Words. Ideas. Actions.

03 April 2023

Tonight’s post is a little bit of a throwback. When I first started these, it was a way to fill the void I was feeling as I abandoned Tweeting. But I ended up writing about Twitter quite a lot in those early days. So, as we come to the penultimate planned post here, it’s only fitting that the weekend’s events have forced me to look at the smoldering wreckage my favorite app has become.

Thankfully, these posts have kept me from logging into The Bird Site. I deleted the app from my phone long ago. I’m no longer loading the Explore tab on my laptop every other hour, either. I think it’s finally safe to say that my Twitter addiction is broken. But that doesn’t mean I’m immune to the continuing decline of a platform I spent so much time and energy helping to create. One such anecdote came to me at about 11 a.m. this morning when a friend in a Slack group shared a report that the Twitter logo had been replaced by Doge.

Now, I’m not a financial genius, nor do I have a business degree, but I’m pretty sure that using an image of a meme-ed Shiba Inu in place of an iconic logo which is known around the globe is not great for the potential profitability of your company. Never mind that the change comes days after April Fool’s Day, and during the window of time where the current management announced they would be removing the Verified check marks which helped people figure out which accounts were actually who they say they are. It’s almost like a voluntary self destruction. But through incompetence. 

I usually like to bring solutions to conversations when I point out problems. But as I’ve said here before, I’m not being paid to solve Twitter’s problems any more, so I’ll leave that to others. I will say that if you were looking to add more nails to a rapidly built coffin, making it harder to trust the information you’re getting there would surely do it. 

There are many things which could kill off a social platform. But most of the deadly choices currently being made at HQ seem to be self-imposed. It’s like knowing you’re deathly allergic to peanuts and deciding to sustain yourself entirely on a diet of Butterfingers. It’s not the fastest way to kill yourself, but it will bring additional issues along with completely, painfully destroying yourself. If I were advising Twitter users, I’d make sure that you’ve already downloaded your data, found another place where your community has gathered, and made the patient as comfortable as possible because it feels like they’ve made a Kevorkian-like choice.

See you tomorrow?

[Important note: I don’t make these suicide references unadvisedly. If you or someone you know needs help, though, you can call 988 in the U.S. at any time.]

16 February 2023

Well, interviews have started. I’ve had a couple of screening calls with recruiters this week and last, but now the full-on “what have you created” discussions with hiring managers and potential teammates is getting underway. So, if you’ll indulge me tonight, I’m going to draft one of my case studies here in front of you. 

As I’ve mentioned when I started creating these posts, writing has been a constant through-line in my career. One of the aspects about being a content designer and UX writer that’s so attractive to me is the ability to use systems thinking to make writing easier and better for both individuals and teams. Essentially, I want to help make crafting content quicker, and more scalable, for global organizations. Whether that means creating and maintaining style guides so that standards are understood and adhered to, or mentoring designers — for instance — who are looking to document their decision-making process so they can better defend them in presentations or submit them as a talk at conferences, I really love giving people the tools to become better communicators. With these systems in place, we can streamline the ways we implement the improvements we want to make in our apps and online experiences. I think of it as setting up a kitchen so that you can create exactly what you are craving. That means ensuring recipes have all the steps you need, you have easy access to the right ingredients, and you’ve made sure the cookware and utensils are clean and in expected and convenient places so that you can start creating rather than casting about for one thing or another. With that explanation of how I think about content strategy in general out of the way, let’s look at an example of how I put it into practice during one project at Twitter.

Specifically, I want to talk about why and how we expanded Twitter’s Tweet limits from 140 to 280 characters. We noticed that people were abandoning Tweets as they got close to that 140-character limit. So the Design Team worked with our data partners to figure out how much of a problem that limit was for people creating Tweets. Turns out, 9% of all English-language Tweets were bumping up against the 140-character limit, but less than a half of a percent for Tweets in Japanese. We also learned that a good portion of those people who were bumping into the upper limit were abandoning their drafts rather than revising them. So this was a problem not only for our users — because they couldn’t say what they wanted to — but also for Twitter, since Tweets were the fundamental building blocks of essentially everything else the business was built on. To put it more starkly, without Tweets, Twitter doesn’t exist.

As we explored ways to test whether giving people more characters would keep people from abandoning Tweets which were too long, we needed to make sure making this change — specifically longer Tweets — didn’t have negative effects on other aspects of the timeline, such as Tweet density, especially in double-byte character sets. In addition to how Tweets would show up in the timeline, we needed to look at the Tweet creation flow, and test different ways to make it clear what the new limits were and when people were getting close to exhausting it. Working with my Design partner, Josh, we created some visual explorations for how we could simply and clearly communicate the new limit to anyone, anywhere in the world. 

