The wizards behind AI have been busy lately providing meaningful employment for digital nonpersons.
One of the hottest jobs for non-humans is crafting and deploying website guestbook spam. This market’s on fire!
If you thought the guestbook spam of yore was impressive, you ain’t seen nothing yet. The new, AI-assisted comment spam has improved keyword stuffing, fewer grammatical mistakes, and, best of all, there’s tons more of it. Your Comment section was never so useless!
And we’re not just talking quantity, here; we’re talking quality.
Compared to the spammers of yore, the new signal depressors have a bold confidence that proclaims, “Hello, world! I’m here to waste your time and extinguish what’s left of your hard-won reader community. Watch me work!”
Yes, the bots who shit in your sandbox are bigger, brassier, and better than ever at wasting your readers’ time and abusing your content to score points on the Google big board.
What’s that you say? You’re not a comment spam enthusiast?
In that case, do as I do: use Akismet to keep cruft where it belongs: off your website. Akismet was strong enough for the comment, form, and text spam of the past, and it’s strong enough for the new junk, too.
(Full disclosure: I work at Automattic, makers of Akismet, but I penned this post this morning purely as an Akismet customer, after happily reviewing the blocked comment spam on this here WordPress site of mine. Thanks, Akismet!)
Ever since an infantile fascist billionaire (hereafter, the IFB) decided to turn Twitter over to the racially hostile anti-science set, folks who previously used that network daily to discuss and amplify topics they cared about have either given up on the very premise of a shared digital commons, continued to post to Twitter while holding their noses, or sought a new digital place to call their own. This post is for the seekers, to compare notes.
These are my personal observations; your views may differ (and that’s more than okay). In this quick survey, I’m omitting specialty platforms like Tribel, Post, and Substack. Feel free to comment, if you like.
The platforms
BlueSky: The most beautifully elegant web interface. Also the best features (other than omission of hashtags). What Twitter should have become. I joined late—Jack didn’t invite me, likely a sign that I was no longer industrially relevant. I have few followers there, and my posts so far get little traction, but that could change. It’s so pretty (and the few friends that use it matter so much to me) that I keep using it, and I reserve judgement as to its future potential. https://bsky.app/profile/zeldman.bsky.social
Threads: Currently my primary alternative to Twitter, and the only place besides Twitter where my posts get at least some response. Not as visually refined as BlueSky, and with a curiously restricted single-hashtag-only policy. Although this editorial decision helps focus the mind, and likely also cuts down on spam, it interferes with amplifying multidimensional posts. But I digress.
Rough edges and restrictive tagging aside, Threads feels like the place that’s likeliest to inherit the mantle of default town square—if any social platform can do that in these new times, that is.
Threads got its huge jump start because, while the IFB was busy finding new ways to make Twitter less useful and more dangerous, Meta leveraged its huge installed Instagram base to give users a more or less instant social network hookup. If it’s easy, and comes with a built-in network of people I already follow, it wins—at least initially.
Meta may also blow their opportunity if they pursue misguided policies, such as impeding (by algorithmic fiat) “political speech” when democracies hang in the balance, regional wars threaten to become world wars, and the climate crisis is approaching a point of no return. https://www.threads.net/@zeldman
Mastodon: How do you decentralize a digital town square? Provide universal social connection without locking in participants? Mastodon (and federation generally) are an attempt to do those things.
These are important and noble goals, but Mastodon (and federation generally) are a long shot at replacing a primary walled garden like Twitter because they require a fair degree of geekery to set up, and the price tag of mass acceptance is ease of setup. (Compare Threads—easy set-up, built-in friends and followers if you already use Instagram—versus the learning curve with Mastodon.)
If BlueSky is MacOS and Threads is Windows, Mastodon is Linux: a great choice for techies, but likely too steep a hill for Ma and Pa Normie. A techie friend invited me to join, and I write there frequently, but, for whatever it’s worth, my Mastodon posts get very little in the way of responses. It is, nonetheless, a highly effective network for most who use it. https://front-end.social/@zeldman
Tumblr: A bit o’ the OG weird wacky wonderful web, and a special place for nonconformist creative types. By its nature, and the nature of its fiercely loyal users, it is a cult jam. I was an early and enthusiastic Tumblr fan, but it was never my main axe, probably because, since the dawn of time itself, I have had zeldman.com.
