Reid Dossinger @reiddossinger - Tumblr Blog

We’ve all sworn off social media at one point or another, but there often isn’t much action after the swearing. I’m guil…

I did a quick writeup of my brief time (I hope “harrowing” comes across as the joke that it’s meant as) away from Twitter and Facebook, which gave me a chance to give publishing on Medium a try. In other words: this is me.

I’m off Google Inbox...for now

About a month ago, I figured that I hadn’t given Google Inbox enough of a fair shake, so I messed around with my notifications and went from using Mailbox to Inbox on my phone, and edited settings so that gmail forwarded to Inbox.

I won’t say that I hated Inbox. But I found it all too easy to miss huge amounts of email. The bundling of promos/forums/etc seems like a logical move, but it’s more like passing the buck, tackling the problem of overwhelming number of emails by just creating automatically-sorted buckets of overwhelming numbers of emails.

And, in fact, I found the one-at-a-time emails coming through Mailbox to be more manageable. I could easily swipe to archive (or delete, which takes more steps in Inbox) and go through forums and promotions quickly and easily.

But probably the most frustrating part of Inbox is knowing that gmail will likely stay untouched as new features go into Inbox instead. Gmail looks increasingly dated (funny how that happens), but Inbox is just not the alternative I was looking for.

I love this graduation speech from Tim Minchin. Packed with irreverent inspiration. Very much worth 12 minutes of your time.

Not Another App (NAA)

A couple of years ago, I had a conversation with some very knowledgeable, very technically progressive people. One guy was theorizing that websites would give way to apps. This seemed way off to me--apps are far more expensive than websites and there’s tons of content that isn’t suited to standalone apps--but we couldn’t get too far into the discussion.

I was reminded this last Friday of the problem with apps, even those that make sense as apps: there’s too many of them for the same thing. I was in a metered public parking lot, and I saw that there was a parking app option. Only, it wasn’t the parking app that I already had, it was a different one. So I could either deplete the stash of quarters in my car for two hours of parking, or I could download an app, enter in my credit card information, and THEN pay for the spot, getting over the fact that I had already done this with another parking app.

It was easy. I went with the quarters. We’re not going to waste our time on apps that a) take longer and are more hassle than the old way, and b) replicate a function that we already have in another app.

(via An Adult's Guide To Snapchat - BuzzFeed News)

Another good stab at explaining Snapchat to those of us who don’t get it. I think there’s two unstated reasons here that Snapchat is different than other social media platforms:

First, it’s a platform dedicated to what would be tremendous oversharing in other platforms, Facebook especially. It’s about constant and mundane moments. If you, as an adult, had a friend that shares one or two photos of their daily lives on Facebook, you’d be okay with that, but what if they were constantly posting short videos and pictures? It’d drive you crazy. And that’s what Snapchat is for.

Secondly--and very much related to the first--is that it’s for people with extraordinary amounts of free time and like communicating every single part of their days to their friends. It’s the social media equivalent of “what do teenagers talk about all night on the phone” from when I was growing up.

And that’s why it’s so popular with teens and college kids. It’s not because they have somehow figured out a communications innovation that doesn’t make sense to us older folks. They just have the time and inclination to share all of these things.

Many a doubter has asked how such efforts relate to Google's mission and primary operations in their classical form. Now Page—if he ever grants another interview—can reasonably respond: "They don't!"

The Invention Of Alphabet Is The Ultimate Larry Page Move | Fast Company | Business + Innovation

This quote made Google’s creation of Alphabet make sense to me.

An analogy for the people who argue "it's not that hard"

Have you ever been to a place--fast food place, movie theater, roller coaster--and seen a line long enough to make you turn around and give up on on the experience? Everyone has, of course. But what a perfect time for someone to tell you that you should do it because "it's not that hard". It's not only not that hard, but standing and waiting in line is pretty much the easiest thing in the world. If the only thing keeping you from doing something was its degree of difficulty, you would never abandon a place for its long line. Think of that the next time you hear (or say) that something is not that hard as an argument against simplifying a process or website. Clearly, our motivations to abandon things depend on far more than how hard it is to complete.

It's time to stop the cycle of perks.

I like the basic point of this article--that just throwing benefits at workers doesn’t make up for disorganization and keeping workers subservient--but it misses two important, deeper points:

1. The majority of the time, companies throw benefits at employees not as some underhanded scheme to pacify them so they won’t complain about other working conditions, but simply as disorganization. Changing the way your managers treat their employees is complicated; a huge change in thinking and process. But benefits are easy for everyone to understand. It’s still a sad thought, but less so than management malevolence.

2. Acknowledging that Google and startups pack on the workplace benefits to keep employees working longer hours is correct, but there’s no mention of how quality of work isn’t measured by time in the office, but by whether the work is done or not. If you’re still asking employees to fill out timesheets so you can track where they spend their mandated eight hours, why would you give them more gyms, cafes, and ping-pong tables?

Putting the debates about artists’ income from Spotify, Pandora, and their ilk in a broader historical context, it becomes clear that the money made from a song or an album has clearly decreased over the last several decades. What’s equally clear, though, is that the value of music is almost as subjective financially as it is aesthetically; the economics of music, it turns out, is more dark art than dismal science.

How Much Is Music Really Worth? | Pitchfork

Absolute must-read. One of the few fair-handed looks at current-day music economics.

