Looking around, it’s easy to be disheartened about people and the state of the world, but on Reddit I have experienced the opposite: people naturally create community, and they are smarter, funnier, and more helpful and caring than I think we often give them credit for.
And this is not because our users are some special subset of humanity. They’re... See more
incentives are everything, and Reddit doesn’t reward self-promoters
it’s utterly impossible for an algorithmic video-sharing website like TikTok to be a “town square” in the same sense that Twitter was supposed to be. There are all sorts of McLuhan-esque reasons for this: text as a medium is much faster to read, the reply and quote tweet function is what makes Twitter dialogic, its focus on text makes verbal wit... See more
an interview about instant messenger that takes place on instant messenger. the lesson is simple: writing is hard because it forces us to improve our thinking.
McLuhan argued that, pushed to its limits, a medium flips or reverses its characteristics.
Internet scale pushes information into disinformation, connection into loneliness, and desire into apathy.
the best software products aren’t just assemblages of functionality ,exposed by particular formal elements (links, buttons, icons, menus). Rather, they organize and shape how you think, and they create or sustain a particular lifestyle