Mashable: The best internet moments of 2023 . “The internet moves fast, and if you aren’t chronically online (like I am), you’re going to miss some of the best bits. That’s why we’ve made a list, in no particular order, of some of the best internet moments of the year. We’ve got you covered on everything from AI trickery to spy balloon suspicions. Don’t say we never did anything for you.”
Hixie’s Natural Log: Reflecting on 18 years at Google . “Someone who wanted to lead Google into the next twenty years, maximising the good to humanity and disregarding the short-term fluctuations in stock price, could channel the skills and passion of Google into truly great achievements. I do think the clock is ticking, though. The deterioration of Google’s culture will eventually become irreversible, because the kinds of people whom you need to act as moral compass are the same kinds of people who don’t join an organisation without a moral compass.”
WIRED: Twitter’s Former Head of Trust and Safety Finally Breaks Her Silence. “From Israel vs. Hamas threats to Donald Trump’s ‘wild’ posts, Del Harvey helped make the platform’s hardest content moderation calls for 13 years. Then she left in 2021 … and disappeared.”
WIRED: TikTok Is the New TV . “The latest satirical show about a rich family bumbling a big business hits small screens this week. But you won’t find it on on Netflix, Hulu, Max, or any other contenders in the streaming wars—instead, it might pop up on your TikTok For You page, shuffled in among influencer videos telling you either to buy snail mucin or not to buy stuff, or maybe clips of people sleeping, dancing, or livestreaming.”
Yale Herald: “Computer Crossdressing”: Charting the Trans Digital Archive. “‘The contemporary trans movement as we know it now—with all its accomplishments and failures—could not have come to be without the Internet.’ This is the central claim of Avery Dame-Griff’s newly-released book The Two Revolutions: A History of the Transgender Internet. Consulting archival resources from people and organizations across the country, like the promotional advertisement (below) for the umbrella Internet organization US TOO (United Sisterhood of Transsexual Outreach Organizations), Dame-Griff outlines the formation of the trans community’s online presence. “
Laughing Squid: An Online Museum of Pivotal Early Internet Artifacts. “Neal Agarwal of Neal.fun created a fascinating online museum of early Internet Artifacts that documents the pivotal years of the development of the world wide web as we know it today. It starts out with the revolutionary ARPANET in 1977.”
David Strom: The decline of online shopping. “So what has happened to online storefronts in the past 25 or so years? In the quest to make everyone able to buy just about anything, they have become unusable. Menus are inscrutable, choices confound, and delivery mechanisms are so plentiful that they can paralyze consumers.”
Hackaday: NFTs And Tulipmania: A Little Bit Of History Repeating. “We were not surprised to read that a company that tracks NFTs declared that most NFTs are now worthless. But the NFT — non-fungible token — market was huge, so around 23 million people invested in NFTs that are now worth nothing. Worse still, the company notes that because of oddities in how NFTs are priced, the real number of worthless assets is probably even greater than they think.”
MIT Technology Review: How to fix the internet. “The existential problem is that both the best and worst parts of the internet exist for the same set of reasons, were developed with many of the same resources, and often grew in conjunction with each other. So where did the sickness come from? How did the internet get so … nasty? To untangle this, we have to go back to the early days of online discourse.”
Ars Technica: Google.com tests a news-filled homepage, just like Bing and Yahoo. “Google is still wondering if it should make major changes to its homepage. The last experiment we saw filled the usually stark white page with info cards showing things like the weather and stocks, but this new experiment, spotted by the site MSPoweruser, has a much bigger focus on news.”
Mental Floss: 11 Social Media Platforms You Probably Forgot Existed (And Why They Failed). “For every Facebook and TikTok, there’s a Friendster and a Vine. We all probably joined some (if not all) of these websites and witnessed their meteoric rise and respective falls from grace. So why did some succeed while other once-popular social media platforms failed? Here are 11 now-defunct networks that you might have forgotten about, plus why they failed to gain traction with users.”
Tuscon Sentinel: Tucson’s Molly Holzschlag, known as ‘the fairy godmother of the web,’ dead at 60. “Molly Holzschlag, whose pioneering work in online design standards led to her being dubbed ‘the fairy godmother of the web,’ has died at age 60. Holzschlag, a longtime Tucson resident, dealt with a series of illnesses over the past decade, including being diagnosed with aplastic anemia. She was found dead Tuesday at her home, family said.”
The Verge: The end of the Googleverse. “For two decades, Google Search was the largely invisible force that determined the ebb and flow of online content. Now, for the first time since Google’s launch, a world without it at the center actually seems possible. We’re clearly at the end of one era and at the threshold of another. But to understand where we’re headed, we have to look back at how it all started.” Interesting article to read as someone who was there for all of it and has drawn very different conclusions in some cases.
BBC: ‘Girl’ trends are sticky and fun. But they can also be problematic.. “Lazy girl jobs are just one instance of a parade of content recently branded as ‘girl’ trends. In the past month, we’ve seen the rise of ‘girl math’, which allows shoppers to justify pricey purchases with a bit of number crunching; and ‘girl dinner’, in which meagre snack platters constitute a full dinner. As these trends rise, there’s one key thing they have in common besides their nomenclature – there’s nothing inherently feminine about them at all.”
Mashable: Fyre Festival 2 tickets are on sale if you can believe it. “Billy McFarland, the co-organizer of the now-ridiculed 2017 disaster of an event, announced that tickets are on sale for Fyre Festival II, supposedly set to take place at the end of 2024. McFarland spent four years behind bars on multiple counts of fraud after the festival, located on on the Bahamian island of Great Exuma, was deemed a scam, with McFarland duping investors and customers out of $26 million.”
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