Sam Liebeskind

Some users may not want to see any potentially abusive content at all, while others may, for example, need to sift through banal personal attacks in order to track credible death threats. The point, however, is that users themselves should be able to exercise significantly more agency over their own social media experience.

For example, Facebook ran an experiment where they sent people less notifications. Over the short term, the findings were pretty intuitive: sending people less notifications increased their satisfaction but decreased their engagement. However, over the long term, sending people less notifications actually increased their engagement, likely because ... See more

Many such experiments, both historical and contemporary, get this balance not just wrong, but wildly wrong. They make the mistake of being about missions first, and placemaking second. That’s a suitable approach for a conference, corporation, religion, or a political movement, but not for a place qua place. Even a virtual place that exists only as ... See more

It's unfortunate because too much of a good thing (and it is a good thing – shrewd and well-intentioned people sharing the things that have helped them), when consumed in a frantic haze, becomes a bad thing (a cacophony of voices shoving advice down your throat, bolstering your belief that there's something you're doing wrong and if you just fixed ... See more