Posts

Re/code made news this week by eliminating comments on the site, noting that most of the discussion about their articles was happening elsewhere. In the larger scheme of things, “Don’t read the comments” is widely regarded as universally good advice. This makes me more interested in sites with healthy communities of commenters. As far as I can tell, comments are as good as the people running sites want them to be. If they invest in building a community, healthy comment sections tend to spring up. If not, they don’t. Fred Wilson makes the same argument in Comments Are Dead, Long Live Comments, and of course his site has one of the most active (and generally constructive) comment sections of any blog you’ll read. ...

A couple of interesting pieces about apps today. In the Wall Street Journal, Christopher Mims says that apps are killing the Web. John Gruber responds by saying that apps are part of the Web. I’m not terribly interested in this argument. If you care about the longevity of your work, you will publish it on Web pages that can be rendered in a browser. Nobody knows what will happen with apps or app stores in the future. If you publish something and want to make sure people can view it in 10 years, it needs to have a URL that works in a browser. If you want to make your work available to as many people as possible right now, you’ll publish it on a Web page. If you go with apps only, you exclude every desktop user and everyone who won’t bother to install your app. Maybe that’s fine for some companies, but for most it is not. Ignoring Web browser is not a realistic option for most people building on the Internet. That’s not going to change any time soon. ...

This article in Business Insider is the first media mention I’ve seen discussing the disappearance of referrers on inbound traffic to Web sites. For people who work in analytics, especially on sites that make money by selling advertising, this is a really big deal. In many cases, analytics can be invasive from a privacy standpoint, but referrers generally don’t contain any information you’d just as soon not disclose. Hopefully this will spur a wider discussion of this change. ...

John Gruber has a piece up about retailers disabling NFC at checkout to prevent customers from checking out using Apple Pay. Retailers are intentionally degrading the customer experience in order to retain the ability to collect data about their customers’ habits. This tradeoff is near and dear to me, as analytics is currently a huge part of my job. What I’d like to know is, what’s the return these companies are getting from tracking the behavior of specific users? For one thing, the work to build systems to exploit this data is resource intensive, and often results in failure. Companies are risking hurting their business by inconveniencing customers in exchange for the opportunity to make more money by exploiting the purchase history of their customers. I’d be really, really surprised if the economics actually work. ...

These days, if you want attentive customer service from most companies, the most direct route is to complain about the company on Twitter in such a way that your tweet shows up in the company’s mentions. It doesn’t matter whether your cable is working poorly, you had problems rebooking a flight, or your iPhone app didn’t work as well as you expected, Twitter is the place to seek relief. This is a problem, mostly for the companies people are complaining about. They’re teaching their customers that the only way to get responsive customer service is to embarrass them publicly. What these companies fear most is that a complaint on Twitter will inspire an avalanche of “me too” retweets and responses that ultimately has a measurable negative impact on their business. That gives every customer who happens to be on Twitter the opportunity to be an amateur extortionist. ...

There’s a debate raging over the news that mobile devices will soon be encrypted using keys that are fully under the owner’s control. The government, of course, hates this idea. Law enforcement feels like they should be able to decrypt anything if they want to. This is not a new debate – there was a huge debate over key escrow in the 90’s. Here are a few pointers to pieces that explain why it’s important that users should be able to use encryption in the way that they see fit. Tim Bray concisely answers the question Is Encrypting Phones OK? Bruce Schneier explains that any back door put in place for law enforcement will inevitably be exploited by others (and links to a number of other good pieces on this topic). Cryptographer Matthew Green speculates on how Apple’s new security measures work. ...

I’m not usually a big fan of listicles, but I do recommend this one: Top 10 Ways To Be a Male Advocate for Technical Women, from the National Center for Women & Information Technology. What I particularly like about it is that it focuses on things that we can be doing right now to improve the professional prospects of women that we work with.

In Trouble at the Koolaid Point Kathy Sierra talks about her experience with online harassment, and more recently, the degree to which people are willing to forgive and forget the past misdeeds of her harassers. She also talks about the wide variety of pernicious lies that have been told about her that have reached such wide circulation that she can’t really shake them, and how those lies have been used to justify her harassment. This stuff happens all the time, to all kinds of people, especially women and other members of underrepresented groups online. ...

Blameless post-mortems are one of the most notable (and perhaps most misunderstood) features of Etsy’s engineering culture. John Allspaw wrote about them on Code as Craft back in May, 2012. In it, he talks about human errors and the “Bad Apple theory,” which is that the best way to eliminate error is to eliminate the “bad apples” who introduce error. Most of the time, when we talk about blameless post-mortems, it’s in the context of outages. What I think though is that once you accept the reasoning behind building a culture of learning around outages (as opposed to a culture of blame), it also changes, or at least should change, how you think about management in general. ...

Today I got around to listening to the A Not So Simple Majority episode of This American Life. The story is about the school board in East Ramapo in New York, where a group of people who all send their children to private religious schools took over the public school board, and have since been gutting the public school system and funneling the money to their private schools. The religion of the group in question isn’t really important. The story is infuriating on many levels, and at the end it left me thinking about how to prevent this sort of thing from happening. I think that the lesson is in the dangers of small-scale democracy. The school board in East Ramapo has a lot of power, not just to manage schools but also to set local property tax rates, and was subject to capture by a relatively small group of people. ...