As we tested this extended character count, we saw the number of those 9% of English-language Tweets which were previously hitting the 140-character limit plummet. With the expanded character count, that number dropped to only 1% of Tweets running up against the limit. We were definitely addressing both the user and business problem. With the solution in hand, we still needed to figure out how to implement it, though.

What I love about the explorations and collaborations we worked on for the final implementation was the fact that the “content” I was strategizing was more than just words. Our needs were global, and that meant that almost any error indicator or hint about the limits were best indicated without words so that they were universal and accessible, no matter how people were interacting with the apps and website. So rather than iterating on different versions of a “Your Tweet is too long” written error message, we settled on an indicator which closed and changed color as you got closer to the new, 280-character limit. We also built the status indicator into the VoiceOver flow so that people using screen readers would know if they had exceeded 280 characters, and by how many of them they had gone over. 

Once we had the product design approved and the product implementation coded, we need a communications plan to coordinate with the launch. Working with the Brand, Marketing, and Comms teams, we did a series of Tweets and blog posts, which I helped edit and ghost-write, to talk about the entire process — from the design and the rationale, to UI indicators and error messages. But we can talk about that part of the story another time. Wish me luck.

See you tomorrow?

26 January 2023

Tonight I want to talk, briefly, about rule enforcement on social media sites. In light of what seems like announcements dueling for “Worst Decision of the Year” awards, Twitter this week reinstated (then suspended again) the account of an avowed white supremacist, followed by Facebook and Instagram’s parent company, Meta, announcing that they will be allowing the 45th President of the United States back on their platforms. 

I’ve touched briefly on the topic of content moderation here in the past, so tonight, I want to share a little nuance about how we approached one aspect of suspensions inside Twitter when I was there. One of the first tasks I had as a content strategist after moving to the Design and Research team was to help our Trust and Safety folks update our enforcement emails, the ones people get explaining why their accounts had been suspended. One important part of the task included finding the right balance between our newly updated brand voice and a stern but understanding tone. 

To start, we took the finite list of policy offenses, along with the number and degrees of infractions involved, and started auditing the existing emails, prioritizing the ones we sent the most, first. As we started going through them, we noticed that we could streamline what we were saying, and to whom, by creating templates which accounted for severity (like first offenses) and the offense itself (like spamming links to people). We started to create templates with places for variables to be programmed in, such as the name of the policy people had broken and the number of times the account had violated it. For a good deal of the most frequently violated policies, this work was pretty easy: Revise the version we had with the new brand voice in mind, test it with the policy variations inserted, and then move on to the next. But here’s where doing work at Twitter gets interesting. 

Even as we were undergoing this transformation, our policies were changing. And for any social media platform you want to be a part of, they should always be changing. No service is going to be able to create a set of policies on launch day which will suffice for any good amount of time without evolving. Because the way people use those platforms will evolve. In good ways and in bad. The policy enforcement teams, hopefully working in collaboration with a lot of other people, both inside and outside of the company, need to stay on top of things like trend manipulation, spam, impersonation, and a whole host of other ways of weaponizing product features. 

Those product features, more accurately the people who are pitching, designing, and developing them, also need to be able to anticipate the number of ways a new or iterated feature can be used for harm, and either build in mitigation factors or re-evaluate launching altogether. It becomes the responsibility for each member of the team to look at what they’re building and ask not just “Who is this for?”, but “Who could this harm?”.

As we step back and think about how we’re building the social web, and what foundational decisions we continue to build upon, I am starting to wonder why we can’t move away from engagement-based metrics and towards something more benevolent. But there’s obviously no shareholder value in curiosity or community or news literacy. Unless and until we can create incentives which reward civility, we are going to keep recreating the scenarios which have ushered in today’s separatism. Especially if Web 2.0 platforms keep allowing the worst of us to drive the conversations for the rest of us.

See you tomorrow?

17 January 2023

Tonight, I reluctantly return to a topic that was part of my everyday existence for at least 5 years: Twitter. Earlier today, the Verge and New York magazine published their collaboration about the timeline and inner workings of the recent Twitter takeover. And while I think it’s a valuable use of your time even if you’re not a former Tweep, I want to focus on one paragraph in particular toward the end of the piece:

Four days later, Twitter crashed. More than 10,000 users, many of them international, submitted reports of problems accessing the site. Some got an error message reading, “Something went wrong, but don’t fret — it’s not your fault.”

See that error message there? That last sentence there with the em dash? The one on the quotes? I wrote that! And, as I mentioned in a Slack channel earlier today, if that’s my Twitter legacy, I’m fine with that. But I want to give you a little history about how that particular error message came about. It’s a combination of content strategy and #LoveWhereYouWork ethos, which is a great example of the zenith of my time at Twitter.

