Category: Culture

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Culture Websites

Dev.to: The most Pleasant Online Community.

Earlier this year, the developer centric social network DEV started popping up regularly in the portions of The Internet I frequent. And for the past month or so, I’ve been loading up the home page almost as frequently as Reddit.

The site itself is like some sort of impossible hybrid combination of Twitter, Stackoverflow and Livejournal. They describe themselves as:

Where programmers share ideas and help each other grow. It is an online community for sharing and discovering great ideas, having debates, and making friends.

In function, it’s a blogging platform much like every blogging platform that is come before LiveJournal, blogspot, tumblr, medium, etc. With a markdown-based editor which I assuming is intentionally “programmy” to make developers feel at home.
Unlike blogging platforms that have come before, dev.to allows creators to easily repost via RSS, maintaining a canonical link to you original post! They have no desire to own the intellectual properly.

In substance, it’s much like stackoverflow, crossed with r/programming or hacker news. Somewhat like stackoverflow, developers post questions relevant to every aspect of development (programming, work, metal health, whatever). But also, developers post tutorials, idea, projects, etc like a reddit or hacker news.
Unlike other developer communities, the entire site is an open source project that anybody can contribute to!.

In form, it’s much like Twitter. The homepage is a reverse-chronological-algorithm-sorted feed (based on your interests) of posts, with headlines, hash tags, hearts and cute little avatars of everybody’s faces.
Unlike Twitter, you’re not limited to hearting a post, you can also unicorn it (I don’t know why).

As a whole, DEV manages to be the most diverse and positive communities I’ve been a part member of in a long long time. By diverse, I mean in every way! By positive, I just mean, people are generally nice and pleasant. You can ask a question and not be told “you asked it wrong” (like they would be on stackoverflow), receive 100 snarky sarcastic replies (like Twitter), or “your dum” (like reddit).

Frankly, I’m not sure how they’re pulling it off. Perhaps it’s because the site is so niche. Or maybe it’s because it’s so small (< 200,000 members at the moment, which is tiny), maybe they haven’t reached the tipping point where toxic individuals are able to dominate the conversation. The fact that the founder Ben Halpern seems to be one of the nicest people on The Internet can’t hurt either.

With all the negative press surrounding the big social networks, I’ve been expecting a some venture capital funded behemoth to replace them any day now. In the same way that Facebook killed MySpace or Reddit killed Digg, I assumed there would be a bigger player that destroys Facebook or Twitter.

But now I’m wondering if niche networks like DEV are the way of the future and it will be more of a death by a thousand cuts for the likes of Facebook.

Whatever might be the case, DEV is a welcome return to a kinder, simpler internet and I love it.

I wonder if there are other niche social networks like that I’m missing out on?

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Culture Websites

What I Learned About The State of Online Creation While Building a Web Comics Feed Aggregator

Web comics were a big part of what I used to like about the old – pre-social-media – Internet. Diesel Sweeties, Penny Arcade, PVP, My Extralife, Nothing Nice to Say, Orneryboy, etc. I’m not sure exactly how it happened, but I just sort of forgot that web comics existed for a good decade plus. Sure some of these classics quit publishing and I think my sense of humour shifted away from others. Whatever the case, it really seems like web comics are back. Or at the very least my interest has been reignited.

Recently in the past month or so, a few really great comics (strange planet, poorly drawn lines to name a couple) have popped on to my radar and I’m all in. Hard.

Now that I’m back in I am bumping into an old problem. There’s not a great centralized location to read everything. In the past I’ve read web comics inside an RSS reader. But RSS readers never felt like the right context, their UI is too ridged, too geared towards written content or something.

Do a search for “web comics reader” and you’re get various websites. Outdated websites from the early days of web comics. You’ll also find webtoons.com, a site that’s taking a good stab at solving this problem. I just don’t like it, it doesn’t feel right for me.

Enter webfunnies.online. The beauty of an open internet is the ability for anyone with some development skills to build their own solution to a problem, just the way they like it.

In the process of looking through dozens of web comics, I discovered some troubling things about the state of online creation.

RSS

RSS still exists as a solid machine-readable way to syndicate arbitrary content.

However creators seem to have forgotten it exists. Less than 50% of the web comics sites I visited advertised and RSS link, even though every one of those made an RSS feed available and published it in the HTML source.

Perhaps this is a moot point since feed readers are good at automatically discovering the

Content Ownership

A large contingent of content owners are publishing original content exclusively to platform like reddit, instagram and patreon. Platforms they don’t own or control. By “exclusively” I don’t mean that they are getting paid to post on those platforms (though in the case of Patreon may be). I just mean that they are posting original artwork directly to those platforms. They simply using those platforms as quick and dirty hosting.

To put in another way, they are giving their intellectual property for free, to for-profit corporations who are using it to sell advertisements.

This does not sit right with me. And I’m not even an artist.

