Werd I/O

This list of the New Scientist's favorite science fiction books is brilliant. The books I've read that are included here are some of my favorites of all time; the others are on my to-read list. What's your favorite?

#Culture

[Link]

"The nation, fractured by war, disease, and famine, has seen more than 6 million people die since the mid-1990s, making the conflict the deadliest since World War II. But, in recent years, the death and destruction have been aided by the growing number of electric vehicles humming down American streets."

A good reminder that our desire for batteries and power has a human impact, no matter which path we take. Renewable energy is still a far better choice, but we run the risk of thinking that "clean" tech is truly clean without doing the work necessary to ensure that everyone in the supply chain is well taken care of.

Solidarity campaigns and activism to protect peoples' lives are good, but it's notable that we never really get to hear about them, and this issue is rarely, if ever, mentioned in the tech press.

As the piece points out:

"“We’re always on the menu, but we’re never at the table,” he said. “The space of transportation planning and climate change is mostly white people, or people of color that aren’t Black, so these discussions about exploitation aren’t happening in those spaces — it is almost like a second form of colonialism.”"

#Technology

[Link]

"The way we raise the money at The Guardian is different than any place I’ve ever been. This is truly a jointly owned responsibility among the business side and editorial."

Every non-profit newsroom needs to move their center of gravity from large contributions to smaller, distributed support from its reader base. The Guardian is doing it incredibly well, and there's a lot to learn from how it's going about things.

I'm not sure about the idea of tracking revenue per article, but the idea of making the whole newsroom involved in its continued existence doesn't seem bad to me (even if it goes against accepted orthodoxy). The trick is not taking it too far, and being open to secondary or tertiary effects. There are some stories that are vitally important even if they aren't obvious moneymakers, and newsrooms must retain a strong argument for running them.

The Guardian's "epic" at the bottom of every article drives a ton of revenue for them, and I'd love to learn more about how they optimize it in practice.

Finally, this seems right to me, and something for all news (for-profit and non-profit alike) to emulate:

"Nine or 10 years ago, we did a lot of work to decide whether we should have a paywall or not. And we decided that we would both fulfill our mission better, but we would also generate more revenue, if there were no paywall. Now it’s part of our DNA and we talk about it every day." #Media

[Link]

I shared this with my team and one of them said they had to check that I didn't write it. This is exactly how I think about (and ask my team to think about) rooting software development in human needs.

"All the elements of a good story are there in the three-act structure of user research." And if I'd written a post about it, it might look a little bit like this one.

There's a reason for the closeness: both our processes were informed by Nancy Duarte, who is very clear about the role of the three act structure. The details of my approach are a little bit different to what’s laid out in this post - something I may write about in a future post. #Technology

[Link]

"The key to effective engineering leadership lies in figuring out which scenarios are worth deliberately defying conventional logic, and when to simply follow the rules."

Lots of good food for thought here. I've definitely been guilty of some of the anti-patterns here - particularly trying to be an umbrella for my team, which can leave people out of the loop and let them feel like they're lacking needed transparency.

The key is being able to jump in and get into the weeds when it's helpful, get out when it's not, and give everybody the context, culture, information, and resources they need in order to do their best work in service of the mission, vision, and strategy.

Speaking of, I love this:

"There’s this pervasive belief that there’s no strategy anywhere, but that’s not true. There is strategy everywhere, it’s just rarely written."

That's been true of every organization I've joined, and - if I'm honest with myself - every organization I've started.

"Complicating things even further, Larson also has found that many companies do have a habit of writing things down, they just aren’t the right things. “It’s the small decisions that end up getting documented,” Larson says. “You’d think it would be the opposite, but in my experience, the answers to important questions like, ‘Why did we go into this business? Why are we shutting down this business line? Why are we doing this services migration that's going to take five years?’ literally aren't written down anywhere.”"

Encouraging people to write reflections, to capture the "why" of decisions that were made, and, essentially, to journal the journey of the team and the company is rarely done, but I think forms part of a solution to many problems. #Technology

[Link]

"While young Taiwanese users discuss everything from relationships to celebrity gossip on Threads, the app has gradually become a gathering space for progressives, who favor independence from China to defend the island’s democracy."

Threads has an official stance of not promoting political use. This is an example, though, of how any social platform will be political whether you want it to be or not - and therefore how the challenges and responsibilities surrounding that speech will present themselves regardless of whether you want them to.

I think there's no alternative: every mass social platform must assume that it will host political content from vulnerable groups (as well as powerful ones) and staff up appropriately. #Technology

[Link]

On answering programming questions: "We found that 52 percent of ChatGPT answers contain misinformation, 77 percent of the answers are more verbose than human answers, and 78 percent of the answers suffer from different degrees of inconsistency to human answers."

