Words. Ideas. Actions.

14 February 2023

It’s Valentine’s Day, so I don’t want to keep you long; you may have other plans. I just want to share my own Valentine to you. Writing these, as I’ve mentioned before, is both an alternative to Tweeting and a therapeutic exercise. They help me cope with the random ideas that get lodged in my head at times, or spur me to  craft a few hundred words about nothing at all. But every time I do, there you are. Reading them. And I can’t thank you enough. 

Obviously, not all of these are packed with revelations. Heck, some of them are just excuses to gush about a band or react to a match or even a take a leap lacking logic. Looking back on them all together, though, you get a pretty good sense of the types of things I care about. To reuse an analogy I’ve seen elsewhere, each of these posts are stones which work together to make up the structure that is me. 

So, enjoy your evening. I’ll add this small brick to the pile tonight, and we’ll keep building this together. I’m really glad you’re here.

See you tomorrow?

02 February 2023

Tonight, I want to follow up on a promise I made earlier this year, to spend more time with friends. Well, today, I over-delivered on that idea. I scheduled a lunch with a fellow dad from our daughter’s school. As I was waiting outside, I saw a very familiar face. My former Twitter colleague, Josh, who had the desk next to me for more than a year, happened to be in town, and was heading to a scheduled lunch date at the exact same restaurant at the exact same time as me! 

I was ecstatic to see him, and we made plans for something more formal when he’s back in the Bay Area in three weeks. My Dads Date™ lunch was remarkable as well. There’s something very calming about sharing your fears and expectations and recommendations with another guy trying to figure it all out. There’s no handbook for parenting, and any and all advice is great right up until you try it. But just having an trusted ear to bounce even the most ridiculous ideas off of and not getting judged is really calming for even the most anxiety inducing fears. 

From there, I biked to my favorite section of Valencia Street, grabbed a couple of books for a very important 9-year-old, and headed to a regular hang with one of my oldest friends. When someone has know you for — at this point — most of your life, there’s a lot of pretense you can dispense with. That’s one of the many reasons I love these regular get-togethers. As well as comparing notes about perfect albums. 

So, this is a reminder, both to myself and to you: Slow down and make time for your friendships. A bit like houseplants, they take a little work, but give you back way more than you put into them. 

See you tomorrow?

13 December 2022

Tonight, I want to point y’all to a podcast episode from The Verge. First, there’s a long, detailed conversation between “Decoder” host, Nilay Patel, and the CEO of Automattic, Matt Mullenweg. After their discussion, Patel talks with The Verge’s deputy editor Alex Heath about what a few possible futures for Twitter will look like. 

Although you’d do yourself a favor to listen to the entire thing, I do want to highlight part of the discussion between Patel and Mullenweg. Specifically the idea that there is a difference between creating policies and enforcing them. Now, there’s a lot of hokum going on right now around what the current Twitter owner is calling “the Twitter Files,” but what it reinforces — at least for me — is that policies are created by humans. That process can be messy. And enforcing those policies can be even messier. 

One of the things I remember vividly from my time at Twitter is the careful and deliberate way we created and corrected the policies people using Twitter agreed to in order to use the service. Interlaced in that memory is how nimble those policies needed to be, because each day brought a new reality, both of what we were seeing on the platform, and also of how people were trying to evade them. So, as we worked to keep up, we also had to staff up and train people to enforce them. And that part took time. 

If you know even the littlest bit about social media moderation or community management — to paraphrase part of Patel’s interview with Mullenweg — you know one thing for sure: These are not technology problems, they’re people problems. And no matter how good your training data or machine learning models are, you are going to have to account for both the bias of the people who built those systems as well as the ever-evolving people you’re trying to use them on. There will never be a “set it and forget it” software solution to content moderation, and the sooner every online community realizes that, the more material the moderation solutions will become.

See you tomorrow?

01 December 2022

I heard a conversation today that I wish I had heard before I wrote yesterday's post. It was between host Sean Illing and his guest Ian Bogost on “The Gray Area” podcast. The two were talking about Bogost’s recent article in the Atlantic called “The Age of Social Media Is Ending.” There is a lot in their conversation of interest, but what really caught my ear — especially after spending so many paragraphs last night thinking about the loss of community — was the idea of conversational scale and the fact that communities should be confined and not global.

That point continues to resonate with me, even hours after the final credits of that episode streamed through my headphones. The notion that everyone can talk to everyone, all the time, and that everyone can be heard and understood, all the time, is just laughable. And I don’t think that, as we used platforms which chased growth at almost any cost, anyone stopped to ask, “If everyone is speaking, who is listening?”

