Linked – Why public chats are better than direct messages

Linked – Why public chats are better than direct messages

ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

But, here it the real world, this doesn’t always work out very well. You really need the culture to be one where everyone is used to working asynchronously and checking the public channel for chances to help out the team. It sounds like that is both the expectation and the reality at this company but for a lot of us the reality is very different. Posting something in a public channel where no one gets a notification that a message is being posted generally means no one sees it. So we go back to using private channels or tagging people in the public channel in order so that we purposefully interrupt them. We haven’t developed a culture where asynchronous communication works and I suspect it’s because we don’t really want it. We want people to respond to us now. We don’t trust them to get back later and, to be fair, we don’t give our peers reason to trust us because we spend all of our time putting out fires and frequently forget to get back to people.

In many cases, it’s a humblebrag. “Oh I saw your message but then I got involved in important things because I’m an important person and never got back to you”.

Linked: Don’t Forget to Name Your ‘Digital Executor’

Linked: Don’t Forget to Name Your ‘Digital Executor’

ByMike McBride Reading Time: 1 minute

As we head into the metaverse, or whatever the cool kids are calling it this week, this is only going to become more complex and more necessary. It won’t just be a social media profile and photos, it’ll be an entire identity in the crypto-blockchain space that will not be accessible to someone else without the appropriate transfer. Don’t leave it to chance. Your family is going to be dealing with enough.

Linked: Facebook Cooperated With Law Enforcement in an Abortion Case. Did it Have a Choice?
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Linked: Facebook Cooperated With Law Enforcement in an Abortion Case. Did it Have a Choice?

ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

However, the article below goes on to note that Meta has options. It could create hurdles, it could delay and fight it. Neither of those would likely make much difference in the grand scheme.

Eva Galperin from the EFF, though, offers the best solution. She points out that tech companies can’t turn over what they don’t have.

It’s the collection. It’s the lack of end-to-end encryption. It’s all the information they keep about all of us forever. If they didn’t do that, it wouldn’t exist to be turned over.

They made a choice, and anyone using their services to communicate private information made theirs.

Linked: Remote Work Helped Meta Achieve Diversity Goals Years Ahead of Schedule
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Linked: Remote Work Helped Meta Achieve Diversity Goals Years Ahead of Schedule

ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

Something I’ve been thinking a lot about in the industries I have worked in has been this idea that remote and asynchronous work is something that makes it less likely that the only people we can hire are the ones who are both willing and able to dedicate their entire days to be in the office and also willing to jump in and do more work at any hour of the day and weekends. That eliminates a whole bunch of people from even applying, especially women with kids, neurodiverse and disabled candidates, and underrepresented groups without a large presence in the area where your office happens to be. (When you start a company in Silicon Valley, Seattle, Austin, or some other “hot” area, your candidate pool is limited to the people who live there now or are willing to move immediately.)

Linked: Data From Fake Legal Requests Used to Sexually Extort Minors
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Linked: Data From Fake Legal Requests Used to Sexually Extort Minors

ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

In this case, we have an emergency process. There are good reasons to have that process, if someone is threatening violence to themselves on social media, it’s useful for the tech company to share some information with law enforcement so they can be reached. But, having the ability to get that kind of response from tech companies is also an invitation to hackers. If they can create a fake emergency request they can collect personal information about any user. They can then use that information to target that individual.

When you create that kind of system, the request needs to be coming from a safe, verified, source. When the source is compromised, and the receiver doesn’t have an excellent validation process, bad things are going to happen.

Because when you have that kind of data, people will try and do bad things with it.

Linked: Spotify’s Rogan problem is a cautionary tale for other tech platforms
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Linked: Spotify’s Rogan problem is a cautionary tale for other tech platforms

ByMike McBride Reading Time: 3 minutes

The article below points out that many of the platforms that exist today may find themselves in a similar situation and face a similar temptation. As shareholders start demanding more “growth” of a platform they are going to have a hard time providing that. There isn’t a large group of people clamoring to get Twitter or Facebook accounts that don’t currently have one. Eventually, they may be tempted to provide some kind of content exclusively on their platform. This pushes them into being publishing and media companies as opposed to tech companies. (We could argue that many of these platforms have started to dabble in being media companies but that haven’t quite taken the step that Spotify did and buy exclusive rights to podcasts.)