To be fair, I do expect AI answers to get better over time, but it's certainly premature to use it as a trusted toolkit for software development today. One might argue that its answers are more like suggestions for an engineer to check and adapt as appropriate, but will they really be used that way?

I think it's more likely that AI agents will be used to build software by people who want to avoid engaging with a real, human engineer, or people who want to cut corners for one reason or another. So I think the warnings are appropriate: LLMs are bad at coding and we shouldn't trust what they say. #AI

[Link]

Nos is running a "journalism accelerator", which onboards independent journalists and publications onto Nostr with guaranteed promotion and 1:1 help.

Nostr is a different kind of open network, in the sense that it's decentralized rather than federated. Famously, Jack Dorsey defected there from Bluesky, in part because Bluesky started offering service-level features like community moderation rather than just focusing on the protocol. It's also much more closely tied to crypto communities than either the fediverse or Bluesky.

I'm curious about the kinds of journalists who might sign up for this. I spotted The Conversation there while I was nosing around, but I haven't found any other publishers I recognized; the network really is very open to build on, so I wonder if more might follow - and if they skew in any particular direction. #Technology

[Link]

"At least two digital media companies are exploring the fediverse as a way to take more control over their referral traffic and onsite audience engagement."

The Verge and 404 Media will both support ActivityPub (a protocol, not a "plugin", as the article calls it) and plug into the fediverse.

This dovetails with what I've been talking about for some time: "Instead of spending time building a presence on other platforms for their benefit, a publisher can do that on their own sites — while giving readers the ability to see those posts on other federated platforms." And while the fediverse is still in an early, growing stage, it's worth taking a bet on.

As Flipboard's Mike McCue says further into the piece, "What The Verge is doing is definitely pioneering the future for media." I'm hopeful that more publishers follow suit - with this and other experiments that have the potential to help them build more direct first-party relationships with their audiences. #Fediverse

[Link]

"It’s simply too early to get into bed with the companies that trained their models on professional content without permission and have no compelling case for how they will help build the news business."

This piece ends on the most important point: nobody is coming to save the news industry, and certainly not the AI vendors. Software companies don't care about news. They don't think your content is more valuable because it's fact-checked and edited. They don't have a vested interest in ensuring you survive. They just want the training data - all of it, in order to build what they consider to be the best product possible. Everything else is irrelevant. #AI

[Link]

"It’s a good time to be ProPublica. And it’s a good thing that we have ProPublica."

Hey, that's where I work!

The article continues:

"Spreading its journalistic wealth has long been core to its mission. The latest iteration of that is the 50 State Initiative, announced last month."

The 50 State Initiative is a commitment to publishing accountability journalism in every US state over the next five years. This is an expansion of the Local Reporting Network, which was already doing great work in partnership with local newsrooms. As this piece points out, there are actually only two states where ProPublica hasn't run some kind of an investigative story - but, of course, the 50 States Initiative goes much deeper than that. It's an exciting time to be working here. #Media

[Link]

"The various decentralized social media systems that have been growing over the past few years offer a very different potential approach: one in which you get to build the experience you want, rather than the one a giant company wants."

There's a chicken and egg problem here: while decentralized systems are absolutely going to be part of the solution, or at least hold most of the properties that make for a good solution, they also need to have a critical mass of people who use them.

A lot of people are looking towards Threads to provide this critical mass, but just as I'd invite newsrooms to consider how to gain more traffic without Apple News, I'd invite the federated social web community to consider what a growth looks like without Meta. It's not that Threads won't help - it's that you don't want to be dependent on a megacorp to provide the assistance you need. You never know when they'll change their policies and look elsewhere.

Still, the point stands: decentralization is a key part of the answer. There's a lot to be gained from investing in projects that provide strong user experiences, solve concrete real human problems alongside the ideological ones and the existential threats, and onboard a new generation of internet users to a better way to share and browse.

That's a tall order, but, as always, I'm hopeful. #Technology

[Link]

"The free version of Apple News is one of the biggest news platforms in the world. It’s the most widely used news application in the United States, the U.K., Canada, and Australia, and boasted over 125 million monthly users in 2020."

And publications are becoming dependent on it.

I agree strongly with the journalist's view at the bottom of this piece:

"It incentivizes users to subscribe to Apple News+ rather than to publications directly, likely cannibalizing some potential revenue. It’s driving editorial decisions, meaning publishers are once again changing their content strategy to placate a platform. And of course the company could wake up one day and decide, like Facebook, that it no longer really wants to be in the news business, leaving news publishers stranded."

