The success of social media is especially confusing in light of technological progress; we have made it so much easier to create and host high fidelity images, videos, even words (fonts, etc), and yet the vast majority of people will only look at them at their lowest quality.

Of all of the issues people have with Google, when I think about the potential they have squandered the biggest failure has to be YouTube. This thing could’ve changed video-based media industries across the world in a lot of big ways and yet here we are, no better than before.

Of the many things I have attempted to change in my life, it’s fair to say transitioning to a diet aimed at (safely) losing weight has been the most difficult. Why does so much food have to be so damned good.

One of the phrases I hate to hear: “Bad language.” How about we all stop trying to control each other?

One of the reasons I trust @manton and @macgenie and @cheesemaker more than, say, the latest “hot talent building a platform with VC money” is that Micro.blog has already been built with the idea that if the hosting ever goes away, my data does not go with it.

This is important.

She barely knew how to Google, and yet here she was, browsing Wikipedia articles and D&D fansites.

– Antoine H. via Twitter

A brilliant story, wonderfully told.

Conversations like this are why I am looking to leave Google once and for all. Jeremy Keith does a great job of keeping the thread on-topic, whilst both Malte Ubl and Paul Bakaus – the Google employees – speak as if they were part of a cult.

Google’s auto-complete in search is horrible. One of many significant examples of how they are clearly more interested in telling you what you are doing before even trying to give you the software as a tool for what you know you want to do.

I can’t wait to get rid of this Pixel.

Missy Elliott - Throw It Back

🔥🔥🔥

It’s amazing how easily we allow sensational, transparently dishonest crap into our lives. Our species is, above all else, seemingly prone to fear-based decision making.

Perception is unquestionably one of the most difficult barriers faced by the independent web. Even for those of us who are opposed to the silos, it’s obvious that they hold a lot of power and are keen to make the open web essentially unusable and thus irrelevant.

Twitter would be infinitely improved if they just banned all politicians.

‘My Instagram got hacked and I lost my business’

I think about events like this a lot. American-made social media literally wrecks the lives of people in other countries and yet non-Americans continue to rely on it.

Sony buying Insomniac… wow. And Kojima RT’d the announcement. 🤔

App Launch Map – Spend more time developing your app

This goes right onto my wishlist and the newsletter is an easy subscription decision.

I’d explain more but instead you should listen to Aleen herself:

Spend more time working on your app.

Welp. No university course this year. Time for a new plan.

The correlation between “tech advocate” and junky feeds has to be high positive. I know you all love automation but can you please consider how terrible this experience is for, you know, most people?

When I look at how much people are accomplishing and they then share personally via mainstream social media, silos and all, I have doubts about my decision to treat them as little more than a broadcast tool whilst rejecting them for personal use.

Need to think about this more.

I hope Automattic doesn’t add paid plans to Tumblr. Ads are bad but there’s something about the spirit of Tumblr, as an aspect of web culture, that doesn’t fit into the enterprise spirit of paywalls. It’s bad enough that it became SFW-only.

BBC: Media giants Viacom and CBS to merge in latest mega-deal

This video will never get old.