LMNT

I saw a few posts and headlines that made me do a double-take. Not because they were particularly shocking, but because they are incredibly avoidable. Ghost is a recently-popular (but actually more than a decade old) blogging platform. People have been moving from Substack (nazis) and Wordpress (bozos) to Ghost. A couple weeks ago, Ghost announced they’re introducing native support for custom fonts, “with even more control over your brand.” WOFF web fonts have existed for 15 years. Read.cv is a professional networking site, like an alternative to LinkedIn, where users could share their résumés and portfolios. People have been flocking here not just as an alternative to LinkedIn but also for people in need of an online professional profile. They even offered blogging tools. Anyway, the team was acquired by Perplexity, an AI search engine, and Read.cv is shutting down. Read.cv was never about AI and had nothing to do with it. Adam Mosseri from Instagram announced they’re raising the cap on reel length from 90 seconds to 3 minutes. He says while 90 seconds was initially chosen to focus on short-form video, this change will allow users to “tell their stories” better. Of course, Instagram has always been restrictive. Even when it was only for sharing photos, they could only be square crops. Because they said so. I went to sleep seeing TikTok’s ban become effective in the United States: being removed from the App Store, delivering alerts in-app to its users, and Oracle preparing to shut down TikTok’s US servers. And then I woke up to news that Donald Trump is taking credit for saving TikTok, despite he himself calling for its ban 5 years ago. Platforms, man. Maxim Leyzerovich you know what can’t get shut down? html Custom typography is easily available if you make your own damn website. You don’t have to wait around for anyone to provide that functionality for you. It’s been here. Sharing your résumé and portfolio is easily done if you make your own damn website. You don’t have to hang your hat on a platform that will sell out to an AI company. Publishing video is not terribly difficult—of any length—if you make your own damn website. You can embed a YouTube URL if all else fails, but if you learn how to encode a video for the web on your computer, you can simply upload the file to your own website. None of us will ever control our own identities on third-party platforms. You relinquish control over your identity when you choose to present yourself on one of these platforms. You can be rate-limited for posting too much. You can be suspended by a bot that determines your behavior is bot-like. The platform can pivot at any time from one thing to another. The entire platform could shut down. You have no control, and jumping from one to another will only mean that you have to do it all again later. Or, instead of all this, you could learn how to make a damn website. If you like this, you can make a donation or buy something from my shop.

As Mark Zuckerberg changes content moderation policies at Meta, I wanted to re-read my post from last year. me The necessity around content moderation is based on the extended reach provided by platforms. Even the companies that claim to care about decentralization—for some reason—still make space for trending content, universal search, and unrestricted replies. These features do not support decentralization. They support platforming. Content moderation is a much bigger issue for platforms than it is for independent, decentralized websites. Without those features mentioned above, posts have limited range and have a hard time gaining traction. Surfacing those posts by functioning as a platform is what enables potential harm. me My ears have limited range. I can’t hear into infinity. Twitter gave everyone in the world the capability to shout into my ear. There’s nothing sustainable or healthy about that. Whenever I beat the RSS drum, someone always asks about discoverability, so I want to put this bluntly: it is through algorithmic discoverability features that harmful posts become visible. Whether they are original posts, reposts, or replies, harmful posts are only able to successfully reach their intended audience by depending on those features functioning as social media websites built them. It should be a little hard for any post to gain traction. That’s a necessary filter to reduce your exposure to things that will deeply upset you and derail your day. Maybe we should build social networking around blogs and RSS feeds. Individual entries in RSS feeds do not need titles, and entries can be anything of any length. They can contain rich media and rich text. They can be everything we have with traditional social media and more. We can link to each others’ posts to quote them. There are no ads. There is no centralized service. There is no company selling your data. You have complete autonomy to move to another RSS reader. You can like whatever you want locally and never have that data stored on a server. Your website is your profile. While Bluesky and Mastodon have domain name verification, if you were to post directly from your domain, no verification is needed. Online verification is an invented problem. As for discoverability? Link generously. Link to people you like who say and make things you like. That’s how everyone discovers more people like that. Replies? Honestly, more than half of social media replies I’ve received over the last 20 years have been unwanted. It’s better on some platforms than others. But in general, replies I receive via email are significantly more meaningful and thoughtful. It functions as a filter. The only reason we don’t have this at scale now is because we don’t have a good RSS writer for regular people. Making an RSS feed is not very complicated, but it is more complicated than it should be for regular people. How does this relate to content moderation? The people you do not want to hear from, the content you do not want to see? You’d never see it. Maybe it exists, but by removing the mechanisms that bring that content to your eyeballs, most harmful content will stay far away from you. This is just another invented problem by social media platforms. It doesn’t have to be this way. It never did. If you like this, you can make a donation or buy something from my shop.