In 2018, our batch of interns was stellar. We consistently had great groups come through, but that year, there was something special in the air. And I’m not just talking about the ones assigned to the Design and Research team. Throughout the org, every intern I worked with not only made the platform better, they taught me a ton, too. It was a pretty great summer. 

Each intern had a mentor assigned, and specific tasks they were assigned to work on. But they also got to pitch and complete a project on their own. One of that year’s interns, Vanessa, wanted to reimagine the design of our error messages. Visually, they had changed very little from the days of the infamous Fail Whale. And that illustration didn’t even come from a Tweep. So her plan was to update our errors, aligning them with our then-current visual brand guidelines, which gave me an opportunity to update the kinds of messages which were available for our engineers to use. 

That’s where this post turns from watching the current Twitter car crash (all layers of innuendo intended) and more towards an error message how-to, at least in regards to how we did it on my team back in 2018. First, we asked ourselves what scenarios could cause an error to pop up for people. From what I can remember, we came up with four broad scenarios we needed to account for:

• User error- This should be self explanatory, but it’s basically something like a typo, usually in a search term or URL.

• Twitter error- Sometimes, things break. And when we knew it was our fault, we needed to tell them that.

• Connectivity error- Not all of Twitter’s features were available offline, so we had to account for moments when we needed more bandwidth.

• Mystery error- And then there were the unexplained gremlins, which may later have an explanation, but in the moment, this was the equivalent of a shruggie.

After we had mapped out all the instances which needed messages, then we had to decide what to tell people. And whether or not we needed them to take an action. So all four of the types of messages we mapped out had a version with a call-to-action (CTA) and a version without. If we knew a refresh might fix things, for instance, we’d include a button reading “Try again”. 

Lastly, we made sure that each of the messages, whether they had CTAs or not, were using our updated brand voice. But we had to make sure that our tone was appropriate for the emotional state of people when they saw it. Remembering that nobody really wants to see an error message — no matter how witty it is — was a key component in crafting a clear message rather than a clever one. We did this by developing a template so that we could balance information with empathy, and roll them out in all 42 languages we were using at the time. 

If we look at that example from earlier, “Something went wrong, but don’t fret — it’s not your fault,” I can tell you that was one for the Twitter error scenario. And it was probably followed by the “Try again” CTA. We reused that “Something went wrong…” piece for all of them, I think, and then tailored the ending depending on which error type it was and what we wanted people to do next. 

Honestly, it’s been a while since writing those, and I don’t remember them all. I wish I had a list of all of them, but I’m sure if you’re still using Twitter, you’ll most likely see them pop up more and more the longer the current regime retains control. While I’m glad these posts aren’t revisiting the Twitter drama as often as when I first started writing them, I was glad for this trip down memory lane today. And happy to revisit some of the content design problem-solving that consumed most of my waking hours back then. I miss that work a lot. But I’m glad to have my life back, too.

See you tomorrow?

13 January 2023

Last night, just after getting yesterday’s post up, I caught the beginning of “Amanpour & Co.” which featured a segment with Dr. Céline Gounder, an infectious-disease physician and epidemiologist, senior fellow at the Kaiser Family Foundation, and the editor at large of Kaiser Health News. She’s also Grant Wahl’s wife. After her recent piece in the New York Times, Amanpour had her on to talk about misinformation, specifically around COVID-19 vaccinations, and how her loss became a central piece of propaganda for purveyors of misinformation online.

This led me to look for her other recent appearances on the topic. She’s been on NPR, CBS, and the “PBS Newshour,” among other outlets. She tells the story of how she wanted to get the truth about Grant’s death out to the public as soon as possible. Her quick efforts seemed to tamp down a lot of the initial misinformation, but after more misinformation started filling social media sites following Buffalo Bills player Damar Hamlin’s cardiac arrest on the field just a few weeks later, she felt it was important to head into the breach once again. 

One of the ways she recommends fighting these conspiracy theories is by pairing facts with empathy. But how do we do it at scale? Not all of us have access to the New York Times op-ed page. And with companies like Twitter gutting their content moderation teams, even the entities which were once trying to battle mis- and disinformation at a large scale are throwing in the towel under the guise of “free speech.” 

I wish I could be more hopeful about these efforts, but the game of Whac-A-Mole we have to employ to combat all that’s out there is just not sustainable. And the pending machine-learning revolution is only going to bake our existing shortcomings into the ones and zeros of machines repeating the same poor decision making which got us into this predicament in the first place, only now at potentially quantum speeds.

