Werd I/O
  • About
  • Notable Links
  • Asides
Sign in Subscribe

Ben Werdmuller

Ben Werdmuller

NotableLinks

Team agreements, consensus and ongoing dialogue

This is lovely: the story of a news organization deliberately fostering a culture of care and equity. "Mutante worked with three organizational psychologists to better understand the experiences of team members. The psychologists used multiple tools to assess the organization and align on the team’s needs. They interviewed

27 Feb 2024

NotableLinks

Drop In Venture Funding To Black-Founded Startups Greatly Outpaces Market Decline

"The decline in capital to Black-founded companies greatly outpaces the overall decline in startup funding. While total venture dollars in the U.S. fell 37% last year, funding to Black-founded startups dropped a staggering 71%, according to Crunchbase data." As the piece points out, this may in part

27 Feb 2024

NotableLinks

Buffer's 2023 Annual Shareholder Letter

Buffer continues to lead by example: extraordinarily transparent and willing to share information about its ups and downs. I wish more startups (and founders) would think this way. Not only is writing well thinking well, but there's nothing to be lost by sharing in this way. It'

26 Feb 2024

NotableLinks

A former Gizmodo writer changed his name to ‘Slackbot’ and stayed undetected for months

"When it was his time to leave, McKay swapped out his existing profile picture for one that resembled an angrier version of Slackbot’s actual icon. He also changed his name to “Slackbot.”" Genius. Serious talk: this is actually a pretty common trick. You can't change

26 Feb 2024

NotableLinks

Demoted, Deleted, and Denied: There’s More Than Just Shadowbanning on Instagram

The Markup found that Instagram is removing content about Israel and Palestine: "Our investigation found that Instagram heavily demoted nongraphic images of war, deleted captions and hid comments without notification, erratically suppressed hashtags, and denied users the option to appeal when the company removed their comments, including ones about

25 Feb 2024

NotableLinks

Nazis mingle openly at CPAC, spreading antisemitic conspiracy theories and finding allies

"In one of the most viral moments from this year’s conference, conservative personality Jack Posobiec called for the end of democracy and a more explicitly Christian-focused government. While Posobiec later said his statements were partly satire, many CPAC attendees embraced his and others’ invocations of the Jan. 6,

24 Feb 2024

NotableLinks

RTO doesn’t improve company value, but does make employees miserable: Study

"Overall, the analysis found that RTO mandates did not improve a firm's financial metrics, but they did decrease employee satisfaction." The finding is unsurprising, but good to have data. It goes on: "Specifically, after an RTO mandate, employees' ratings significantly declined on overall job

24 Feb 2024

ASCAP for AI

Hunter Walk writes: The checks being cut to ‘owners’ of training data are creating a huge barrier to entry for challengers. If Google, OpenAI, and other large tech companies can establish a high enough cost, they implicitly prevent future competition. Not very Open. It’s fair to say that I’

24 Feb 2024

NotableLinks

What Happens to Your Sensitive Data When a Data Broker Goes Bankrupt?

"The prospect of this data, including Near’s collection of location data from sensitive locations such as abortion clinics, being sold off in bankruptcy has raised alarms in Congress." As it should - although, of course, fire sales are not the only way this data gets sold and

23 Feb 2024

NotableLinks

European human rights court says no to weakened encryption

"The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has ruled that laws requiring crippled encryption and extensive data retention violate the European Convention on Human Rights." This renders some of the EU's own proposed legislation illegal. More importantly, client-side scanning and backdoors become illegal in themselves, making

21 Feb 2024

NotableLinks

US newspaper circulation 2023: Top 25 titles fall 14%

Print newspaper subscriptions of the top 25 titles continue to steeply fall. But digital subscriptions are up. Newspaper is just a technology; the journalism it carries continues to be valuable. One concern is how to maintain accessibility: a print newspaper can be read by anyone with access to the physical

21 Feb 2024

NotableLinks

New York Times publisher A. G. Sulzberger: “Our industry needs to think bigger”

I'm pretty critical of the NYT's coverage these days - I wish they'd do much better on trans issues and on being more critical on America's involvement in global conflicts - but this is a fascinating, illuminating interview. It's honestly

20 Feb 2024
See all
Werd I/O
Mastodon
Bluesky
Threads

Subscribe to new posts

Werd I/O explores the intersection of technology, democracy, and society. It's independently published by Ben Werdmuller, reader-supported, and always free to read.