Stop turning awesome apps into internet noise machines
The news aggregating app Artifact is shutting down.
Jarrod Blundy wrote at his blog HeyDingus:
I do wonder if it would have had a brighter future without the ability to add comments. I never engaged with that social aspect of the service, and I expect it contributed massively to its complexity and moderation costs.
I think about this every time a good news or link aggregation app goes away. These apps are, fundamentally, trying to help you sort the signal from the noise in an overwhelming “media ecosystem” or whatever we’re supposed to call it these days.
As soon as they add their own social layer on top of the news and the links, they have betrayed their best use case and their most loyal users. It’s like buying a pair of earplugs, only to have them turn into in-ear headphones or hearing aides you don’t need and never asked for.
Engagement, which they thought would spike after going social, craters. Resources, which were optimized and sufficient and scalable with increasing revenue over time, are siphoned off, as Jarrod wrote, into moderation and increasingly complex development cycles.
It’s a kind of death spiral that most founders notice too late, so kudos, of a sort, to Artifact’s founders for knowing the telltale signs of a terminally ill app, and letting it die with some dignity.
There are already plenty of places to share links and half-baked hot takes. The real challenge, for Artifact’s founders and anyone else with the leadership, technical and fundraising skills to tackle it, is to build something extremely useful to individuals without draining all of its lifeblood into a push for “social” that ultimately just turns it into another internet noise machine.
Finished reading: Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White 📚 — ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
Skip and dance, jump and prance! Go down through the orchard and stroll in the woods! The world is a wonderful place when you’re young.
It sure is.
What a hell of an amazing book to relegate to the unjustly dismissed “children’s” shelves. This book gets five stars, no question about it.
White manages to address, in my opinion, so many of The Important Things We All Should Learn About Rather Young If Possible, including misogyny/clueless men, bullies, transactional acquaintances, competition, the joy and sorrow of freedom, the dilemma of the naive but intelligent, parenting (well, let’s be honest, mostly motherhood), the distinction between pathology and an innocent’s rational-from-their-perspective perceptions, the rarity and value of adults who are aware of the immediately preceding concept (like the inimitable Dr. Dorian), evolution, religion, birth and death, and, of course, the intergenerational power of real, no-but-seriously-really-real friendship that reaches out beyond its originators and enriches those who come after, in ways known and unknown, for years or decades to come.
Like I said, just a hell of a book.
📱 Someone please tell me which non-leather bifold wallet case to get for an #iPhone 14 Pro, preferably in pink. Extra points for MagSafe compatibility but it's not required.
🤖 Don’t bother giving your three-year-old a comprehensive 10-minute explanation of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s early career up to The Terminator, featuring one of the absolute BEST accent performances of your LIFE, because, honestly, they aren’t going to appreciate it at all.
😕 Thanks to Casey Newton mentioning it on the #HardFork podcast and my having no judgment regarding the apps I try, I downloaded an app called bonk. Join the whatever this is and find me at https://bonkbonkbonk.app/friend/joeross …
iPhone as geek guardrails
Here’s a reply I posted to someone I follow on Mastodon who, on being issued an iPhone by their employer for work calls, was wondering why anyone chooses it over other options when, for example, it’s hard to sideload something as simple as a custom ringtone:
Look I need guardrails and I’ve known that ever since I was bopping around the command line on my HTC Evo 4G.
Some of us stopped headbanging not because the music left our hearts, but because if you feel something too deeply for too long it can destroy you.
That’s what was happening to me in the bowels of my root-and-rom addiction.
Now I pay 0.99 for a ringtone to Tim Apple and say thank you sir may I have another because I’m safe from sudo-ing on my phone.
🤨 Is it true that despite paying for the special upgrade I can't set the #ChatGPT iOS app to default to 4 instead of 3.5?i
Princeton Public Library.
Dear Lawyers Still Manually Numbering Paragraphs:
Stop it.
Here’s a tutorial:
- Place your cursor where you intend to begin the numbered section of your pleading.
- Click the numbered list button in your word processor.
- Repent, and feel your soul become lighter.
Yours, scoldingly,
Joe
⌚ Audio recordings are an overlooked way of keeping memories with your kids. Mine are both under 4 and, while pointing a phone camera at them often changes their behavior, a surreptitious audio recording is easy to do. I've got some great stuff that I'm almost certain an attempt at photos or video would've prevented. Aside from sleep tracking, this is the most common way I used my Apple Watch.
⚖️ Okay maybe I'm just a hopelessly biased defense lawyer but can anyone read this and tell me with a straight face that the plaintiff didn't set this up...
⁉️ I’m curious: has anyone else recently seen excessive outgoing #DNS requests on their network from #Wyze cameras? This was a known issue a while ago but I thought they had fixed it.
I've noticed unusual spikes in the past 60 days or so, and when I blocked Wyze and its related domains using NextDNS, logs showed they accounted for more than 40 percent of DNS requests from my network (‼️).
🎸 I’ve played an acoustic guitar for and with my two kids since my oldest was born a few years ago, but today I plugged an old electric of mine into an amp for the first time in maybe ten years and the kids loved it, and it reminded me that there’s music-making at the core of me.
🤢 It's not a great headshot. I look so... unfamiliar with the "Smile!" command. And thanks to a moment of poor judgment, and Gravatar, it'll be all over the internet until I decide to change it again. Which will likely be soon...
(Yes, I know it's not attached. That was intentional...)
⚠️ So I’m going to do a real blog post about this when I find the time, but today I discovered that my router’s admin panel is accessible via a combination of selecting the right IP and appending a string of numbers to the name of the HTML page that contains the admin panel. The string is the same across a nonzero number of individual routers, some of which can be located with the right Google search…
🐎 Julia Glassman, writing at The Mary Sue (with major #spoilers for the newest batch of episodes):
What makes this show so great is that it isn’t afraid to employ writing that’s savvy enough for adults to enjoy. Bluey navigates real conflicts, while her parents—the delightfully flawed Bandit and Chilli—work through believable, thoughtful issues of their own. This isn’t your average children’s show.
And now, with ten new episodes having dropped on Disney+ earlier this summer (they came out in Australia a whole year ago), the show is getting positively meta.
I dare even people without kids to watch a few random episodes of Bluey without learning something they wish they learned decades ago.
Sherlock Holmes giving serious Nardwuar vibes in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle📚:
My name is Sherlock Holmes. It is my business to know what other people don’t know.
This particular quote, for nerds who know, is from adventure number seven, The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle.
😠 I’m looking at the Be Our Guest dinner as my wife and I finalize our plans for #Disney World and I need someone to tell me why the menu at one of their top restaurant experiences is so vegetarian-hostile.
Pan-roasted zucchini?
Really?
Disappointing.
⚖️ From a report at Law Dork by its proprietor, Chris Geidner:
Starr issued an “administrative stay” on Thursday that will last for 30 days while he considers the airline’s request for a stay of the order pending its appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.
Judge Starr is having a good think about whether he’s willing to endure the near-certain reversal, and the more-likely-than-not searing bench slap that will accompany it…