I was stunned when Grant died. I wrote about it as best I could shortly after it happened. I still shake my head in disbelief when thinking about what a shock it was. And is. If there’s one good thing to come out of all this it’s Dr. Gounder’s efforts to cement Grant’s legacy in a beneficial, meaningful way. By protecting and empowering Grant’s memory, whether it ends up being through a journalism award or scholarship, and potentially putting out an anthology of his work, the ideas and ideals he stood for can live on long after his final whistle.

See you tomorrow?

11 January 2023

I haven’t fully thought this through yet, so I can’t promise a revelation by the end. While listening to The Light We Carry, Michelle Obama shared her version of advice I’ve tried to accept for years: Don’t fear mistakes because you can learn from them. If I had a quarter for every time I’ve ever tried to put this into practice, I would have been able to buy Twitter myself. 

We’ve been led to believe that a broken bone will be stronger in that place when it heals. And it’s this misconception that, I think, helps fuel the idea that we get better after learning from our mistakes. My worry, however, has always been what are the greater ramifications of making that initial mistake? 

Obviously, there are some jobs where a mistake at work can be much more costly than others. Giving the wrong entrée to a guest at dinner service is not as dire as, say, amputating the wrong leg. And this kind of thinking has always pushed me to avoid mistakes in the first place. Now, that’s not to say I’ve never made them. But boy do I hate it when I do. And I tend to get down on myself for not doing better. 

One way I’ve been exploring changing this is by admiring the art of Kintsugi, the art of fixing broken pottery by piecing the broken pieces back together and binding them with gold. Instead of trying to seamlessly glue them back together, you accentuate the fact that the original has been fundamentally changed, and potentially become more valuable, by adding a precious metal to it. This highlighting of where something went wrong is such a fascinating idea to me, yet I can’t stop thinking about how they could have prevented the pottery from getting broken in the first place. 

I’m not sure I’ll ever get comfortable with the idea. Especially when I think back on my work at Twitter, where making a mistake could have terrible, global consequences. It was a burden I carried each and every day. But I felt like I had been training my entire life to make the right decision the first time, rather than having to go back and undo any damage done. How much gold do you think it would take to put Vine back together, anyhow?

Unfortunately, the biggest side effect of this kind of thinking is that because I expect so much from myself, I tend to have similar high expectations in others. And when you’re raising a child, that kind of thinking comes into conflict daily. Or, more likely, hourly. But parenting travails wasn’t where I wanted to go tonight; I can save that for a future post.

See you tomorrow?

10 January 2023

I come to you again tonight with a nugget from a podcast. This time, it’s a line from the recent episode of “Decoder with Nilay Patel.” It was a broadcast of a live discussion between Patel and Chokepoint Capitalism co-authors Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin. If you’re interested in the cross-section of creative work and capitalism, the entire chat is worth your time. But Patel said something towards the end of their discussion that leads me to tonight’s post: 

“There’s a difference between having an audience and having an algorithmic audience.”

Last weekend, we watched “Marcel the Shell with Shoes On.” It’s based on characters created by Jenny Slate and Dean Fleischer Camp in the Marcel the Shell books that we read to our daughter when she was little. The movie is a sweet look at Marcel’s search for his family after a marriage breaks up. That search leads to him creating a YouTube channel to talk about the search. I won’t give away much more about the plot, but Patel’s quote reminded me of a line from the movie that I jotted down in my notebook when Marcel was talking about the people watching his video uploads: 

“It’s an audience, not a community.”

Both of these quotes are so important to the work I used to do. And both the nuance and the differences between an audience, whether algorithmic or not, and a community seem to be important all over again as we get word that Twitter is moving toward an all-algorithmic timeline. I won’t get into the ins and outs of what we prototyped and what we learned while I was there, but trust me when I say that I was very vocal about the design and product decisions when we were testing a purely algorithmic timeline for people. 

Which brings me to the nut of tonight’s reason for all this exposition: If we can trust people to build an algorithm, we should be able to trust them to curate a timeline. What do I mean by that? Well, let’s get into it. 

Years ago, while working with my friend Scott, the social web was just taking shape, and the cost of building an app was falling precipitously. We would often think about mashing up different existing app ideas to create a new one. One of my favorites was what we ended up calling Looksy. It was basically a way that you could share links with your friends to items you had seen around the web that were interesting to you, asking them to “give ‘em a Looksy.” This was back in 2008, when sites like StumbleUpon and Digg as well as RSS feeds were a lot more ubiquitous, and useful, than the walled gardens we have today. But core to our idea was that people, friends even, were trusted link sources for their other friends. That human curation, and the ability to target specific links to specific people, was an essential piece of the experience we wanted to create. 