Communities gather around common interests. For me, I was able to find mine based on soccer and loud, distorted guitars and the love of political representation. Very rarely was I able to find someone with all of those same interests, but the unique aspect of Twitter was that even though not every Tweet from an account you followed was important to you, the person Tweeting them usually was. And you knew that even though you didn’t love the San Francisco Giants, for instance, as much as they cared about each and every at-bat, you had an appreciation for the joy or agony each October brought to them. 

As I rethink what it means to have to rebuild the online community I had on Twitter, I am reminded that I already have access to many. There’s the Twitter alumni Slack group, where a common past and a common purpose brought us together to help Tweeps find new jobs and has led us to reconnecting in other ways. I also have my content strategy community, where we gather to share ideas and resources and talk about how we can move our discipline forward in the face of repeatedly explaining what it is we do and why it’s important. And then there are the various text threads with friends about music or soccer or Florida politics. Each of these are communities I rely on. But they’re all discrete. With Twitter, I had access to many in these communities at a moment’s notice, all in one place. I guess it’s the immediacy that I miss. But, as Bogost pointed out in “The Gray Area,” maybe some friction is good. Hell, if there was a little more friction to getting these words online, you might not even be reading them. And I’ve yet to decide whether that’s a good thing or not. 

See you tomorrow?

30 November 2022

I’m not sure how this next sentence is going to go over, but here goes: I miss Twitter. That’s not a surprise if you’ve been reading any of these posts. But I want to talk a little about the layers of loss I’m feeling. Still. 

First, there’s the service itself. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I feel like one of the vital tools I used to have to navigate these increasingly confusing times has been lost to me. And it’s not just the news-gathering that I miss, but also the ability to share what I’m seeing and learning. Now, I understand there’s some hubris in that thought, but that’s one of the reasons I loved Tweeting out ideas in the first place; there was, more likely than not, a trusted follower who would gently correct me when I needed it. And that brings me to the next reason I miss Twitter.

When I joined the service in 2007, it was so I could follow one of the first communities I had found online. When we first moved to San Francisco a year earlier, I didn’t know more than a handful of people here. But they introduced me to their friends, and then we ended up at the same events and all of a sudden, we started to gather online around the pictures we took when we were together. And they ended up on Flickr. Those images, and the comments we left on them, was my first real San Francisco community. And gathering online led to us gathering in real life, where we took more pictures and posted them online, and the cycle continued. After Yahoo!’s acquisition, however, Flickr started to change and our community began to splinter. Thankfully, there were enough people in-the-know that we were able to reconvene on an emerging platform based in 140 characters. Once there, my community expanded globally. I miss the easy access to those voices multiple times a day.

That brings us to the final layer of loss, Twitter the company. It’s weird, I know, to have so much of one’s identity defined by a corporation, but I cannot really adequately express how close we were as colleagues. And still are. It is, in a sense, another category of community. We had a shared experience. A shared purpose. And shared values. But there was also an appreciation for the differences that each of us brought to the many problems we were trying to solve that made us greater as a group than we were as a collection of individual experts. It’s cliche to use a sports analogy about putting a team together, so in an attempt to avoid that, let me take another route: We were like your favorite band. Yes, we were competent as solo performers, no matter what instrument we played, but there was something magical that happened when we started playing together. We did become greater than the sum of our parts. Not every song was a hit, but the creativity and ambition in each of them could not be denied. I really miss those tunes. 

I really don’t know where I am in the grieving process anymore. I’m not even sure I know how many total steps there are to work through anymore. But what I do now is I’m still sad. And mad. And I have no idea how, or if, I’ll ever truly get over this loss. Each of these layers is a lost community. And in a time where it’s harder to gather and the future is so unsettling, I’m finding that lack of supportive voices even more acute. But if you’re still reading these, please know that I appreciate you, and I’d love to rebuild a community with you. I just don’t know where or how. I’m open to ideas, though.

See you tomorrow?

22 November 2022

I spent most of the day watching the World Cup (Argentina, wha’ happened‽), and it I was reminded of a couple of ideas that I’ve touched on in the last few days. First, witnessing these matches with a community is so much better than watching alone. Second, a great deal of work goes into creating and maintaining a community. Tonight, I want to look at both of those ideas a little bit, and revisit some of the analogies and thinking we used to use while creating experiences for new users of Twitter.

One of the recurring ways we talked about Twitter was by comparing it to a party. This worked on many levels, and failed on a few, but for now, let’s stick with it, shall we? As a guest, the first item you need for a party is an invitation. You can’t go to a party you don’t know about, right? So, we needed to make sure we built in a way for people who had encountered Twitter in the wild to know that they were welcome to come visit. And they didn’t even need to bring anything. When Tweets were embedded in news articles, for example, we built a system so that if you didn’t have an account, you could still select the Tweet and navigate to a page with it, and the most relevant replies about it, as well as a quick way to create your own account so you could add a reply of your own.

