onfocus

• Mike Monteiro: One person’s history of Twitter, from beginning to end
• The Atlantic: Twitter's Harassment Problem Is Baked Into Its Design
• Twitter: A Calendar of Our Safety Work
• BuzzFeed: How People Inside Facebook Are Reacting To The Company’s Election Crisis
• Bridget Phetasy: How to Listen to Women When They Share Their Stories of Sexual Assault
• PressThink: Normalizing Trump: An incredibly brief explainer
• Charged: WiFi is broken - Everything must be updated!
• The Uncomfortable - A collection of deliberately inconvenient objects. Everything new is old again.
• Brian Fies: A Fire Story - A comic artist's house burned down in the Santa Rosa fires and he told his story in comic form.
• Wired: Equifax Deserves the Corporate Death Penalty

Feeling heartbroken about the devastation in Sonoma County where I used to live. I'm sure you've seen pictures and heard stories by now. They're going to need help.

• The Atlantic: What Facebook Did to American Democracy - Alexis Madrigal: "The information systems that people use to process news have been rerouted through Facebook, and in the process, mostly broken and hidden from view."
• BuzzFeed: Climbing Out Of Facebook's Reality Hole
• BuzzFeed: Facebook Says Its Fake News Label Helps Reduce The Spread Of A Fake Story By 80% - The lag time to identify is about three days though.

• Recode: Dear @Jack: It’s time to suspend Donald Trump from Twitter
• GQ: Twitter Should Shut Down Donald Trump’s Account Before He Starts a Nuclear War
• Politico: Twitter deleted data potentially crucial to Russia probes
• Vanity Fair: Why Twitter Silenced One Of Harvey Weinstein's Accusers

• Washington Post: Google uncovers Russian-bought ads on YouTube, Gmail and other platforms
• Washington Post: Pierre Omidyar: 6 ways social media has become a direct threat to democracy
• Rambling Space: Apple created the attention sinkhole. Here are some ways to fix it.

• Thrive Global: The Secret of Happiness and Living a Good Life - by Tim O'Reilly. I really like "Will what is necessary..."
• Hackernoon: Spotify’s Discover Weekly: How machine learning finds your new music - Discovery Weekly is absolutely my favorite Spotify feature. Its picks are uncanny. Here's why.
• A Dictionary of American Slang (1926) - Some capital slang in this old chestnut from the 20s. Part of the new Sonny Bono Memorial Collection of copyright-questionable works at the Internet Archive.
• The Rock Test: A Hack for Men Who Don’t Want To Be Accused of Sexual Harassment - Not only is this hilarious on its own, it was tweeted out by The Rock.

I took a day off from Twitter yesterday and it was fantastic. I highly recommend social media fasting. I have already uninstalled Twitter and Facebook apps from my phone but I'm such a creature of habit I had to block twitter.com from myself in various hosts files and with parental controls on my iPhone. Of course I can easliy undo these, but that little speedbump from my mammal brain reminds my lizard brain that I'm trying to stay away. I need to find a way to make breaking that addiction a regular habit. har har.

• The Atlantic: Google and Facebook Failed Us - Current algorithms can't handle breaking news.
• @zchamu: Twitter shittery, and how we are all doomed: a thread. - Twitter leadership refuses to accept the paradox of tolerance.
• @yonatanzunger: I worked on policy issues at G+ and YT for years... - Context for Twitter leadership's intransigence.
• Infowarzel: The Milo Emails: Don't Make The Gamergate Mistake Again - Some context for the important article about Breitbart by Joseph Bernstein at BuzzFeed.

• The Atlantic: Death at a Penn State Fraternity - Excellent reporting on a painful and infuriating story.
• Wall Street Journal: Yahoo Triples Estimate of Breached Accounts to 3 Billion - The price of centralization.
• Engadget: Former Equifax CEO blames breach on one IT employee - No, you "can't fix stupid" as one Senator suggests but you can make massive data aggregation illegal. Maybe the bigger stupid is the fact that Equifax exists at all.
• The Guardian: 'Our minds can be hijacked': the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia

• The World of Tomorrow - Fantastic first issue of a new online comic set in the early Internet days. Subscribe!
• Calling Bullshit - An open course by two professors at the University of Washington about identifying and countering bullshit in our media diets. We should all take this.
• Japanese Vending Machines at Night Juxtaposed with a Wintry Hokkaido Landscape - Escape into wintery convenient stillness through these photographs.
• Optical Effects in User Interfaces (for True Nerds) - *raises hand*.