What companies really need to measure is not how engaged their employees are, but rather how consistently energized they feel

from When Employee Engagement Turns Into Employee Burnout - NYTimes.com I don't love this article as a whole--its recommendations are too non-specific in a "make your employees happy" way, and don't get me started on the old "exec wishes he'd spent more time with his family" junk--but I was really struck by this quote. Workplaces can stifle creativity not just in oft-discussed ways like hostility and disorganization, but not concentrating on finding ways to make its employees stay interested in their jobs. What this doesn't mention, though, is that many of the ways that workplaces can sap enthusiasm are indirect to the person's actual job. HR, IT and Finance departments, by not fixing inefficiences, contribute a lot to employees ultimately wondering why they bother. Timesheets, employee evaluations, travel reimbursements: all these things create obstacles of time and frustration that keep employees from getting to the things they're excited about.

There's a truly bizarre strain of anti-intellectualism running through both ends of the political spectrum, fostered by people who instinctively distrust anything beyond their immediate comprehension.

The Food Babe Is A Raving Lunatic

Reading this quote in what is yet another addition to the pile of Internet Outrage kind of switched on a light: the more complicated our technological advances become, and the more we our lives take in said technological advances, the more we have to simply trust that what's going on is the best for us.

There's no shortage of analogies here: everything from the financial system to our cars to our Google searches. The anti-GMO and anti-vaccination crowd(s) are extremes for sure, and the anti-government folks aren't really too different, but at the heart of it, there's a fear that's understandable. The more complicated something gets, the more you have to hope that the people behind it are working in your best interest. And any of us can think of examples in which those people are certainly not working in your best interests.

This isn't a defense of anti-GMO or anti-vaxx arguments (though I've been in enough arguments to know that it will be taken that way), but simply as a way of asking the question: how can we move science and technology forward with transparency and openness? How can we set up a system where we can all trust what we can never understand?

brucesterling

parislemon

What could go wrong?

This is why many powerful people in tech can only conceive moves to “change” the industry in terms of magical futures like “more women founders” or “getting young girls to code”.

The Myth of Magical Futures — Kate Losse

A fabulous take on sexism in tech that puts the focus on hierarchy, and the passing the buck of the problem onto not just women (rather than everybody involved), but on women founders.

#sexism in tech #hierarchy #workplace

Apps I Love: Buffer

Buffer is one of those apps that takes a common approach--an app that schedules posts to multiple social media outlets--and gives it one little tweak that makes it infinitely more useful than all the others. In this case, you're not just scheduling posts, but clicking a single button and adding it to a queue in a schedule that you've set up beforehand.

It's totally changed my sharing habits. I used to want to share multiple articles in a short time span, but knew that, from a sharing perspective, that doesn't really make any sense (who's going to click on all of those in a short period of time), not to mention annoying the hell out of anyone following you.

With Buffer, I can add a bunch of links over the weekend to my Twitter and know that they'll go out bit by bit, and on days when people are actually likely to see them. If you use IFTTT, you have your favorites and shares from other channels added to your Buffer, giving your channels a constant (but totally digestible and not annoying) stream of content.

Professionally, it's the easiest way to cross-post content (which is totally okay in my book) to Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+, and unlike, say, Hootsuite, Buffer actually gets the Google Analytics campaign tagging correctly for each.

The only real downside I've found is that, by queuing up old content, it's easy to forget that it's gone out, leading to comments and likes that you have to take a few moments to re-orient yourself to the subject, but it's totally worth it for much more efficient sharing.

#Apps I Love #Buffer

On that U2 album stuck in your library

There's been a lot of talk (maybe too much talk thereIsaidit) about the U2 album appearing in everyone's iTunes, and the vast majority of it misses the point by focusing on the artist. Yes, many people still love U2, many people have hated them since the 80s, and some of us love them AND cringe at their pretentiousness and self-righteousness. That latter bit kind of forces the "who" on the issue, making it difficult to separate Bono's smugness from what's really going on.

The issue is that a company is manipulating your library. On the surface, that may not seem like a big deal.

But deeper, this is just the other side of Amazon pulling content from Kindles. It feels different because it's them giving you something rather than taking it away, but I really think that it's shaking people because people's libraries are personal collections, and when someone puts something in there that you don't want, it's the company telling you, "you can use this software, but it's ours, not yours".

#U2 #iTunes

In e-sports, the game played would change constantly

Here's the interesting thing about video games becoming money-making, spectator sports: it's sports in which the game being played changes constantly. Sure, it's Dota 2 that's the current big spectator sport, but it will almost certainly be something else in the coming years, making it the equivalent of having baseball be popular for a few years, then those athletes switching to football for a year (with some doing better than others at the new sport) and then hockey becoming massive and no one really playing football or baseball anymore.

It's hard to say whether this would be a good thing. On one hand, video games are a different animal; thriving on the variety. But most of the world's most popular sports thrive on their history--soccer and baseball in particular--as on the game itself, and even if video gaming could rival and even surpass physical sports as spectator events, wouldn't we at least lose something without that history?

#sports #e-sports #video games

Tweets worth cross-posting

Every time you publicly shame someone for bad code, you perpetuate the culture of fear which makes us all afraid to make mistakes.

— Elizabeth Naramore (@ElizabethN) August 23, 2014

#Tweets worth cross-posting #coding

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