Posts tagged "social-media" - nolan caudill's internet house

Thoughts about Twitter

Fri, 04 Nov 2022 11:36:44 +0000

I write this as thousands of Twitter employees learned in the past day that they no longer had a job. They were dumped unceremoniously, the result of the addled whims of a walking meme. I wanted to write this to remind myself what Twitter was because what it’s about to be will be a different, more chaotic and more toxic place. I mostly feel anger and frustration towards Elon and the yes-men he put around him, and sadness for the people that worked there that truly believed and worked towards the idea of what Twitter could be.

(If you’re a Twitter person that is looking for a job, needs a resume reviewed, or needs an introduction, let me know.)

First, what I believe is already happening.

The illusion of Elon Musk, David Sacks and Jason Calcanis as savvy operators is gone. This endeavor will be one of their lasting legacies: taking a much-loved, revenue-generating cornerstone of the web and smothering it within weeks, while likely losing billions of dollars and ultimately needing to sell the site for parts. They thought they were rolling out some grand experiment in social discourse, forgetting that brands, users, and speech are all tightly intertwined in somewhat important things like revenue and profit.

Further, the same cast of characters is also acting out some of the worst takes to management, leadership and business that the VC thoughtleaders and hustlehards regularly regurgitate. Those who actually work in the industry have always seen how detached from reality these aggro-fortune cookie tidbits are, and now we’re getting to watch a play unfold where we already know how the ending goes.

And those who have worked on social networks recognize that the problems in social media extend past “Why can’t I say whatever I want?” Seeing them try to learn how to operate something as big and complex as Twitter in today’s political environment from first principles (which VC thoughtleaders can’t resist) is not unlike watching a toddler learning how gravity works, except in this case I spare no soothing encouragement or helpful grace because it is no secret how difficult it is to run world-scale social networks

Topping it off, I am not confident the company will be able to keep the service itself up. Anyone that has worked on large, complex system knows that the margin of error in uptime and downtime is often whether the right person is within arms’ reach of their laptop. Working software is as much as what’s in the head of the people that work on it as it is in the code, and it is a near guarantee that Twitter will be seriously degraded soon (days? weeks?) and the people they need won’t be there.

But, what is gone? Twitter was a unique spot where journalists, celebrities, titans of industries, your family, friends and co-workers, would join a daily mosh pit filled with a mix of truly important cultural moments and the most inane things you’ve ever seen. It was weird and it was special and it’s going to soon be a memory. With employees gone, with the clowns running the circus, with a reduction in trust and safety, and the exodus of advertisers starting, Twitter will likely go from Elon’s new toy that is too difficult for him to play with, to being passed on to his legal and finance advisers to sort out.

Twitter was flawed but I believe many of those flaws are inherent in running an ad-supported social network. Seeing the new management believe they have the one weird trick to balance their own version of “free speech” and the revenue-generating machinery is like a random person taking over a restaurant chain because they didn’t like how their burger was presented: expensive, ill-advised and likely to end up with people dining elsewhere.

