Category: Tech
Twitter: Amp Up the Noise
Making the blue check mark mean “This person can afford $20/month” instead of “This person is who they say they are” is only the latest way Twitter has downgraded its signal/noise ratio over the years.
Word is that Twitter’s new owner is planning to charge $20/month for a blue check mark.
Which of course, means the blue checkmark will now be useless. Well, useless to the users of the site, anyway. It won’t tell you which of several accounts is really the person you’re looking for, just who has $20/month to spend on it. (Not that it was perfect, but at least it was a signal.)
It’s sort of like when SSL certificates went from being expensive and needing verification — so they were a sign that you were on the right website — to cheap and later free. Except an SSL/TLS cert still tells you something: your connection is protected from eavesdropping. The checkmark doesn’t tell you anything valuable.
But Twitter’s been messing with the signal/noise ratio for ages.
Downgrade the Signal
Ads themselves (or promoted tweets, or whatever you call them) are already adding noise. Then they started showing you other people’s “likes,” removing some meaning from the action and adding noise to the stream. These days they even show you tweets from people that people you follow are following.
On Mastodon I’ll sometimes get distracted from something I wanted to do or look for, but I can almost always get back to it. I’ll pop onto Twitter for 5 minutes to look for something and I’m there twice as long because I can’t find it in all the attention-grabbing “features.” The other day I decided to unfollow all the corporations and organizations and only keep the actual people on the list, and I still had trouble finding things.
I suppose from Twitter’s perspective it worked, because I was there for 10 minutes instead of 5…but it makes me less interested in coming back later.
Every bit of noise you add to a signal cuts down on how much value the listener gets out of it. Eventually the ratio is no longer worth it, and all that attention you managed to extract from them by ratcheting up the noise drops to zero.
The 2022 Social Media Experience
It’s been four years since I described the 2018 Social Media Experience. Let’s see what’s changed in that time!
#Twitter is still like a train crashing into a burning dumpster. The old owner wouldn’t let firefighters in because they did such a brisk business selling marshmallows, and the new one thinks it needs more gas because the flames aren’t hot enough and it would be unethical to keep the fire down to even marshmallow-toasting levels.
#Facebook…TBH I haven’t been there in a while, but I get the impression it’s still like a large family gathering, only now conversation is mostly drowned out by your racist uncle/in-law’s soapboxing and the TV commercials for things related to his screed instead of just being interrupted by them, unless you can hide out in a different room, where you’ll still get interrupted by commercials for things related to your own conversation.
#Tumblr is the weird coffee shop you used to hang out in but you’ve outgrown. It was bought out by a national chain and homogenized into the ground, but they offloaded it to a smaller chain and now each location is allowed to have its own personality again.
#Mastodon is like a building with a lot of small parties going on: Not as many people in each room, but you can actually hear each other talk, and people will sometimes hang out in the hall or move to another room, connecting conversations together. But finding a good room can be tough.
#Pixelfed is like Mastodon, except everyone’s brought photos and made the room into a gallery.
#Instagram is like checking out your friends’ vacation photos, but every other photo is an advertisement, and half of your friends’ pics are full of product placement.
TikTok…from what I gather, it’s like being in a crowd with people you don’t know, and someone keeps pushing other people at you that they think you might want to talk to.
Of course, all of them have people who will Judge You because You’re Doing It Wrong.
The Web Was Responsive From The Start
I’ve been meaning to write a post about email newsletters that still assume you’re reading on a desktop and send out layouts that rely on a wide screen size and end up with tiny 2-point type on a mobile phone — you know, where most people read their email these days.
Then I stumbled on this usability article by Jakob Nielsen.
From 2012.
It pretty much covers what I would have said, and more. But a decade on, I still get email I can’t read without moving to a bigger screen.
The Time Before Tables
The funny thing is that HTML, by design, already adjusts to different sized displays, windows and terminals. In the very early days, you couldn’t make it not be responsive unless you added a block of pre-formatted text.
Once HTML picked up a little more rendering capability (tables, images and image maps), you had people designing websites who were accustomed to fixed-size media, and the paradigm stuck.
— Build your layout in Photoshop at 800×600, then slice it up into clickable pieces and reassemble the whole thing on a page!
— Wait, now we can aim for 1024×168!
— Oh, hey, we have widescreen now!
— Huh? What do you mean the window isn’t always fullscreen?
— Phones now? Ugh, I’ve gotta make a totally different website!
And so on.
Responsive Styling
These days you can apply relative sizes to everything, and tweak the layout based on the logical screen size instead of physical pixels. (Shout-out to high-definition displays here!) Modern HTML+CSS is amazingly improved in flexibility, and if you plan it right, you can often just rearrange the same page for screens from small cell phone size up to those widescreen monitors. Obviously this depends on what kind of site or application you’re building.
But for email, especially for newsletters, where reading the text is the main point, it should be an obvious choice!
Expanded from a thread on Wandering.shop.
Electrical Breakdown (the other kind)
The “Today’s Outlook” section of the California electricity ISO shows detailed trends and breakdowns of how much electricity is available from which sources over the course of the day, and both actual and projected demand.
You’d think demand would be highest during the hottest part of the day, but it’s early evening, when people are getting home and turning on their own air conditioners. Just as solar is fading.
Remember Amazon Drive? No?
Amazon is shutting down their Drive service. “What Drive service?” you may ask? So did I. It’s a cloud drive like Dropbox or Google Drive, and I’d completely forgotten about it until I read that headline.
According to the FAQ, it was being used by apps for photo and video storage (I assume on Fire tablets) and those have all been moved to Amazon Photos (which I’ve definitely never used).
But something jogged my memory…not just of when Google moved all their Google Plus photo features over to Google Photos, but something else involving music.
So I looked. And it turns out I actually have some files on there after all:
Two folders.
One was “Archived Music”, all albums from 2011 that I’d imported from my CD collection. I’m not sure, but I think the service might have been integrated with Amazon’s online music player way back when, and when they disconnected them, I didn’t have anything else I wanted to use it for.
The other was “My Send To Kindle Docs,” and it was full of ebooks and PDFs from 2015-2016, most of which I recognize from Humble Bundles.
I guess I should look through and see if there’s anything I don’t have a local copy of anymore. That I want to keep, anyway.
Hi, We’re Your Bank! (Yeah, SURE you are.)
Phishers: Hi, we’re your bank, please click on this attachment for important information.
Security experts: Never click on an unexpected attachment in an email even if you think you know who it’s from. It’s likely to be malware or a scam to steal your login credentials.
Actual banks: Hi, we’re your bank, please click on this attachment for important information. 🤦♂️
Seriously, I HATE these systems. The way they keep phishing and malware techniques believable — and have for years! — is worse than any supposed security advantage in not just using email. Half the time the info isn’t any more sensitive than a receipt would be. Or heck, even just “There’s a new message in your account, please log in to see it and use your own bookmarks to get there.” That’s actually more secure!
:sigh:
It’s really too bad all the schemes to add end-to-end security to email over the years have been either too cumbersome to take off for general usage or vendor-specific.