Later, services like Nuzzle (whose parent company, Scroll, was bought by Twitter bought about a year before Jack Dorsey stepped down), started to fill the space we were looking to fill with Looksy, but it was more of a heat map of popularly shared links from the sources you had already trusted, whether from your Facebook friends or accounts you were following on Twitter. It was a great way for me to keep up with what the people I was interested in were interested in. Which was always one of the biggest attractions of Twitter to me. It was like I had self-selected a couple of dozen editors-in-chief for the most interesting publication on the web each and every day.

This curation concept was also one of the big reasons I always admired the Curation team at Twitter. They were constantly gathering and vetting and explaining the links and information and trending topics on the service. The Explore tab on Twitter became the fastest, and usually best-sourced, breaking news service on the planet. Without argument. I miss it every day. Especially when I need a quick update on something I’m not totally interested in. Need to know the score of a game you’re not watching, the Curation team had you covered with not just the scores but a few Tweet-length highlights so you could get the gist of any match. Natural disasters? The Curation team had the latest, accurate information from trusted sources served up at the top of your feed. And for the all-too-often breaking news of a terrorist attack or mass shooting? Unfortunately, the Curation team had a lot of practice, and brought their humanity and care into crafting updates with the right balance of information and empathy. 

I started my writing career as a news producer for Florida Public Radio. Drafting and editing scripts with our reporters was one of my favorite tasks. But it was tough going more often than not. So, when I see people who get it right, over and over, I have to stop and admire them. It may be why I miss that part of Twitter most of all. Because I know how much work it was. And what a talent it is to do it well. As we lose one more space where careful curation is being replaced by an algorithm which rewards engagement over curiosity, I am lamenting Twitter’s loss all over again. 

See you tomorrow?

15 December 2022

Whelp, I’m not going to lie to you: I’m pissed. I spent a good part of last night devoting much too much headspace to Twitter. And tonight — well — tonight, it’s gotten worse. And, like I said, I’m pissed. Mostly at myself, though.

See, I’m mad that I trusted someone who’s proven over and over that he cannot be trusted. I took him at his word. And, even though I disagree with him more often than not, I was giving him the benefit of the doubt that he would practice what he preached. But the truth is that it doesn’t matter. Twitter is his now, and he can do whatever he wants with it. We’re just going to have to live with the consequences.

I don’t know that I have any larger point to make here tonight. I just wanted to leave myself this reminder: Twitter is gone; stop expecting anything different. I think that may be a good reminder for others, as well. It’s definitely a shocking wake-up call for the reporters who were trying their best to use the service while they reported on the service. But we all need to rethink our information diets without Twitter in it. And that’s hard to even wrap my head around.

Sure, I get push notifications and listen to far too many podcasts. But there was something special about getting news from Twitter. I’ve been trying to figure out why those other sources aren’t doing it for me, and I think I finally figured it out this week: Those other apps have their own editors-in-chief, deciding which stories to cover and how. But with Twitter, I played that role. I could keep up with headlines, whether local or global, but I could also dig much deeper on niche topics, like why a Pavement B-side is so popular on Spotify. 

The more I talk about “the glory days of Twitter,” the more I start feeling like that star athlete in high school who just can’t resist reliving his glory days, no matter how many years ago they were. But make no mistake, the changes at Twitter will have some pretty big consequences on how, who, and where our news comes from. We found ways to stay informed before Twitter. And we’ll figure out a way without it. But this liminal period, where voices are amplified and suppressed based on the whims of a fragile, probably increasingly unstable, narcissistic megalomaniac, should have us questioning why we allow this much power to be held in such questionable hands.

See you tomorrow?

14 December 2022

I start tonight frustrated. Not because today saw the end of a great underdog story at the World Cup. No, it’s about the tedious and capricious changes Twitter implemented just because its owner can’t handle the public scrutiny the platform he now owns thrives on. So, he’s made another snap-judgment change. One which benefits only him. Without regard to the broader implications of its rushed implementation.

I don’t know why I’m surprised. At this point, these kinds of seemingly arbitrary decisions have become de rigueur. Yet, here I sit, mouth agape, staring into a screen, reading about how ham-fistedly this has been rolled out. I don’t want to dwell on this too long, because I already hate how much mental space Twitter continues to occupy in my mind, but as I read about the new location-sharing policy, and its enforcement, I thought about a blog post I wrote ages ago the day of the Boston Marathon bombing. 

There’s an idea in that collection of words and reactions that is as naïve as it is novel when we look back on it today. But using eyewitness Tweets has been the bread and butter on countless news stories over the years, even if we didn’t know what we were reading about at the time. 

Making real-time, location-based information a potential violation of the new Twitter policies is going to hamper the first-drafting of history we’ve come to rely on from the service. But, like I said, this should no longer be a surprise. I’m just having a hard time coming to grips with the idea that Twitter isn’t what Twitter was. Yes, I’m not Tweeting any more. And, yes, I’m using it very infrequently. But when a news story breaks, I still search the desktop site for news. And I get immediately reminded of how much we’ve lost, not the least of which was the amazing work the Curation team did to put Tweets into context so we could quickly understand what we knew about a story, and why we knew it.