Newsrooms - say it with me - need to establish direct, first-party connections with their audiences. Anything else gives a third party too much supplier power over their businesses and presents an existential risk. Apple News is useful right now, but at its heart the dynamics that drive it are no different to Facebook or Twitter. There's nothing to say it's here for good, and there's nothing smart about letting Apple own your relationship with your readers. #Media

[Link]

"I want the IndieWeb to be a viable alternative to social media, gradually widening the audience beyond tech-savvy folks by making the tools easier to use and more reliable."

This is what we were trying for with Known: something that felt social but was fully under the user's control. We had installers at third-party hosts; we had our own managed service; we had the open source code for people who wanted to use that directly.

The fediverse adds a missing piece here: Known suffered immensely from a blank page and no reader view when you logged in for the first time. Now we can build platforms that immediately connect people to a much wider social network that is outside of monolithic corporate control but also makes it (relatively) easy to find the people you care about.

A combination between the fediverse and indieweb is almost inevitable. This is what Ghost appears to be building today, for example, with its new integrated fediverse reader tool. WordPress may also be headed in that direction. And there will be many others.

A huge +1, also, to the idea that we can "manifest momentum by speaking aloud your dreams and letting others share them with you". This is how community-building works.

And, for the record, I'm all-in. #Technology

[Link]

A lovely blog post by Jon Hicks on his process for creating the ShareOpenly icon. Characteristically, lots of care and attention went into this.

I'm really glad you get to see the open hand icons, which we eventually decided against, but feel really warm and human.

Jon's amazing, lovely to work with, and has a really impressive body of work. I'm grateful he was able to contribute such an important part of this personal project. #Technology

[Link]

"Taken together, our findings imply that return to office mandates can imply significant human capital costs in terms of output, productivity, innovation, and competitiveness for the companies that implement them."

There's no doubt that there's a lot of value in being in the same physical room together; I'm writing this on the day after a work summit that brought my team together from across the country, and I'm still buzzing from the energy. But I think anyone in tech that proposes a full-time return to office policy needs to rethink.

It comes down to this: "it's easier to manage a team that's happy". People want their lives and contexts to be respected; everyone's relationship with their employers has been reset over the last few years. This goes hand in hand with the resurgence of unions, too: the contract between workers and employers is being renegotiated, and particularly for parents and carers, but really for everyone, working from home yields a kind of freedom that's hard to replace. And asking people to come back reads as a lack of trust and autonomy that erodes relationships and decimates morale. #Business

[Link]

"A quarter-century into its existence, a company that once proudly served as an entry point to a web that it nourished with traffic and advertising revenue has begun to abstract that all away into an input for its large language models."

This has the potential to be a disaster for the web and everyone who depends on it: for journalism, for bloggers, for communities, for every voice that couldn't be heard without an open, egalitarian platform.

The answer for all of those stakeholders has to be depending on forging real, direct relationships with real people. It doesn't scale; it doesn't fit well with a unidirectional broadcast model for publishing; it's now how most people who make content think about what they do. But it's how all of them are going to survive and continue to find each other.

I've been urging publishers to stop using the word "audience" and to replace it with "community", and to think about what verb might replace "publish" in a multi-directional web that is more about relationships than it is reaching mass eyeballs.

Of course, it might go in a direction we haven't predicted. We'll find out very soon; the only real certainty is that things are changing, and the bedrock that many people have depended on for two decades is shifting. #Technology

[Link]

This is great news for Mozilla, for everyone who uses the internet, and for everyone who cares about ethics, privacy, and human rights.

We need a well-functioning Mozilla more than ever - and that much-needed presence has been absent for years.

The spirit in the following quote gives me a lot of hope - I think this is how all technology should be built, and how all technologists should approach their work, but it's rarely true:

“After all, the technology we have now was once just someone’s imagination. We can dream, build, and demand technology that serves all of us, not just the powerful few.”

I hope - and believe - that she can make it happen. #Technology

[Link]

"When Courtney Gore ran for a seat on her local school board in 2021, she warned about a movement to indoctrinate children with “leftist” ideology. After 2 1/2 years on the board, Gore said she believes a much different scheme is unfolding: an effort by wealthy conservative donors to undermine public education in Texas and install a voucher system in which public money flows to private and religious schools."

An interesting ProPublica story about the motivation behind some of the money that's funded these bizarre right-wing school board elections. It's not so much about the ideology as it is about undermining trust in public education itself, so that it can be replaced with a voucher system that would benefit the underwriters.