For a while, when the IFB first started wrecking Twitter, an uptick in Tumblr usage suggested that the funky old network just might take over as the world’s town hall, but this hope was unrealistic, as Tumblr was never about being for everybody, and Tumblristas are mostly happy keeping the platform a home for self-selecting freaks, queers, and creatives.
I’ll note that Tumblr is part of the Automattic family, and I work at Automattic (just celebrated my fifth anniversary there!), but my opinions here are mine alone. BTW—in nearly 30 years of blogging, that’s the first time I’ve used that phrase. https://apartness.tumblr.com
LinkedIn: A comparatively safe social network with a huge network built up over years, hence a great place to share work-related news and ideas.
Some early Twitter adopters of my acquaintance—especially those who mainly write about work topics like UX—have made LinkedIn their primary social home. For most working folks, it is undoubtedly a place to post and amplify at least some of the content that matters to you. OTOH, it’s not a place where I’d share deep takes on CSS (that’s probably Mastodon), cosplay (Tumblr), or personal true confessions (one’s blog, Threads, Twitter before the IFB took over). https://www.linkedin.com/in/zeldman
Twitter itself: During its heyday, before the IFB, and when it was the only game in town, I loved going there to see what clever things my smartest friends were saying, post my own bon mots, and promote content that mattered to me.
I’ll limit my comments on Twitter’s current state to noting that I still post there, from stubbornness as well as habit, and primarily in the (increasingly forlorn) hope that the IFB will eventually tire of his toy, or of the ceaseless financial hemorrhage, and go away, leaving the site to rebirth itself as an open source project or under the care of new, non-fascist owners.
Though the algorithm punishes my posts, and though I’m continually appalled by the MAGA posts, Russian disinformation, racist/ misogynist/ anti-semitic spew, and Trumpian ego of the current owner, I shall, at least for now, continue to defend my tiny turf there.
I follow you on Mastodon and even when usually don’t respond to bunch of posts, I can still appreciate people being there. Since I use RSS, I get to read your posts that way usually coming to your website.
[…] In search of a digital town square – L. Jeffrey Zeldman, non l’ultimo dei fessi sul web, cerca di fare il punto sullo stato dell’arte del self publishing oggi; […]
[…] In search of a digital town square – L. Jeffrey Zeldman, talks about the state of the art on mantaining a presence on the web today, with the available tools. […]
Bluesky introduces open-source, collaborative moderation for federated social media websites: Bluesky was created to put users and communities in control of their social spaces online.…
When I joined a tech company after working for myself for 20 years, the corporate world had changed in many ways. One, in particular, struck me. My old jobs had existed in environments so laddish and rowdy that even I, as a man, had felt uncomfortable in them. So I’d gotten out.
For 20 years, I ran my own businesses. I prioritized impact over profit. I prized adherence to a set of beliefs over survival. If marketplace disruptions made pivoting to an ugly business model the only way to keep a company going, I shut that company down—even when I wasn’t sure what I would do next.
After shutting down enough of my companies to convince me that maybe “business” wasn’t my strength, what I did next, in 2019, was to join Automattic, Inc.—the people behind WordPress.com, Jetpack, WooCommerce, Simplenote, Tumblr, and other web-based empowerment tools.
It’s nothing like the places where I used to work.
We believe in Open Source. Follow a Creed. Instead of laddishness, we support and even celebrate difference. One way that support flows is through Employee Resource Groups, which we at Automattic call Automattician Resource Groups, or ARGs—so that’s the name I’ll use here.
ARGs are communities, formed around personal identity and situation, where colleagues connect with and support each other and work together toward common goals.
At Automattic, we have several of these ARG communities. Eventually, as the lead of Automattic’s Employer Brand activity, I plan to join them all. Initially, I joined two: Neurodiverseomattic and Queeromattic. I saw myself as an ally. In joining these two ARGs, I hoped to become wiser and kinder; to increase my ability to support, live, and work with family, friends, and colleagues; to deepen my interpersonal skills; and to grow in compassion and understanding.