I will miss Twitter for a long, long time. Even if I find another service which meets my news needs. But until then, the loss is just so pronounced. Nothing lasts forever, obviously, but I wasn’t ready for Twitter to be taken from me. Not like this.

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?

07 December 2022

Tonight’s post is going to be a little bit meta (please note the lowercase “m”). I want to talk about the process of writing these, the pros and cons of my approach, and the aspirations I have for at least one of these. First, some logistics. 

Normally around here, everyone is in bed by 10 p.m. Except me. That’s when I crack my knuckles and get to work on these. That usually means I need to already have an idea in mind about what I want to write about, and just buckle down to get the thoughts out of my head and onto this page. I may have mentioned it before, but to reiterate, I want to have everything up and posted before midnight. That gives me about two hours to get close to 500 coherent words together, add links where needed, choose a title from my predetermined list (have you figured out where I’m pulling these titles from yet?), and scroll through my old photos to select one which is mildly related to the evening’s topic. 

So far, I’ve posted one of these almost every weekday evening since the beginning of November, my own version of NaNoWriMo. And after working on more than two dozen posts, one conclusion I’ve come to is that it’s so much easier to write about opinions than to write about facts. And maybe that’s why we’re so inundated with a morass of ideas which we have to navigate through to get to the truth. Let’s go back to the World Cup as an example. 

If I want to put up 500 words about how much I despise the play, technique, and mindset of a certain high-scoring Portuguese captain, I could do that pretty effortlessly, without having to cite one stat or example, just a stream of consciousness about how watching him makes me feel. And, since that‘s my lived experience, there’s not really much debate about it. But if I wanted to present a well-informed case about why I think a more petite, 35-year-old forward from South America is a better all-around soccer player than a certain recently terminated Manchester United forward, I’d need to back it up with examples and statistics and a thorough evaluation about why one brings value to a team and the other only values himself. And that takes work. Just sharing an opinion is far from work. 

When we start to evaluate information, it takes critical thinking. And research. And the humility of knowing what you don’t know as well as the confidence to get a little uncomfortable in order to potentially learn something new. Another in the long list of reasons why I loved Twitter was the ability to learn something new every day. Or even every hour, if I was willing to spend that much time and effort to seek new information. Under the new leadership, however, the burden to verify what you’re reading is far too much. You used to be able to trust that most of the news you were seeing, especially on the Explore tab, was presented with enough context for it to quickly make sense. Now that the entire Curation team is gone, though, one has to be more than skeptical about every trend and hashtag listed, especially on the Trending section. 

While I stand by the thoughts I’ve been able to collect in these posts, I know that there’s not a lot to them. Right now, I think that’s fine. If you’re reading them, I hope you’re appropriately skeptical of what I’ve put here. Eventually, though, I want to be able to spend the time and effort to put something together which teaches you — and probably me — something new. I know that the process of putting these words together is a clarifying process for me, so from just that aspect, these are valuable. I hope they're a little valuable to you, too. Even if they’re not Tweets.

See you tomorrow?

06 December 2022

Today felt very fragmented. It reminded me of reading Tweets for hours at a time, constantly context shifting. It’s been a while since I felt like this. And I’m not a fan. Let’s start with the number of items on my mind. There are a lot. And when I get like this, I need an outlet. But first, a story: 

During my senior year in college, my best friend and I won a trip to Mexico. One of the many memorable things that we came back with was the concept of worry dolls. As I remember the explanation, when you have something you’re worried about, you whisper it to one of these small, woven figures, place it in its box under a pillow, and then get a good night’s sleep. Ideally, in the morning, the doll did the worrying for you while you got some sound sleep. 

If you’ll allow, I’m going to spend a few minutes using these paragraphs as today’s worry dolls, in the hopes that leaving them here will help with my discomfort. 

In an homage to a recurring theme here, let’s start with Twitter. The news there keeps getting worse. And more surreal. All while I have this nagging burden to help as many people as possible find new roles, especially people in The States on visas. 

Let’s move on to my current role. We had what’s been termed as a “lift and shift” reorganization, meaning they took my entire org, from Director all the way down, and placed it under a different leadership team. It’s left me feeling unsettled, both literally and figuratively, while I wait for a better understanding of new goals and priorities while staring at an unfinished 2022 to-do list. 

Now, to politics. As I type these words, results in the Georgia senatorial run-off election are looking good for Senator Warnock’s re-election. But even as I breathe a sigh of relief, I see a gathering storm on the horizon in the form of the 2024 election. It’s like we’re always holding our breath, on constant alert. And I just want to come up for air.