There were a number of other ways for people to come across Tweets, and for people without accounts, they all needed to act like invitations, no matter where these invites were discovered. Not many people want to go to some random party, though, so we also needed to let people know that they’d both be welcome and have people there who they’d want to be with, talking about topics they’re interested in. This was always one of our hardest jobs, and, admittedly, we didn’t always get it right. Whether it was using people’s location or address book contacts or explicitly asking for the topics and interests most important to them, creating a warm welcome in those first few minutes after walking through our theoretical threshold were make-or-break for whether people wanted to stay at our soirée. 

No matter how we tried to do it though, one idea was clear: If we didn’t present people with interesting Tweets, either about topics they wanted to read about or from accounts they were interested in, people would question why they were there and not stay very long. Those first few moments, the moment that figurative front door opened and our guest scanned the room to see who was welcoming and where they could find a perch, was the pivotal moment for Twitter to show its value. But because Twitter is such a uniquely individualized experience for everyone, there wasn’t really a great way to throw the same party for everyone on the globe. Which is how and why the party analogy starts to break down.

See, in those early hours and days, Twitter is work. Seriously. Think back to how much time you put in to finding and following the accounts you have in your Timeline. Those didn’t just appear all at once. Sure, we built some tools and systems to recommend handfuls of hopefully relevant accounts to you, but you still had to search and scroll and open profiles and vet each and every follow decision, sometimes waiting a few days to see what kind, and how often, the accounts you chose to follow Tweeted something interesting. Nobody wants to do that much work, especially at a party, but if you invested in the effort, the payoff was like no other. Which is why we’re seeing so many people struggle to replace Twitter with something else.

New platforms like Post. or Hive Social or anything that comes after are all going to face some version of the same problem: They’re not Twitter. The communities we’ve built for ourselves, some for more than a decade and a half, are not going to be recreated in two weeks, no matter how fast they are working through their waitlists. What we need, honestly, is patience. We are going to fragment. And then we’ll start to reconvene. Maybe we’ll gather around events, or maybe it’ll be because we’re all talking about the same topic. But however it happens, it’s going to be slow and we’re going to need to be mindful of the mistakes we’ve made in the past. Think of it like this: Yes, we had a great time at our 21st birthday party, but there were some people there and some decisions made that we probably regretted the next morning. As we start planning for our metaphorical 22nd birthday, maybe we should just invite a few close friends over for some snacks and a nice board game. Nobody wants to try and host a party in a global town square.

See you tomorrow?

21 November 2022

Tonight, let’s start with some facts:

1. I’m writing these posts in an effort to collect some of my thoughts instead of posting them to Twitter.

2. For better or worse, most of my thoughts lately have been about Twitter.

3. I love watching the World Cup.

4. Supporting the World Cup this year (and in 2018, to be honest) is more than problematic.

5. Watching the World Cup without Tweeting about it eliminates a ton of the enjoyment I get out of the tournament.

6. I’m having a very hard time enjoying the things that I love while they are simultaneously being destroyed by ego and greed.

In 2018, I spent hours in The Lodge on the fifth floor of Twitter’s HQ watching match after match of the last World Cup. I was taking pictures and encouraging people to wear their favorite jerseys to work and help create a community around one of my favorite events. All of it was to help illustrate that you could be yourself when you came to work for Twitter. Your passions and personality matter, and we wanted it to show up every day. Since I just so happened to be the Design And Research blog’s editor-in-chief at the time, I also assigned myself a blog post about it, in part to justify all my screen time down there.

I’ve written about the World Cup many times before. In fact, the first item I ever posted on Medium was about going to my first match in 1994. Since that inaugural outing, I’ve traveled to France 98, Korea Japan 2002, Germany 2006, South Africa 2010, and the 2014 edition in Brazil. But with each passing tournament, being a fan of the World Cup became more and more problematic because it also meant you had to be a customer of FIFA. And the level of corruption and misdeeds there just kept getting bigger and bigger. Between the bribery in awarding Russia the 2018 event, and the fact that neither the U.S. nor my beloved Italians qualified for it, I was more than deterred from going to see any matches that year. Watching them at work, and turning those viewing sessions into something positive, just felt like the right antidote.

Putting aside the fact that Italy again failed to qualify this year, the corruption, human rights record, and abuses of the workers hired to build all the needed infrastructure kept me from getting on a plane to Qatar this year. Surely, though, I could find a World Cup community at my new job, especially with the help of my Twitter feed, right? Well, as we now know, Twitter is far from the tool it used to be for following the Cup this year. And I’m left with a very similar question: How can I continue to enjoy something when I disagree so vociferously with the people who control it?

