Medium

  • Worth Reading – The Last Days Of Social Media

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 3 minutes

    They may not be the perfect medium for connecting with other people online or staying informed, but at least we get to choose what we subscribe to and what fills our readers’ and inboxes. As an internet user, I’ve always been a fan of RSS as a way to stay informed and follow my favorite sources. As a creator, I’ve learned to love newsletters as social media has become less effective for sharing my blog posts. As someone with many friends in faraway places, I’ve been a fan of social media as a technology that can keep us connected, but it seems to be doing less and less of that these days. 

  • Worth Reading – Why Remote Managers Burn Out Without Knowing It

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

    I stopped my quote at that word “intentional” for a reason. I use that word often in this context. Whether you have teammates who are fully remote, hybrid, or just located in a different office from you, everything needs to be done intentionally. Communication, meetings, goals, expectations, etc., all need to be purposely set. If you want your team to feel free to disconnect after hours or on weekends, then you have to do that intentionally. If you allow work to creep into every hour of every day, or get lazy about communication, or demand an immediate response to an email late at night, even one time, you set the example that your team follows. 

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    Linked: Section 230 Story: Coping with the “New Normal”

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 1 minute

    In all the talk about eliminating Section 230, I think this gets lost, and I’m glad Jessi is writing about. “Our reliance on the Internet, especially during the pandemic, is evidence that Section 230 continues to work as intended, despite its age. To set an expiration on the law is to accept that maybe we’ve…

  • Linked: A conversation with an iTunes card scammer

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 1 minute

    This is an interesting post, first because I’m surprised the iTunes gift card scam is still happening, and people are still falling for it, but secondly because I think the conversation is educational. Notice all of the weird excuses for why they can’t do it themselves, why they are unreachable by phone, the avoidance of…

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    Happiness Lab On How Grades And Rewards are Manipulative

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 4 minutes

    One of the most popular arguments we hear, and one I’ve made myself, is that to truly stay informed, and avoid living in the bubble of our own political bias, we need to make sure we are getting information from a variety of sources, including ones we may not agree with.

    This study seems to be telling us that isn’t enough, and it can easily be manipulated. If I read an opposing viewpoint, and there’s no reward for doing so, I’m unlikely to really be influenced by it, but if I read an opposing viewpoint and get rewarded for it, I’m more likely to change my mind.

    Now, remember that emotional contagion we might get from social media? What if I shared one side of a political view, and got rewarded by the algorithms or whomever with lots of likes and comments, and the post got shared a whole bunch, but posts from the other side, got none of that? Which side am I more likely to agree with? Right, the one that I got better grades on. Not because it’s true, better, or more accurate, but because I am rewarded for thinking that way. Rewarded the way I’ve been my whole life, since I was a little boy, from the first time my parents wanted me to behave a certain way, all the way through my school years, and for all of my career.

    How hard would that be to fight against? Almost impossible, I’d say. How easy would it be for social media to do it, either the companies themselves, or large groups of users?

    How does that influence what we do see on social media?

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    Why Section 230 Actually Matters For the Internet as we Know It

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 4 minutes

    I found this article from The Hill to be rather enlightening on the subject of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Because it shows that most of the critics of it, on both sides of the political spectrum, simply don’t understand what it is. Most of them seem to think it either: Frees big…