Twitter to Flickr, and Back Again

Sun, 30 Sep 2012 07:00:00 +0000

I just got back from a week in Hawaii and only took my film camera. I shot 5 or 6 rolls of film and I look forward to getting them up on Flickr but there are many steps between those 35mm canisters still sitting in the bag I need to unpack and someone being able to click a link to look at them. (Unless everyone wants to come over to my house, which is also fine with me.) I think this is worth the wait but it does remove a bit of the instantaneousness that services like Flickr and Twitter offer. It’s fun sitting on a palm-covered beach or enjoying a tropical drink on a warm patio with a slow-moving fan, taking a picture, and send a modern-day, wish-you-were-here postcard to a few friends. Today, the snapshot app of choice among my friends appears to be Instagram. This is perfectly fine and I use it a bit, but I’m a Flickr man and I’d rather use that, especially since the rest of my Hawaii photos will go there. It’s nice to make a big set of all of the vacation photos, and be able to email the link off to Mom and Pop, and even nicer to be able to see them again together in 1 year, 5 years, 25 years time. As far as Flickr goes, I feel pretty good about their thoughts about longevity. The postcard delivery system, to extend (and strain) the metaphor, is Twitter. Twitter is probably the best spot to put things where people will see them sooner than later. Instagram comes equipped with its own social network but Twitter is the common stomping ground of me and my friends and acquaintances. Bert and Chris built a thing for Recollect mapping your Twitter social clusters. Also, Meghan told me to put more pictures in my blog posts. The crux of the problem was how to get my photos directly to Twitter and Flickr without building a Rube Goldberg device, because things with fewer moving parts break less and are easier for me to understand. Going through a multi-step process, especially when I’m on the go (it’s mobile!) and when I’m trying to enjoy my surroundings (it’s social!), sounds horrible. I want one app and to be able to hit one button. Flickr does have a mobile app, which is serviceable, but I usually already have Twitter up and most Twitter clients have this nice ability to take pictures within the app. With my phone, I’m usually sending a tweet with a photo attached, and not a Flickr photo that I also want to share on Twitter. Twitter to me is the Instant, which is usually what I want when on the go. Twitter is, in its fundamental glory, a magic word distribution system (via Kellan, via Aaron). Most Twitter clients allow you do media-webby things like upload a video or a picture to a service of your choosing, get a link back in return, and then helpfully include that link for you in the tweet. This outsourced-upload thing uses what is formally called OAuth Echo. This is described here and seems to have originally been thought of by Raffi Krikorian of Twitter. Flickr is not one of the upload options, but things like cloudapp, droplr, pikchur, twitgoo are (at least in Tweetbot). I’ll take most of the blame for Flickr not being included as it was something that I was working on in my side time towards the end of my tenure, but didn’t finish before I left. One service does handle this handshake of Twitter-to-Flickr, gdzl.la, but it returns the link back as a gdzl.la link, effectively introducing one more URL forwarder into the world (which is a shitty thing to do if you can help it). Twitter for iPhone used to support different image backends but probably took it out shortly after they built their own image upload thing. So there’s that. So, after a week of wanting to take pictures with my phone and send them along to Twitter, and having to choose between Instagram (look at all those filters!) and Twitter’s Official Image Backend™ (store up to 3200 pictures!), I decided to build my own Twitter-to-Flickr uploader atop Aaron’s parallel-flickr of which I also run an instance of for myself. In theory, this OAuth Echo upload stuff could live by itself (see gdzl.la) and there’s no reason that I couldn’t return my parallel-flickr’s instance URL but there’s something nice about saying “here’s my Flickr kit”, playing along with the aforementioned idea of fewer moving parts as well as knowing all the archival bits-and-pieces going on. Using flamework and the pieces of p-flickr that were already there, a few cups of coffee and a chunk of quiet time, I was able to bolt it on. One important thing that made this possible is that these 3rd party clients, knowing that they are building things that the official client won’t or can’t build WANT you to build more things to fill the gaps. Tweetbot, at the end of the list of the dozen or so included image backends, has a field marked “Custom…” which takes a field to put in an URL endpoint that knows the steps to the OAuth Echo dance. This kind of allowance and permission is refreshing as things become increasingly less so. No, YOU drive. It looks like Aaron merged this change and the upload branch (which made my part really easy) this morning so if you’re running parallel-flickr, feel free to kick the tires on it, and if not, look at the code and see how easy it is do.

Moderation Amplification

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 07:00:00 +0000

A few nights ago, I came across Tom Coates’ post titled Social whitelisting with OpenID… about how to handle moderating an online forum when the amount that needs to be moderated outweighs any one person or small group of administrators’ capabilities (due to time, sanity, etc). This post was written in early 2007 but this system which advocates building a web of trust between your friends was never built as far as I know.

It did remind me though of a moderation tool that me and couple other tech folks designed and built right around this exact same time for a TV station’s website overhaul.