I accomplished those goals, but I also gained something I hadn’t expected.
It started with Neurodiverseomattic, a group that provides support and resources for neurodivergent Automatticians (including but not limited to autism, ADHD, dyslexia) and their allies.
As the dad of an autistic daughter (who also suffers from an alphabet soup of additional diagnoses), I have the joy of loving, living with, and learning from one of the most brilliant minds I’ve ever encountered. But I also have the challenge of supporting someone whose life, through no fault of her own, is often painfully difficult.
I must listen when she needs an ear. Advise when she seeks help—and occasionally when she doesn’t.
Autism, in my daughter’s case, simultaneously includes remarkable, magical, wondrous capabilities, along with painful, mostly social, disabilities.
Some Neurodiverseomattic members are neurodiverse themselves; some are neurotypical but support neurodiverse family members; many, maybe most, are neurodiverse themselves and also support neurodiverse family members.
Over months, the more I shared experiences with members of my ARG, the better I became at meeting the challenges of parenting an autistic, depressed, anxious, dyslexic, artistic, gifted, emotionally intense, profoundly insightful teenager. And the more I came to realize that other members of my family had also been on the spectrum. Like my late father. And maybe my late brother. And, in a different way, my late mom. And…
And the more Ava shared her past experiences of being bullied, misunderstood, abandoned, and confused, the more I realized that I myself had had many of the same feelings and experiences growing up that she was having.
Like Ava, I had gone through a period of crying every day at the thought of going to school. The terror of brutal bullying and the shame of not fighting back. The shock of trusted friends laughing at me, not with me, or pretending not to know me. Lubricating their rise in the social ranks by pretending to find me ridiculous. Or maybe not pretending.
Like Ava, I’d concocted strange fantasies to try to understand why these things happened to me. Had I committed some crime? Was I a mistake? Had my parents been bribing my school friends to pretend to like me, and then run out of money?
So much of what Ava experienced, I had experienced. And so, it seemed, had many of my neurodiverse colleagues who courageously shared their stories.
And, finally, reader, it sank in:
I’m not just the president of hair club for men, I’m also a customer.
I’m on the spectrum. Of course I am. And always have been. Of course. And just never, ever knew.
Once I saw it, I was amazed that I’d never realized or even wondered about it.
Once I saw it, I was grateful to work at a place where we’re afforded the kind of support that can not only help us improve our people skills, but can also introduce us, on a deeper level, to ourselves.
And meanwhile, as an ally, I also joined Queeromattic. Need I say more?
Okay, I will.
The world I grew up in was so homophobic, and the romantic films I grew up watching were so prescriptive, that I got in touch with my heterosexuality long before I reached puberty … and didn’t recognize my queer side for decades.
Not even when I made out with a boy. (Hey, I was drunk.) Or years later, when I made out with another boy. (Hey, I was drunk, and, anyway, he looked like a girl.)
My new self-knowledge is mostly academic. Divorce has freed me of certain illusions, a spiritual practice has brought a taste of inner peace, and aging has eased up on the hormonal gas pedal, so that I no longer confuse attraction for a plan, or feelings for fate. Parenting keeps me plenty busy and fulfilled, and singlehood may not be exciting, but I’ve had enough excitement for multiple lifetimes.
Romantic love is for those still willing to risk everything. I prefer to hold onto what I have left. Because I know it’s a hell of a lot.
Thanks to the wisdom, vulnerability, truthfulness, and compassion of the friends I’ve made through my company’s ARGs, I have come to better know myself. It gives me pride, no pun intended. It even grants me serenity. And for that, I am grateful.
Screenshot of slide highlighting the four phases of WordPress Gutenberg.
Not only are we enabling folks to express themselves uniquely on the web, unlike the cookie cutter looks that all the social sites try to put you into. We’re doing it in a way which is standards-based, interoperable, based on open source, and increases the amount of freedom on the web.
