Winter reading
Three big books; vitality and waste.
Bad shape
wrecka.geThe idea I keep coming back to is that the big platforms, like Dickens' Marley, were dead to begin with, and are now something particularly bad, which is dead on their feet.
Twitterlike is a Bad Shape
Twitter and its imitators have adopted a structural design that is fundamentally bad for people. This isn't just a matter of who's in charge; it's a problem with the thing itself. Forcing users to adhere to a tight character limit, discouraging link culture, preventing people from editing their own posts, steering people into sharing things they hate, incentivizing rage bait with trending feeds, subjecting people to decontextualized encounters, encouraging conflict by discouraging tags, and leaving users powerless to clean up the resulting mess—all of this is bad shape.
111. How Facebook Stoked Civil War in Myanmar, with Erin Kissane - Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure at UMass Amherst
In part one of our interview with researcher, designer and, in her own words, "ancient Internet person" Erin Kissane, we look at what happens when a platform swallows a whole society's media landscape but abdicates all responsibility to the people using it. In this case, we're talking about Myanmar
Trump Administration's Arrival on Bluesky Highlights Growing Pains for Open Networks
The administration’s antagonistic entry to the platform is best understood as a game of chicken, writes Erin Kissane.