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TLDR: If you're a woman under 25 then get rid of Instagram. Anybody over 35 should get rid of Facebook: We estimate the effect of social media deactivation on users’ emotional state in two large randomized experiments before the 2020 U.S. election. People who deactivated Facebook for the six weeks before the election reported a 0.060 standard deviation improvement while people who deactivated Instagram for those six weeks reported a 0.041 standard deviation improvement. Exploratory analysis suggests the Facebook effect is driven by people over 35, while the Instagram effect is driven by women under 25.
David is warning us that our internet is being colonized and exploited by a cabel of tech titans. Five years later, and we know it's even worse. Smaller products, and smaller teams, run by people with different motivations may be the answer.
Enforce some artificial constraints to force yourself into developing better websites: Unlike other outdated examples, clicking through to the NetBSD Wii port takes you to the latest stable NetBSD 10.1 release from Dec 2024. As soon as I discovered this was fully supported and maintained, I knew I had to try deploying an actual production workload on it. That workload is the blog you’re reading now.
There is an idea in my bubble that running your own website is A Very Good Idea. I subscribe to the idea that running your own website is A Very Good Idea and will continue to help that along in my career. But there is a heaping helping of It Depends involved here.
KIXX.NEWS edition for:
There has been quite a lot of recent debate about Web Components. Lea has a good take on it: Web components reduce the number of use cases where we need to reach for a framework, but complex large applications will likely still benefit from frameworks. So how about we conclude that frameworks are useful, web components are also useful, and move on?
We have now reached the point where iOS 15 on my 9 year old phone has been "upgraded" sufficiently that when I am typing at speed, characters show up on screen nearly half a second later.
We went to the moon. We used to be a society.
Not sure what is more poignant here: The 9 year old iPhone, or the fact that our technology becomes outdated by our software?
From Jason: I remember “disruptive” when it was called a “paradigm shift.” You should be worrying more about making something people want to buy, and less about disrupting everything.
A 2009 gem from Paul Graham: "I decided to ask the founders of the startups we'd funded. What hadn't I written about yet?"
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Pretty cool: The Backdooms is a compressed, self-extracting and infinitely generating HTML game inspired by DOOM 1993 and The Backrooms that can be launched and played in a web browser directly from a QR code.
Must read. I found myself laughing out loud to the point where my wife (who was trying to sleep) had to kick me out of bed. Funny, because it's true, and drives home some really great points which I think will inspire, motivate, and move all of us. (For those that don't know, Maciej runs the Pinboard bookmarking site).
Efficient navigation is vital for a functional website, but not everyone uses the internet the same way. While most visitors either scroll on mobile or click through with a mouse, many people only use their keyboards. [Includes some great recommended reading at the bottom of the article.]
As many of you know, Jeff Atwood is the co-founder of Stack Overflow along with Joel Spolsky. In this 2018 post, at the 10 year anniversary of Stack Overflow and 6 years after leaving the company, Jeff goes through some of the product decisions that were made and the resulting challenges Stack Overflow will face now.
What is rarely considered in the web and product design process is the social and societal impact of our product being used by hundreds of thousands — even millions — of people every day. Think bigger, more holistically, and more empathetically about the work that you do.
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Anything Matt has to say about WordPress should probably get a top spot on this site. It's interesting to read his thoughts about Google search results, Perplexity, and comments about giving a deposition in court to "defend" WordPress. Strange times we live in!
A brief history of Google's push for the AMP web stack, the invasion of AMP-enabled email, and how AMP died on the vine. If we build sites the right way, AMP is a solution to a non-problem.
You need to read this one. No Excuses! "Did you ever get an email from your friends in Bulgaria with the subject line “???? ?????? ??? ????”? I’ve been dismayed to discover just how many software developers aren’t really completely up to speed on the mysterious world of character sets, encodings, Unicode, all that stuff."
A series of 7 relatively short articles about rendering type on the web from the Typekit blog. This is important background reading to fully understanding how typography is displayed on screens and what websites should be doing to make it nicer for all of us.
The mobile-first design methodology is great. It focuses on what really matters to the user, it’s well-practiced, and it’s been a common design pattern for years. But I've recently noticed in my work over the last few years that thinking mobile first does not always get me the outcome I want, and can be harder to maintain. It is good to see a different perspective.
From the Google Ivory Tower: Knowing when to use a polyfill for a feature depends on its availability across browsers, and Baseline can be helpful in making that determination.
An amazing little bit of insight from Seth's Blog: "When AI shows up, our mistake is thinking that if we can’t find useful brilliance in one simple prompt, it’s broken."