Erin Kissane
Erin Kissane
Lots and lots of work to do to make alternative spaces more welcoming.
community
The Verge
The Verge"Yahoo Answers, one of the longest-running and most storied web Q&A platforms in the history of the internet, is shutting down on May 4th. That’s the day the Yahoo Answers website will start redirecting to the Yahoo homepage, and all of the platform’s archives will apparently cease to exist. The platform has been operating since 2005."Corporations continue to be bad at hosting our conversations and managing our data.
runyourown.social
Darius Kazemi describes running a modified Mastodon instance for 50 friends. This is my kind of heresy:
"I'd like to advance the notion that software does not have to scale, and in fact software can be better if it is not built to scale."I think his vision of thousands of small communities that federate would be a better future for social media.
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A thousand times yes.
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"This is an era of networked wealth, going to scale, first mover advantage, positive feedback loops, virtuous cycles, high concentration, and high disparity. These are some of the intolerable conditions of the time we call (with subversive hope) Late Capitalism." [via anil]
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"[Technical separation] lets the trolls and the normal society stay safe, but it also prevents those two from ever running into each other, from ever having that chance to understand each other. I don’t know how to let the trolls and straights run into each other in a productive way, but it’s one more thing we should think about."
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Maciej is correct. Again. "Perhaps they didn't feel they had a say in the matter. Maybe the economic interests promoting car culture were too strong. Maybe they thought this was the inevitable price of progress."
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I was quoted in this article about the history and state of Web comments.
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Popular Science is turning off user-submitted comments. "A politically motivated, decades-long war on expertise has eroded the popular consensus on a wide variety of scientifically validated topics."
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"HistoryTag records the histories of specially tagged things, so you can see how they were made and how they live in the world." The Internet of Things is off and running. This is a great idea.
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Joshua Schacter's latest project: tagging people's Twitter handles with skills they can perform. It's a way to see what people are known for among their peers. More tagging!
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Excellent thoughts on community moderation. "This is why community moderators have real power; they need that power to intervene, educate, and refocus the community's exuberance on more substantive content. People will fight you almost literally to the death over their right to be entertained, and to entertain others."
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Hilarious gallery of terrifying horse mask pictures contributed by Amazon users. [via mlkshk]
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"So, my hypothesis is that IAMA [I am a...] and AMA [ask me anything] are an important type of citizen journalism. Call it 'community journalism.'" TIL (today I learned...) is also a nice convention. [via waxy]
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This command line browser that can run JavaScript looks handy for testing web apps.
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Hell yes, ethics. "When people are saying ruinously cruel things about each other, and you're the person who made it possible, it's 100% your fault. If you aren't willing to be a grown-up about that, then that's okay, but you're not ready to have a web business. Businesses that run cruise ships have to buy life preservers. Companies that sell alcohol have to keep it away from kids. And people who make communities on the web have to moderate them."
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"...there will always be the open web for the geeks, the misfits, the eccentrics, the control freaks, and any other term we can think of to proudly express our healthy skepticism of giving up too much control over what really should be ours."
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Dave Winer is correct: "Have the courage to stake out your spot on the open web. Fill it with delicious treats, and connect it to others. That's creativity."