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Culture

The case for Facebook… or something like it

President Barack Obama, with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, holds a town hall meeting at Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto, California, April 20, 2011. (Official White House Photo by Lawrence Jackson)

I am about to write something that is extremely unpopular amongst my peers in 2019: I like Facebook and I think can can be part of a healthy and productive online diet.

Facebook has been getting high profile negative press almost daily, for what seem like a solid year. A lot of it is well warranted — Mark Zuckerberg seems to have a problematic view of privacy — and a lot of it may be FUD.

This post is not a defense of Facebook.

If you want to read a defense of Facebook, take a look at my post on Cambridge Analytica last year.

A year or two after its public launch Facebook was an objectively good product that added value to the world. It presented a set of online tools in a way that was easy to use by completely average internet users. The features everybody flocked to are still in existence in the Facebook of today, they’re just largely buried under piles of garbage.

Allow me to explain.

Connecting with long lost friends and distant relatives.

When I first joined Facebook it was a lot fun to connect with the kids I used to eat lunch with in the cafeteria every day in high school or that one guy you shared homeroom with in grade 7. At the time it was a novel way to connect with people, it felt groundbreaking and overwhelmingly, it felt good.

Over the years the novelty has worn off obviously. And Facebook’s emphasis on “News Feeds”, combined with people’s penchant for posting contentious content (or the algorithm’s encouragement of this content) has make these distant connections more tenuous. From what I’ve seen around me, I think Facebook can seem like a stereo-typically bad, never-ending, year round Thanksgiving Dinner. It can can feel bad.

But I really do think at it’s core, the ability to connect with your wife’s Grandma who lives in Edmonton could and should have a positive impact on the world.

Photo Sharing

Facebook was the first place that made it easy for me to share photos with a group of people. My extended family started to join Facebook right around when my kids were born, so I ended up using this feature quite a bit at the time.

Unfortunately, photo sharing has really fallen by the wayside. I don’t use this feature any more and have even gone so far as to migrate photos from Facebook to Google Photos.

Even so, I know my mom and others would still prefer the simplicity of sharing photos inside Facebook, rather than installing yet another app.

Messenger

Facebook Messenger is a decent, cross-platform instant messaging client. It’s almost my defacto Messaging app (especially now that I switched to Android). However, I do think there are some legitimate privacy concerns, so I actually don’t like using this one.

Facebook Connect

When it launched, Facebook Connect was groundbreaking. The ability to enable account signup/creation on other sites/apps without needing to enter a password or any other account information was amazing. It was a real move forward for online security.

It still performs that function well, I’m just a little wary of how Facebook is using these connections.

Groups

I don’t use groups much personally. But they actually seem like a decent way to keep up to speed on a given niche or a local community. My wife always seems to know what’s happening at our school and in our neighbourhood, immediately. This feels good. This feels like the thing the internet was built for.

Sure groups contain a fair bit of random gossip, the occasional spammer, asshole and that sort of thing. But I think that fact that groups are self-moderated goes a long way into keeping these communities sane.

Groups feels like something Facebook should be focusing on more.

So What?

The media has been proclaiming Facebook’s death since the day after it launched. I first commented on people quitting Facebook 9 years ago. Maybe it’s more real this time, it’s hard to say. If I was more conspiracy minded, I might suggest that some nefarious puppet-master is leading a concerted effort to bring down Facebook. Or maybe just push down the stock price for a big short.

As it stands, I feel trapped. There are absolutely no alternative to the type of “friends and family” community Facebook enables. There aren’t even any up-and-coming social networks in development that I’m aware of.

At the same time, continuing to use Facebook seems like a mistake. If the dubious advertising and privacy practices aren’t enough to keep me away. Most of the posts that find there way to the top of my page are upsetting and I find myself hitting “mute” a lot.

IMHO Facebook could do well to focus on those core features that brought people to the platform in the first place.

So what now? Thoughts?


BTW I’ve written a lot about Facebook in the past. I’ve linked some of my favourite posts above. But I think the full 12 year archive is pretty interesting. Check it out.

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Culture

Netflix for My Dad

My parents bought their first new TV in roughly 20 years, replacing an ancient tubed dinosaur with a modern smart TV. Last night I set up Netflix for them.

My dad is nearly 70, recently retired and finding himself with a lot of extra free time. He’s worked hard all of his life and hasn’t had much time or energy for movies and TV in 30 or 40 years. Suffice to say, Netflix’s library thousands of movies and TV shows extremely daunting to someone who has almost zero exposure to pop culture.

With that in mind I set it upon myself to come up with some recommendations. It was a lot more challenging than I expected!

My Criteria.

Not ultra violent or sex-filled. I’m confident my dad would be turned off by most everything with a MA or hard R ratings. That said, he was a long haul trucker so language is less of an issue 😉

Set in our universe. No lightsabers, phasers, magic wands, zombies, vampires, super heroes, etc. I get the sense these sorts of elements would be too distracting and take him out of the experience. It’s easy to forget how much we suspend disbelief in order to enjoy more fantastical movies. I’ve included one exception to this rule on my list – Guardians, it’s a good introduction to the more comedic Marvel movies and I’m really just interested what he’ll think of it.

