Rant

My friends, I have a request. That request is, for all that’s Holy, stop calling things “clickbait.” It’s an old and busted term that has no place in the media landscape of 2023.

While startups are busy trying to put (more) people out of work writing or doing artwork, how about turning some attention towards the DMV?

Bit of a rant here, so be warned… Caught two threads today with the general gist of “why don’t people just…” –specifically, why haven’t people learned from Twitter or just sucked it up and started using 2FA, no matter what level of computer literacy they might be at. Why don’t open source projects just stand up Mattermost instead of Discord? Why haven’t users finally learned and started adopting 2FA? In the first instance, I think people just imagine standing up a service and don’t think about the long-term implications of offering a service like Mattermost for a project....

For years, I’ve resisted installing AdBlock or any other type of ad-blocking software. Not because I love ads, but because so much content is ad-supported (including content I used to write) and there wasn’t a clear way to support “free” content otherwise. What finally drove me over the edge wasn’t an actual “ad” at all, but the affiliate network run by Taboola. You know the ones, you can’t visit many popular sites without seeing something like this:...

Too many ledes in tech publications and blogs suck. I’ve been doing more editing and more content curation lately. The upshot of that is noticing a lot of really boring, fluffy, slow-to-the-point ledes that utterly fail at drawing the reader in. It’s not hard to do a decent lede as long as you remember a few guidelines and take the time to revise. Assume you have less than 150 words to make your case....