One golden rule of the web is “don’t read the comments”, because, as nearly an absolute rule it brings out the worst in the worst people. On a news site, this is triple the case. In polite company, religion, politics, and money are things to tread carefully around even with close friends, but with the veil of anonymity that the Internet provides combined with a website that deals daily in stories of religion, politics, and money that often directly impact the reader, it’s a damned near-perfect recipe to attract explosive, hateful, and irrational comments.

As part of this TV site’s redesign, there was to be more of focus on contributions from the viewers, which were in the form of photo and video submissions, guest blogging, a simple “wall” for members to leave comments for one another, and, of course, comments on news articles.

As a hard rule, beside every piece of member-added content, we always put a link where anyone could report abusive content. This would go into a moderation queue in our administrative tools and our editors could act on it, either marking it as abusive or marking it as “seen but okay”. For a news site, with millions of visitors a day, this system wasn’t manageable, as there would be as many false positives and there would be valid abuse. For some, it was abusive if someone disagreed with them and they couldn’t find a way to logically defend their argument. This was overwhelming for a tiny editorial staff.

So, we had to devise something to at least bubble up the true offenders in the moderation queue. (Now, this was 5-6 long years ago and I’m sure it’s evolved since I left, but here’s how I vaguely remember it working.) The idea that we came up with was this: a member reporting abuse is right if we agree with their judgment, and people that report abuse “correctly” more often build up a certain amount of us trusting their judgment. If someone reported abuse 100 times and a 100 times we agree with them, there’s a really good chance that their next report will be correct as well.

So we assigned every user a starting trust score and for every time they reported abuse that we deemed valid, we’d bump up their trust score. On every abuse report, we’d look at the trust score of the person that reported it and if it met some threshold, we’d silently remove it from the site. Their abuse report would still exist in the system, but there was less of a time pressure to go through the abuse queue as after awhile, a small army of reliable reporters would be moderating the site for us.

On the flip side, if an abuse report was deemed wrong, their score would be drastically reduced, halved if I remember correctly. We were fine with the penalty being so severe as good users would build themselves back up and introducing a little chaos into this system was nice as different editors would have slightly different standards, and a lot of the time judging whether something was abuse or not was a judgment call. Chaos was inherent in the system from the start.

These scores were obviously secret, shown only to the editors, and I honestly can’t remember if we were actually doing the silent removals by the time I left, but I do think those reports at least got priority in the moderation queue and when going through thousands of reports, this was incredibly helpful.

I like to view this kind of system as sort of an ad-hoc Bayesian filter where your moderation efforts are amplified, rewarding and ultimately giving some weight to people that moderate like you do.

So, the social whitelist begins with allowing a subset of users to post, while the trust score model involves dynamically building a list of good moderators that agree with you on what is abusive content.

I still love the idea of social whitelisting or building up a set of trusted users to help you with moderating, as both are more organic approaches to moderating, meaning that it’s forcing you as a someone in charge of a community to actually make decisions about what kind of discourse you want on your site.

This is also why it saddens me a bit today as more and more blogs are just dropping in web-wide, generic commenting systems, like Facebook’s. While it is enabling almost everyone to be able to quickly log in and start adding comments, it’s horrible for the site owners that are trying to build an intimate community. Every decent community probably has a baseline standard of what’s acceptable: no hate speech, no physical threats, no illegal content, etc. This is what Facebook provides – a baseline – and nothing more.

Any community worth moderating is nuanced, has a voice and a direction. Facebook doesn’t offer this, so every blogger that drops in this commenting system is making that trade-off between ease of user engagement and being able to effectively manage a community. I’d like to see more sites go back to these more hands-on and thinking-hard approaches to how to moderate and direct their communities instead of relying on someone else’s standards of what constitutes a good contribution.

The Front Line

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 08:00:00 +0000

So, Yahoo messed up today. They’ve messed up other days, too, but this was an especially red-letter day amongst other red-letter days, and this is one that has me ticked off.

For reasons I don’t know, Yahoo laid off the highest level of Flickr’s customer support, the people that end up filing bugs against the developers and helping the trickier cases get solved for the members. Those guys getting shown the door is as bad as it sounds.

