Pages Tagged “Signal-to-Noise”
Blog Posts
- That Blue Checkmark
Twitter Blue is what happens when you start treating a tool as a status symbol, so you throw the tools away and start selling gold-plated hammers made out of thin plastic.
- Twitter: Amp Up the Noise
Making the blue check mark mean “This person can afford $20/month†instead of “This person is who they say they are†is only the latest way Twitter has downgraded its signal/noise ratio over the years.
- May I Have Your Attention Please. All of it. FOREVER.
One thing I like about the Fediverse is that it doesn’t constantly scream for your attention to keep you online as long as possible.
- Dear Twitter: Please Ditch the Clutter
Have you ever been to a Las Vegas casino? The main floors tend toward sprawling layouts, with lots of shiny distractions to entice you to stay and spend more time and money on the slots instead of helping you get where you’re going. That’s what Twitter’s new layout feels like. When Twitter started out, the […]
- Quick thoughts on Twitter’s prototype changes
As you’ve probably heard, Twitter is planning major changes, and is testing them in a prototype app. Threaded conversations are good, though I think the UI here still needs polish. Hiding the interaction buttons until you click on the post: Yeah, it might make people think a little more. Putting some friction into sharing can […]
- Who are phone notifications for?
Phone notifications aren’t notices, they’re alerts. They should serve your interests as the person using the phone, not the interests of the app or service.
- GPS Navigation Options We Need
GPS navigation options we need: I know how to get to the freeway from home. I know how to get home from the freeway. Don’t send me down someone else’s narrow residential streets just to save two minutes. If I’m trying to get somewhere other than home after work, I’ll use GPS to get an […]
- Broadcasting “Likes”
I figured out exactly what bugs me about Twitter & Facebook putting friends’ Likes in the timeline.
- Too Many Notifications
It takes forever to get a new phone’s alert settings just right. Every app is configured separately, and they all want your attention.
- No More Origin Stories
It’s bothered me for a long time that movie studios seem to think the only story worth telling about a superhero is the origin. You get a trilogy if you’re lucky, then back to another origin take. It would be like only ever running the pilot of every TV show even though they’re designed to […]
- Not “Frictionless Sharing” Again…
Frictionless sharing is just a way to generate noise. I don’t want to know every article you read on some website. I want to know which articles you think are worth sharing.
- Delivery Confirmed…Somewhere
I’ve lost some confidence in USPS’s delivery confirmation service. Even though we put mail delivery on hold while we were on vacation, USPS claims that delivered a package at 4:08pm on Saturday. So, either they didn’t honor the mail hold and delivered it…in which case who knows where it is now…or they did honor the […]
- If You Teach a Man to be Phished…
I’ve dealt with a couple of companies that try to plug the general lack of security in email by using a “secure email” service…that acts just like a phishing attack.
- If This Were a Real Emergency, You’d Be Dead By Now
If a phone menu is going to remind callers that 911 is a better call to make in an emergency, shouldn’t it say so BEFORE a 5-minute authentication, not after?
- Promoting Old Posts
There’s a plugin to automatically tweet links to old posts – but is it an effective way to promote forgotten gems?
- The REAL Problem with Twitter
Twitter asks its users the wrong question, and it’s outgrowing the limitations of SMS messages.
- The Problem With Challenge-Response
Some people think it’s a great idea to block spam by having their email system automatically reply to any unfamiliar address, forcing the sender to jump through hoops that spammers presumably won’t bother with. About half an hour ago, the IEEE Communications Society sent out a call for papers on its mailing list. So far […]
- Wolf Cry
More “You sent a virus!” garbage going around. It’s gotten to the point where I don’t even look at most delivery failure notices, which means I could easily miss errors about mail I really did send. I got ticked off enough this time that I wrote back to the return address on the warning, matching […]
- Total Waste of Bandwidth
I regularly get bogus bounces from clueless virus scanners that don’t realize the sending address is fake 99% of the time, but this takes the cake: Sometime last night I received three copies of the same notice from some system in Brazil. They had written their virus warning in Microsoft Word, saved it as HTML […]
- Weblog Etiquette vs. Link Rot
On an ideal Web, pages would stay put and links would never change. Of course, anyone who has been on the Internet long enough knows just how far away this ideal is. Commercial sites go out of business, personal sites move from school to school to ISP to ISP, news articles get moved into archives […]
- Sound and Fury
I don’t like car alarms. Mainly it’s a matter of “crying wolf.” They go off for the stupidest reasons and don’t signify an attempted theft, so everyone ignores them. I can imagine a lot of cars have been broken into or stolen despite the alarm because people heard it and assumed it was just the […]