No Animation. See above. Though if Pixar movies were still on Netflix I’d have included a few.

Well rated. I don’t want him to be turned off by bad movies. As inspiration I combed through Rotten Tomatoes’ top 100 movies for each of the past 25 years. Get Smart is an exception to this rule, included because I know he liked the old TV show.

No TV Series. I thought about including TV shows, but jumping in to a show on episode 1 one can be a daunting proposition. Plus most TV series take a while to build, so I don’t think telling my dad to “watch The Office” would be terribly fruitful. The right thing to do would be recommending a couple of specific episodes. I included Dirty Money because it’s 6 episodes and I’m confident my dad would be interested in the content of each of them.

Available on Netflix Canada. This was by far the most limiting factor. Netflix seems to have dropped a lot of content recently. So much so that I could not come up with a list of 10.

The List

  • The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
  • The Bourne Identity
  • Dirty Money
  • Get Smart
  • Good Will Hunting
  • Guardians of the Galaxy
  • Hot Fuzz
  • Ocean’s Eleven

This list seems incredibly short and it kind of is. I’m sure I’ve missed a few good ones. But mostly, the January 2019 version of Netflix Canada is just kind of sad.

Feel free to leave a comment with your recommendations.

Categories
Culture Winnipeg

The Portage & Main Debate

Debate surrounding the referendum to reopen the Portage & Main intersection to pedestrians has been dominating my social media so much so that I feel compelled to comment.

My feeds are filled entirely with #VoteOpenWPG proponent and in my humble opinion they could be doing a much better job. I’m not even strongly opposed to opening the intersection. Yet I’m not finding the arguments very compelling at all.

Here’s Why

I’ve organized the main points I’ve seen online into a few categories and put on my contrarian hat to illustrate how they could be seen as flimsy and irrelevant.

History

“The intersection was open to pedestrians for much longer than it has been closed.”

This argument has little weight because change is the inherent nature of history. A lot has changed since the intersection was founded in the 19th century. Modes of transportation are vastly different, horses and buggies are nowhere to be seen, streetcars have come and gone; skyscraper exist, etc. The fact that the intersection was once packed with pedestrians 50 years ago has little baring on what might or might not happen if the intersection was open again in 2019.

Accessibility

“People with mobility issues cannot cross the street because they can’t access the underground.”

This is true, but the argument is not compelling. Winnipeg’s downtown is relatively small. Taking a route that does not cross Portage & Main does not add significant distance to the trip. (Unless you need to get directly between the 3 buildings directly at the corner of Portage Ave E.)

The Underground Sucks

“The underground feels unsafe, poorly lit, the entrances smell like urine, etc.”

Again, this may be true, but if true it’s just not a compelling argument for opening the intersection to pedestrian traffic. It is an argument for spending resources on improving the underground.

“Good for business”

Making the argument that opening the intersection will be good for business automatically lumps this issue in with many other downtown revitalization projects that have been presented as magic bullets to “fix” downtown. With arguable success.

It’s also one of the only points that seems objectively false. For one, the intersection is dominated by office towers, there are literally no street-level businesses within the scope of that block. For another, if pedestrians stay above ground, the underground concourse would certainly suffer. If more pedestrians travel above ground, fewer will travel underground.

Future of the city

“It’s about what kind of city we want to be in the future.”

Do we we want a city that’s progressive and pedestrian friendly? Or do we want to live General Motors Utopia of the 1950s? As someone who grew up in the suburbs, current lives and works in the far flung reaches of St James, I get the sense that a vast majority of Winnipeggers are perfectly happy living in an autopia. If this is the argument the “yes” side is depending on, I am afraid they will be disappointed.

I think that sums up just about everything I’ve see in favour of re-opening the intersection. And to be fair (as Alyson Shane points out in her post for a few weeks ago) the arguments against opening the intersection are quite weak as well.

However, we are not being asked to vote in favour of not doing something. We are voting on investing tax dollars in a project that many Winnipeggers see as frivolous or of dubious value at best.

Status Quo Is Free!

Unless it’s not.

According to a July 24th, article in the Winnipeg Free Press by Dan Lett

All told, the city is committed to spending about $3.5 million on street-level upgrades and planning the re-opening of the intersection. We do not know the final cost of tearing down the barriers. However, the existing barriers are falling apart and removing them could very likely be less expensive than rebuilding them.

If true, this is the only point that matters. People of all political persuasions are motivated by dollars and cents. If it’s going to cost more money to keep the barricades up, taking them down should be a nobrainer. Moreover, $3.5M is well under 1% of Winnipeg $1B+ operating budget.

Lett goes to point out:

There is also the fact that private land owners at Portage and Main need to do repairs to the underground infrastructure that supports Winnipeg Square, the underground shopping mall. That work will require the removal of some of the barriers. Rebuilding them seems a pointless endeavour.

I couldn’t agree more.

The fact that we’re debating this, let a lone having a referendum is the most Winnipeg thing ever.