When sites get larger, both in members and staff, the gap tends to grow between the people that build the site and the people that use it. Sometimes this happens with product decisions, but it almost always seems to happen with developers. Our job is to write and ship code to the best of our abilities, though, through no acts of spite or laziness on our parts, our code is not perfect. It’s a fundamental nature of current software. We’re human, we’re imperfect, and we write bugs.

After we write and ship code that probably contains a bug or two (or three), our job is to then write more code, which will also contain bugs. It’s a bad cycle.

This means that someone has to be in the middle, as the face of Flickr, acknowledging these mistakes and going to great lengths to fix things. This is often a thankless job, as users just want their problems to go away and developers (usually) don’t like to be told they messed up. But they do it for the good, and for the love, of the site. Every bug that gets filed and every support case that gets carefully answered makes the site that much better.

After being a liaison between these two worlds long enough, you end up knowing more than anyone else on the team. When you have millions and millions of users that hit every button and link in combinations you would never dream of, then reporting the “interesting” outcomes of their explorations, these support agents become walking encyclopedias of the ins-and-outs of the site and with Flickr, there are odd edge cases waiting on every page. Having people on your team aware of everything the site does is huge. You literally can’t buy that or replace it or outsource it, though it appears that Yahoo thinks it can.

With big sites, not only do you have bugs, but you have outages. These same agents that can recite all the guestpass-viewing conditions and know offhand whether a photo should be visible in Germany, also get to sit on the front lines and explain to users with emotions ranging from impatient to pissed-off that some section of the site will be back as soon as possible. This is not a position to be envied but one they always handled with grace and aplomb.

To be constantly deluged by the requests and demands from stressed users and keep showing up in high spirits day after day demands a special kind of character. Not only do you have the patience of a saint (imagine getting asked the same 3 questions, 50 times a day, every day) but also the tact to work with developers and product folks whose priorities are different from the users, as those things tend to go.

And that’s probably the biggest thing that hurts: the users of Flickr lost their major advocates today. At product meetings and developer meetings, it would be these support folks constantly asking, “But what about the users?”

On a personal note, Flickr lost several good people today. If you had me name the top 10 Flickr employees that loved the site the most, half of them got handed pink slips today. Working with that entire team was absolutely one of the highlights of my time at Flickr and any other company that has a need for calm, intelligent, and resourceful customer support folks would do well to contact me or any other person that has ties to Flickr to get you an introduction.

To the support folk that are now ex-Flickr, you’ve got a stupidly strong alumni organization and we know how good you guys are – we’re here for you.

I don’t really know the real purpose of me writing this. I’m always hesitant to write anything good, bad, or otherwise about my past employers, but this one deserves to get called out. Yahoo made a major mistake today and there’s no other way to interpret it. I’m mad and this is my soapbox.

Flickr-the-site will be fine but Flickr-the-culture took a huge hit today and those suits in Sunnyvale balancing some column or doing their thousandth “re-org” are completely to blame. I bet they don’t even know what they’ve done and that’s probably the worst part of the whole thing.

Choose Your Medium Carefully

Tue, 14 Jun 2011 07:00:00 +0000

So we looked in the dictionary for words around it, and we came across the word “twitter,” and it was just perfect. The definition was “a short burst of inconsequential information,” and “chirps from birds.” And that’s exactly what the product was.

Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter, LA Times

Something I’ve been thinking about as someone who has a too-large portion of his life tied up in bits and bytes spread across servers around the world is what would happen if the various services I use and publish to were to somehow lose all the data I’ve put into them.

If my emails were to disappear, I’d be distraught. That’s my historical record. If I was an adult in any previous generation, this would be my desk drawer filled with correspondence with friends, job offers, birthday cards, wedding invitations, baby announcements, simple I-love-yous from my wife, with every single thing properly dated, sorted, and filed away. My email archive is exactly that, just in a virtual form in this virtual world. Other people’s email, I imagine, would be just as important to them. Vast slices of modern life is stored away in these accounts.