Then, there are the self-imposed expectations that the holidays bring. I know this is an area where I can do a lot of work in relief on my own, but I keep putting pressure on myself to overdeliver, probably overcompensating for my perceived shortcomings as a father and husband by over-purchasing gifts. Nothing is sufficient, and everything falls short. Not to mention the cost of absolutely everything is way higher than we budgeted. 

And that brings us to the bigger, uncontrollable items, which I’ll just list because I can’t even fathom where to start finding solutions for them (which is probably why they vex me in my sleep). There’s the probably-pending doom from climate change. And the dire economic outlook for the upcoming one, maybe two, years. Oh, and the fact that hundreds are still dying every day from a pandemic which is much worse than people care to admit. And the fact that those health outcomes are, in part, due to the racial disparities so rampant in our healthcare system (more aptly characterized as our insurance empire). 

Unfortunately, I think I could keep listing items for another hour, or so, but I do want to let these worry ’graphs get to work so that I can get some sleep. I hope my worrying out loud doesn’t add to your own list, but if it did, please find some worry dolls of your own, and take care of yourself tonight. 

See you tomorrow?

05 December 2022

Tonight, I’ve been trying to rebuild the news consumption engine that Twitter used to be for me. A few weeks ago, I created an account on Post. Mainly, it was to make sure I could squat on my username. At the time, usernames had to be four characters long. So, instead of @F6x like my Twitter handle, I leaned into the Post. branding with @F6x. on Post.

Ages ago when I joined Twitter, it was the Wild West. I didn’t know who to follow, outside of a few friends who had introduced me to the service in the first place. Thankfully, I have some pretty smart friends. And they have smart friends. And by just looking through who they were following, I found a core group of people and accounts who made my Twitter experience immediately valuable. Getting value out of those first few days, as I’ve mentioned before, is a fundamental reason I came back day after day. And now, I’m having to start that process all over again. 

I took a few moments this evening to look through the accounts some people I trust are following. It’s a very manual process, and I tend to gravitate toward journalists and news organizations, but I think I’m getting somewhere. The tediousness, however, reminds me of writing about finding quality Twitter accounts to follow all those years ago. At this point, I’ve resigned myself to trying to get my news fix from Post., but trying to find community elsewhere. Conflating the two may be a mistake, anyway. I’m pretty sure all the context shifting was bad for my brain. But even as I try to rebuild my own personal news service, I’m finding I miss a handful of features I helped build at Twitter, specifically Bookmarks and Lists. But for now, I’ll take what I can get.

I know I’m a long way from being able to trust another platform with most of my information diet. And a great deal of my identity. But I think the harsh reality of having so much emotional investment in a company has been a hard lesson that I should have learned a while ago. Nevertheless, I’ll keep trying to scratch my news and information itch with a combination of podcasts and Posts. Maybe I’ll even start keeping a wish list of how we can all help make news consumption sustainable and edifying for both those creating it and those consuming it. 

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?

28 November 2022

Over the Thanksgiving break, I wanted to try an experiment. While I know I was refraining from Tweeting, that didn’t mean that I couldn’t pretend I was Tweeting. So, on Thursday — between meal prep and World Cup matches — any time I felt like sending a Tweet, I started typing as if I were actually sending, but added it to an ongoing note on my phone instead of sending it. This is what my day looked like, as seen through Tweets not sent:

9:22 a.m. 
Christiano Ronaldo goes down more easily than DogeCoin. I dislike both. 
#WorldCup 
#POR
#GHA 

9:30 a.m. 
Yes! 
#WorldCup 
#POR
#GHA 

9:37 a.m. 
Well, poop.
#WorldCup 
#POR
#GHA 

9:46 a.m. 
Hope!
#WorldCup 
#POR
#GHA 

9:58 a.m. 
That could have been an epic finish! Quite a match. 
#WorldCup 
#POR
#GHA 

10:00 a.m. 
There’s something very disconcerting about spending the time between #WorldCup matches putting together the ingredients for stuffing. 
[ GIF of Open wide for some soccer ]

12:32 p.m.
Well, I hate it, but that was a gorgeous strike from Richarlison. 
#WorldCup 
#BRA 
#SRB 

4:24 p.m. 
This is our best in show. 
[ picture of Baker trying to eat off our Thanksgiving plates ]

11:28 p.m. 
We’ve reached that point in the evening of Thick Thursday where I’m regretting my decisions around pie. Mainly that I only had two pieces. 
[ GIF of Homer Simpson thinking about pie ] 

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?