Like many things I enjoy in my life, the enjoyment includes introducing and sharing them with others. Most of the time, that sharing came through Twitter. Without that outlet this year, I’m finding the already subdued reaction I’m having to this year’s World Cup — it’s in November for chrissakes! — even more muted as I watch without a large part of my community.  There’s no immediacy. No online joy. No memes! I hope that this post, and the ones which will probably follow, will help me find a new tribe. Maybe even on Post. But if you’re watching, too, and have complicated feelings about enjoying the matches or Tweeting your reactions, or both, please know that I’m here for you. Even if the Azzurri are not.

See you tomorrow?

16 November 2022

There were two bits of news which caught my eye today. The first broke early this morning regarding what is, essentially, a loyalty test for current Twitter employees. Apparently, the current owner gave people until 5 p.m. ET today to decide whether or not they were “hardcore” enough to continue to work for him. In the note, according to news reports, Twitter’s owner said, “At its heart, Twitter is a software and servers company …” 

The gasp I let out when I read that. 

But let’s park that for a moment while we talk about the other news bit I wanted to share. It’s the recent “On the Media” mid-week podcast episode about Twitter and Mastodon, their similarities and differences; take a listen before we move on:

Now one idea both these items have in common boils down to one of the fundamental values of Twitter: conversation. It’s not a stretch these days to say Twitter’s current owner fundamentally doesn’t understand its value. And his recent ultimatum to staff, reducing the platform down to — what was it again? — “software and servers,” is just so far off the mark. I mean, seriously, I’m having a hard time adequately putting into words how completely misguided this thinking is. 

But this isn’t the place to go on and on about everything he gets wrong. Instead, I want to point out just one of the many ways Tweeps used to think and work toward creating what we called “the conversation layer of the internet.” In 2018 (actually, it was exactly four years ago yesterday), the Design and Research team invited Priya Parker, author of The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters, to talk to us about how we could make sure that our work was helping create a place where people would feel comfortable to come to have those conversations. We learned about how people need to feel welcomed, we took part in workshops on how to shape constructive conversations, and we were constantly reminded that we were building to account for the unpredictability of humans. 

Now, if we think about Clive Thompson’s conversation with Brooke Gladstone on that embedded episode of “On the Media,” you’ll hear how the people who are fleeing for Mastodon are still doing some of the conversation curation work that we were trying to build into the product. But instead of Twitter’s product decisions helping keep you part of — or away from — particular discussions, on Mastodon, moderators are having to do the work that our product design decision used to do for you.

See, it’s much more than “software and servers.” 

As I revisit these ideas, I’m sad all over again. Twitter gets compared to a lot of other types of social media. But one thing that’s been true almost every day since its inception is that Twitter is not like any other platform. And no other platform will ever be like it. It attracted a certain type of person who favored the written word over video, was able to context-shift in the matter of 140 characters, and who were more than happy to speak truth to power and find a community of like-minded folks to gather with to make real change in the real world. Yes, the “Twitter is not real life” people have a point. But to ignore the influence people on Twitter were able to impose on the powerful is to completely ignore meaningful movements that have literally changed the world.

See you tomorrow?

04 November 2022

Last night, shortly after I posted yesterday’s entry, I saw a link in the Twitter Alumni Slack for a Twitter Space featuring current and former Tweeps, and I reluctantly joined. I’m glad I did. In it were current and former Twitter employees sharing fond stories, favorite memories, and lots of honest, genuine admiration for each other and what we have built. One thing that stood out for me, though, was the intense sense of camaraderie. 

We talked about Tea Times and One Team and the stories behind how we got certain celebrities back on the platform. And, as the night grew later, and the tales got more sentimental, one thing was clear: There is nothing like Twitter. And no matter who owns it, nobody can take those memories away.

One story that was shared happened at a Tea Time in 2018, right after most other platforms were booting a certain loud-mouthed Texan with a penchant for denying the reality of a massacre of 26 teachers and children. Twitter, and Jack specifically, had decided not to follow suit. There’s a lot more I want to share about this later — and I intend to — but it was a reminder that no matter how much we loved each other and this platform, we had to continually face, and respond to, almost each and every unpredictable event the globe could throw at us. While still building for the future. It’s no wonder why our bond is so strong.

I tried my best to go about my day today as normal, but it was simply impossible. Seeing new members join the Slack, hearing their histories, and reuniting with people I haven’t talked to in more than two years meant the world to me. And just being able to commune and commiserate with them did me some good as I watched news story after news story come to the same realization we had already reached: Twitter will never be the same.

Today exhausted me, and I didn’t even get laid off! But all of this news has definitely taken an emotional toll. I just hope I’m able to redirect this sadness and angst into something more productive, like finding these Tweeps new roles, and helping maintain the community that’s sprung up out of the decomposing body of what was a living, vibrant, beautiful organism, thoughtlessly buried by all this needless turmoil. Here’s hoping that all this decomposition leads to many new blooms very soon.

See you tomorrow?