Flickr is another service that I would be devastated if the archives were to disappear. Not only does it hold my photographs, but it holds a fantastic amount of important historical information, and because of the hard work and foresight of the people before me, the archival features and sense of history of the service is on par with museums and libraries, the same which use the service for their own online presences which I think says a lot. It also holds common people’s historical records, every user getting their own section where everything is sorted and dated, showing that “yes, the history of your images is dreadfully important”. Losing Flickr would be equivalent to the loss of a major museum or library. (Aside: I work at Flickr because I love Flickr, not the other way around, or I wouldn’t be there.)

My Delicious-now-Pinboard bookmarks are my personal filing cabinet, full of links to things that I have read, want to read, and should read. It’s also the culmination of my smarter-than-me friends and acquaintances’ thoughts and online trailblazing. Not only that, but with the genius of tagging, things are grouped together by categories and types and an organic ordering has emerged from the messiness of the web and the coldness of Google’s algorithms that can only come from giving the data the utmost respect, by preserving it and connecting it. It’s my personal memory and narrative about what I come across and as such is closer to an explorer’s daily log, like Lewis and Clark’s journals, filled with many small discoveries, the whole being worth more than its pieces. If these bookmarks were to vanish, it would be a hard-felt loss.

With Twitter though, if every account, including my own, were wiped clean, I think I’d miss very little about what was gone. I see Twitter as a day-to-day community pinboard, where people plaster new thoughts on top of old ones and it seems that most people approach the service likewise.

Twitter has never made an effort to be a service that shows that it cares about the history or permanence of its data. There’s no archive page and even trying to get to the end of a timeline is a painful, slow experience. And due to these traits, I’ve never been tempted to treat it more than an interesting thing that hums and buzzes alongside my daily life that I poke into occasionally.

Maybe due to Twitter’s own lackadaisical attitude towards its history or maybe due to its 140 character limitation, people don’t seem to care about their histories either, creating very little content that stands out. I have trouble recalling any messages that I would actually want to pull from an archive. Even if someone keeps Twitter as their daily log, with the whole showing a life in progress, how is one user’s moving day or new job different from another’s if they are both limited to stating the main fact and little else? To me, that seems such like a bland, sparkless enterprise.

Regardless of the content created on Twitter or how people view the function of the service, it’s hard to deny that Twitter has shown little effort in presenting itself as anything more than an ephemeral dumping ground of short sentences.

Of the @towerbridge events of the past few days, I’m more bewildered than sympathetic. I’m not surprised about Twitter’s handling of the account transfer as businesses do what businesses do, but instead to the community’s reaction to it. The emotion I feel is identical to watching someone build a sand castle at the beach that gets swept away: it was a nice sand castle, a majestic effort, but it was built on a beach and tides which come every day took it away. The only difference is that the castle-builder understood his lot in life and knew that the his creation wasn’t meant to last. Why would you build something that you want preserved if you know now you won’t be able to get to it later?

I think it’s incredibly optimistic for people to think that any online service will value your data as much as you do. To think that Twitter, where you can’t even access more than 3200 messages into the past on a timeline, values that data so much that it will never a break a link, never transfer control of a handle for legal or monetary reasons, never limit access to your data, seems to be people projecting what they want the service to be instead of what it actually is.

I still enjoy Twitter and am active user and have a few friends whom I greatly respect that work there. Often, Twitter can be a beautiful thing but it’s beauty is captured in knowing exactly what the Internet is thinking at that moment. I just think that people are asking too much of a service that describes itself as “a new and easy way to discover the latest news” to be a permanent historical record and who’s earliest definition included the words “inconsequential information”.

To me, it seems that Twitter hands you a pile of same-sized paper scraps to scribble your multi-sized thoughts and occasionally the wind scatters them, down a drainpipe or into the ocean. If you want something to outlast you, or at least until the end of the month, you have to choose your medium carefully: Twitter is newsprint, not vellum.

Attributions: Sand Castle by Joe Dsilva, on Flickr, Pinboard: Mission Accomplished. by Filipe ’shello’ Rodrigues, on Flickr