This quote says it all:

“It’s all about destroying the trust with the citizens to the point where they would tolerate something like doing away with public schools.” #Education

[Link]

"Aggregate Facebook traffic to a group of 792 news and media sites that have been tracked by Chartbeat since 2018 shows that referrals to the sites have plunged by 58%."

I'll bang this drum forever: establish direct relationships with your audience. Do not trust social media companies to be your distribution.

That means through your website.

That means through email.

That means through direct social like the fediverse.

It's long past time that media learned this and internalized it forever. #Media

[Link]

"Last year, more than 50% of all global venture funding for AI-related startups went to companies headquartered in the Bay Area, Crunchbase data shows, as a cluster of talent congregates in the region."

In other news, water is wet.

There was a moment during the pandemic when it looked like everyone was going to work remotely and there was an opportunity for startups to be founded anywhere. I think that time has gone: the San Francisco Bay Area is once again the place to found any kind of technology startup.

Yes, there are always exceptions, but the confluence of community density, living conditions, universities, and mindset make for a perfect storm. NYC and London - and maybe Boston / Cambridge - are pretty good too, for what it's worth, but the sheer volume of startup activity in the area gives San Francisco the edge.

This is something I fought earlier in my career: my first startup was proudly founded in Scotland and largely run from England. I wish we'd just moved to San Francisco.

This isn't to completely sing the praises of the city: the cost of living is now astronomical, and there's a contingent of right-wing activists that seem to want to paint it as some doom spiraling hellhole, as if its progressive past isn't something to be proud of. But there is still beauty, there is still that can-do sense of adventure, and if I was founding something new, that's probably where I'd be. #Technology

[Link]

"British newspaper groups have warned Apple that any move to impose a so-called "web eraser" tool to block advertisements would put the financial sustainability of journalism at risk, the Financial Times reported on Sunday."

Counterpoint: block the ads.

The web is designed to be a flexible platform that can be mixed and remixed however you need. One of the points of CSS was that you could have your own styles for a site and they would supersede the interface that came out of the box.

Relying on ads is a race to the bottom. There are plenty of other ways to make money and build deeper relationships with your audience - many of which don't require paywalls or any invasive technology at all.

Ad technology profiles and tracks users; slows down websites; wastes energy; obliterates the user experience; and isn't even all that profitable. It's hard to square an organization that claims to be acting in the public interest advocating for them. #Media

[Link]

"The youngest generation of American workers is prepared to move away from states that pass abortion bans and to turn down job offers in states where bans are already in place, a new survey from CNBC/Generation Lab finds."

This stands to reason: why would you move to a place where government wants to control what you do with your body? Whether you have a uterus or not, caring for the well-being of people who do is obvious. And all the societal overreach and Handmaid's Tale overtones affect everybody.

I'm interested to see how this affects those locations over time. Of course, there are other implications of this legislation, too: it's likely to be one of the major drivers for voters in November. #Business

[Link]

This interview is as interesting for what it doesn't mention - fediverse, for example - as for what it does.

This helps explain why he distanced himself from Bluesky after he'd previously established it and ensured it had funding:

"This tool was designed such that it had, you know, it was a base level protocol. It had a reference app on top. It was designed to be controlled by the people. I think the greatest idea — which we need — is an algorithm store, where you choose how you see all the conversations. But little by little, they started asking Jay and the team for moderation tools, and to kick people off. And unfortunately they followed through with it."

That's not actually how Bluesky works - the people who were banned were banned from the reference implementation, not the protocol. And, often, they were banned from the reference community for heinous content that would have prevented other people from being able to make use of that space. Any open social platform that doesn't support moderation will be dead in the water: moderation is a key part of running any community.

I think Jack knows this, so I don't buy it.

Meanwhile, the interviewer is a Partner at Founders Fund who once blocked me on Twitter for being too left-wing, which I think sort of puts the comments about moderation and freedom of speech in context. #Technology

[Link]

Simon Willison has a perfect name for unreviewed content that is shared with other people: "slop".

He goes on:

"I’m happy to use LLMs for all sorts of purposes, but I’m not going to use them to produce slop. I attach my name and stake my credibility on the things that I publish."

I think that's right. I'm less worried about using LLMs internally - as long as you understand that they're not impartial or perfectly factual sources, and as long as you take into account the methods used to generate the datasets that were used to train them. (Those are some big "if"s.)

But don't just take that output and share it with the public. And *certainly* don't do it so that you can publish content at scale without having to hire real writers. Not only is that not a good look, but you're going to harm your brand and your reputation in the process. #AI

[Link]