You may have seen Mark Zuckerberg’s five-minute video about how Facebook is doing literal U-turns on many of their content moderation policies. If you didn’t watch it, I guess you could, but you might just come away so upset and disheartened by how a man who initially built a website to rate the attractiveness of women at Harvard could become so culturally powerful at a global level. I have used social media for a long time. I have seen Facebook and Twitter both go from novel status-sharing to cultural battlegrounds. I have seen them both pretend to grow up; neither platform was ever built on the premise of providing “free speech” to the world. Pretending they were is just propaganda from their respective founders. It was an evolution formed from opportunity. Setting aside what free speech means, it is something valued by people the world over. As a selling point, it is universal. The easiest way to capture the world as your user base is to advertise something everyone wants. As long as people post on websites they do not own, there will always be content moderation. It will just specifically target different groups based on the political climate. It’s not about free speech. It’s about the speech the platform allows and amplifies. The result of everyone in the world posting whatever they want has not been overwhelmingly positive, however. Regardless of content moderation policies, while social media has undoubtedly contributed positively to the world by exposing reprehensible behavior and rapidly distributing evidence on a global scale to hold some people accountable, it has also failed in equal measure. It is not always successful as a means for accountability. Arguably, it is an ineffective means of doing so. In addition, while these platforms have been been great tools for organizing like-minded groups of people who can put pressure on policy at local, federal, and even global levels, that is not limited to …good people. [Download the video.] Josiah Bartlett The Internet has been a phenomenal tool for hate groups. The decisions Mark Zuckerberg is making are as unsurprising as they are terrible. When I watched the video, Mark said he would move the content moderation team out of California. I whispered, “to Texas,” just before he said the same. Twitter’s trajectory is in lockstep. I won’t say X is as bad as it can get, because I believe it can become much worse. Both of these platforms will get worse. This is gonna be so, so bad. If you like this, you can make a donation or buy something from my shop.

Dan Counsell Can we please have the macOS X Lion UI back? 😍 Yes, I would also like that. I would welcome any standard UI that gives us back some tools we lost. There’s a refined clarity to this version of Aqua. It evolved gracefully to this point, where every element was distinctly different and yet cohesive. Consider the search field alone. Now, search fields have the same appearance of every other field: squared. The pill shape distinguished itself. Removing that characteristic introduced a level of ambiguity that is unnecessary. The same can be said for so much in modern visual design (or lack thereof). I’d like to point to something I said almost 5 years ago: me When we lost visual richness in software, we lost a requirement to think about design with regards to how it looks. That’s not just making it look nice, that’s making sure that we visually communicate the UI successfully. It’s very unfortunate that the baby was thrown out with the bathwater. I distinctly remember when Apple claimed one value in the new design language was “deference,” but after 12 years, this approach is clearly not as thoughtful as it was advertised. It is not as accessible as they have wished. We still have thin red text on gray buttons that lack significant contrast. We still have translucent elements and blurred backgrounds that confound reason and rationale. We traded away that refined clarity for over a decade of ambiguity. I took some time to reformat an old Twitter thread on the subject into a proper blog post, and I encourage you to read it. How much has improved since then? If you like this, you can make a donation or buy something from my shop.