this ...
December 11, 2022
Over on Medium, VP Content Scott Lamb asked:
We’re curious what you think. How do you think Medium should approach AI-generated content? What are good and bad examples of AI content? What are you concerned about? What are you excited about?
Here’s how I replied:
I think my biggest ask is actually on ...
December 9, 2022
One of the most meaningful pieces of work I’ve been a part of this year was The 19th’s dashboard of what abortion laws look like in every state right now, which has been updated for seven months and counting.
The genesis of the idea came from The 19th’s data visuals reporter ...
December 5, 2022
Lots of people have been worried about deepfakes for a while, but I think the bigger, more pressing concern is detecting AI-generated text.
I’d love to be proven wrong on this hypothesis: the only real market for long-form AI text generation on the web is to generate spam. There are other ...
December 5, 2022
As an employee of a non-profit newsroom, I’m not supposed to do three things: make public partisan statements, donate to political parties or causes, or declare donations. (The latter is why I stopped my long-running Fairness Friday series of posts explaining which social justice cause I’d donated to each week. ...
December 5, 2022
One of the things that makes me proud to work at The 19th is our equity lens that pervades everything we do. While it's most obvious in our reporting, it touches every aspect of the org.
I’ve been writing a technology assessment framework that we can use when we’re evaluating services, ...
December 1, 2022
Articles and streaming media I found notable. ...
December 1, 2022