18 November 2022

Constructive. Therapeutic. Restorative. These are just a few of the words that bounced around in my head today during the ex-Tweeps for Good Day. The fact that people who had just lost their jobs self-organized to fulfill some of the volunteer commitments Twitter’s current owner failed to honor says everything you need to know about the people who worked for The Bird App.

As I may have mentioned, there were a ton of reasons I always wanted to work at Twitter. Pretty high up on that considerable list was their commitment to giving back. They did this in many ways, but the most visible way was the twice-yearly days of services. Originally called “Friday for Good” (for reasons I’m sure you can figure out), they were eventually renamed “Twitter for Good Days,” and took place in every city where Twitter had an office. This year’s fall sessions were originally scheduled for today, but after the takeover — and unceremonious dismissal of the team which organized these — every event was essentially canceled. But Tweeps found a way.

Using the Alumni Slack, we quickly put together as many teams as possible to show up to as many of the original projects we could. And what’s even better is that what used to be Tweep-only affairs were now able to welcome people from our entire history. I immediately signed up for two.

In the morning, I headed to Compass Family Services for my first project, where we spent time with some of the kids there before rolling up our sleeves to clean, sort, and organize the library, art supplies, and teaching tools for the unhoused and at-risk kids. Obviously, the work was rewarding. But what I was not prepared for was how meaningful it was to talk with other former Tweeps about what was going on. Some had left years ago. Some in the last month. And for a handful, they walked out yesterday. But all of us had an undeniable connection, both to that place and to the commitment we had to giving back. It was the fullest definition of gratifying.

When that first session was over, a few of us got an impromptu tour and history lesson around some of the Tenderloin from former Tweep and Neighbor Nest impresario Leah Laxamana. One of the places she highlighted was at the corner of Golden Gate and Hyde: La Cocina. So, a few of us stopped for a quick bite before rejoining her at Faithful Fools for my second project. There, we helped make banners featuring the names of the more than 400 people who have died on the streets of San Francisco this year. These banners, and others being put together by other groups around the city, will all be part of a memorial ceremony at Civic Center Plaza starting at 5 p.m. on 15 December. It was as humbling as it was important.

From there, a number of people from projects all around town, and a few former Tweeps who spent the day at their current gigs, gathered at Zeitgeist to reconnect. And hug. And cheers. It was glorious. And one common theme which kept coming up in conversation after conversation was how connected we felt to each other all because of the happenstance of, at some point, being able to call ourselves Tweeps. It’s a bond I’ve only read about in groups who have survived a traumatic event. And in some respects, no matter when we worked there, we have. But it feels bigger than a common email domain. More than a shared mission statement. It feels like a lifelong commitment both to each other and the ideals we worked to implement each and every day to make Twitter. For good. And I hope that feeling never ends.

See you tomorrow?

17 November 2022

There’s no big theme or focus today, just a brief story. I have a friend who I’ve known for decades. And although we met in middle school, it wasn’t until about ten years ago that we reconnected, making a commitment to get together every six weeks, or so, to make sure we never drifted apart again. Well, as it happens, today was one of those days where we were scheduled to get together. I made my way to our regular spot, picked out a seat near a back wall, and waited for Muni to deliver my friend to our rendezvous.

As I sat, trying to ignore the Twitter train wreck, I kept seeing familiar faces filling up seats at the other side of the bar. Turns out, dozens of my former Twitter colleagues were getting together having just ignored the ultimatum to be more hardcore. I headed over and was immediately greeted with as much warmth as surprise. And lots of hugs. It felt so good. And so sad. 

See, when I left Twitter, we had, only months before, started mandatory work-from-home. I turned in my laptop by shoving it in the mail. I sent farewell notes to colleagues by DMs. All the pictures and mementos from my desk were shipped to me in a box. But I never really got to say goodbye. 

Tonight felt like a wake. We talked about the good times, made fun of the mistakes we made together, and generally romanticized what was — when we really think about it — just a job. 

But it was more than a job, wasn’t it? We could have worked at any number of other places, if all we were looking for was a job. But a lot of Tweeps called it our dream job. We were doing work we enjoyed, with people we genuinely cared about, on a service we felt purpose-built to maintain and improve. I don’t know that this will ever exist again, definitely not for me. I cannot imagine a more perfect way to take the disparate skills I have and apply almost every single one of them in such a focused direction.

Seeing the service coming apart at the seams tonight has been incredibly hard. And I can’t look away. I took a little break to type this up, but even as I feel like I’ve said all I want to say right now, I find myself wanting to rush to the end, just so I can go back to the voices of the people who built that imperfectly beautiful platform. However, if you see me out in the next few weeks, and don’t mind listening to someone gush about a job I haven’t had for more than two years, ask me about Twitter. Istill have a lot more to say.

See you tomorrow?