Elezea: resources for product leaders - So where should we post now?
Hi there, and welcome to another edition of Elezea! This is a newsletter focused on interesting and helpful reading about technology, software development, and internet culture. I’m sure I am not the only one who is currently re-evaluating where I spend my time online. Two tangentially related articles gave me lots of food for thought on this topic over the past couple of weeks. First, Dave Rupert makes this point in It takes one person to knock down a silo:
Second, Jamie Zawinski asks that we Do Not Use Services That Hate The Internet (please read the whole thing, it’s great):
(In other words, don’t use Hive or Post) I like how these posts urge us to consider how, before Facebook and modern social media, the “social web” was pretty much just labors of hypertext love, loosely held together by the online equivalent of duct tape—RSS, trackback links, blogrolls, IRC, etc. I’m not saying we should go back to those old tools specifically (although ooh.directory—”A collection of 951 blogs about every topic”—is pretty sweet). But maybe it’s worth going back to why we invented those awkward solutions in the first place. We saw an opportunity to connect with like-minded people online, to form communities around niche interests, and to make our worlds bigger. Those are worthy outcomes, even if the solutions we had at the time might not be ideal any more. So where should we post now? I’m going back-and-forth on that a lot. Depending on the day/time/mood, I either want to go all-in on my blog again, or revive Tumblr, or give Mastadon a solid try, or just double down on this newsletter… In short: I have no idea at the moment, but I know I want to keep writing, so I’m trying a bunch of things and hoping at some point I find something that works and that doesn’t make me feel gross. Wherever I end up, I hope that it’s a place like the one Dave describes in the post above:
(Btw, thank you all for not being pigs. That’s pretty cool.) What I’m readingEmily Webber wrote up a great talk of hers called Why can’t we all just get along? where she laments how we tend to drift towards working in silos at the expense of collaboration, shared responsibility, and valuable outcomes. The whole write-up is great, but I especially appreciated her call-out to be mindful of collaboration especially when we talk about x-led companies:
She makes some great recommendations for how to avoid these pitfalls as well. Gibson Biddle has some good advice on giving and receiving feedback in What systems are most effective for giving feedback to employees?
Related: Renée Diresta’s How Online Mobs Act Like Flocks Of Birds is a wonderful essay about the design of social networks and what makes content moderation so difficult:
A rumor “spreads because we spread it” is such a basic concept but we so often frame the spreading of certain types of content as if we’re victims to the inevitability of it. We’re not. We can stop the spread of dangerous and negative information if we wanted to. The problem is that we can’t agree on what “dangerous” or “negative” means, so round and round we go. I like these appsI wanted to mention a couple of reading apps that I absolutely love right now. The first is Matter, where I do most of my article reading. We’ve had reader apps like this before, but Matter keeps getting better and more delightful with every (frequent) release. The second is Substack’s own app. This is where I start my reading every day. I imagine if you are not subscribed to a bunch of Substack newsletters the app might have a bit of an “empty town” problem. But I am a little bit obsessed with newsletters (you can see all the ones I am subscribed to on my profile), so there is always something to read for me. The app is wonderfully designed for a great reading experience. Give it a try: Some stray links
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