2006 DOESN’T seem forever ago until I remember that we were tracking IE7 bugs, worrying about the RSS feed validator, and viewing Drupal as an accessibility-and-web-standards-positive platform, at the time. Pundits were claiming bad design was good for the web (just as some still do). Joe Clark was critiquing WCAG 2. “An Inconvenient Truth” was playing in theaters, and many folks were surprised to learn that climate change was a thing.
I was writing the second edition of Designing With Web Standards. My daughter, who is about to turn twelve, was about to turn two. My dad suffered a heart attack. (Relax! Ten years later, he is still around and healthy.) A List Apart had just added a job board. “The revolution will be salaried,” we trumpeted.
Preparing for An Event Apart Atlanta, An Event Apart NYC, and An Event Apart Chicago (sponsored by Jewelboxing! RIP) consumed much of my time and energy. Attendees told us these were good shows, and they were, but you would not recognize them as AEA events today—they were much more homespun. “Hey, kids, let’s put on a show!” we used to joke. “My mom will sew the costumes and my dad will build the sets.” (It’s a quotation from a 1940s Andy Hardy movie, not a reflection of our personal views about gender roles.)
Jim Coudal, Jason Fried and I had just launched The Deck, an experiment in unobtrusive, discreet web advertising. Over the next ten years, the ad industry pointedly ignored our experiment, in favor of user tracking, popups, and other anti-patterns. Not entirely coincidentally, my studio had just redesigned the website of Advertising Age, the leading journal of the advertising profession.
Other sites we designed that year included Dictionary.com and Gnu Foods. We also worked on Ma.gnolia, a social bookmarking tool with well-thought-out features like Saved Copies (so you never lost a web page, even if it moved or went offline), Bookmark Ratings, Bookmark Privacy, and Groups. We designed the product for our client and developed many of its features. Rest in peace.
I was reading Adam Greenfield’s Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, a delightfully written text that anticipated and suggested design rules and thinking for our present Internet of Things. It’s a fine book, and one I helped Adam bring to a good publisher. (Clearly, I was itching to break into publishing myself, which I would do with two partners a year or two afterwards.)
In short, it was a year like any other on this wonderful web of ours—full of sound and fury, true, but also rife with innovation and delight.
As part of An Event Apart’s A Decade Apart celebration—commemorating our first ten years as a design and development conference—we asked people we know and love what they were doing professionally ten years ago, in 2006. If you missed parts one, two, three, or four, have a look back.
Update! Episode 11 featuring Nicole Sullivan on CSS optimization is now available for your listening and viewing pleasure at 5by5.tv.
If writing good CSS is tough, fixing someone else’s (or multiple someones’) bad CSS is a rarified art calling for the skill of a surgeon, the sensitivity of a Stradivarius, the patience of a saint, and the diplomacy of a Zheng He. Nicole Sullivan is one of the best and most successful of that small pool of CSS troubleshooters. Dan Benjamin and I are thrilled to have her as our guest on Episode 11 of The Big Web Show. Join us today, 8 July 2010, for the live taping at 1:00 PM ET.
Nicole is an evangelist, front-end performance consultant, CSS Ninja, and author. She started the Object-Oriented CSS open source project, which answers the question: how do you scale CSS for millions of visitors or thousands of pages? She also consulted with the W3C for their beta redesign, and is the co-creator of Smush.it, an image optimization service in the cloud.
Nicole is passionate about CSS, web standards, and scalable front-end architecture for large commercial websites. She speaks about performance at conferences around the world, most recently at An Event Apart, The Ajax Experience, ParisWeb, and Web Directions North.
The Big Web Show is taped live in front of an internet audience every Thursday at 1:00 PM ET on live.5by5.tv. Edited episodes can be watched afterwards (often within hours of taping) via iTunes (audio feed | video feed) and the web.
ZingChart hopes to end the war between HTML5 and Flash in web-based charting:
Today we launched the first charting library that renders charts and graphs in both HTML5 <canvas> and Flash. Rather than join the Flash vs. <canvas> debate, we built a version that renders charts in both frameworks. With the recent launch of the iPad, we hope ZingChart Flash + HTML5 <canvas> helps the growing data visualization community focus on building great visualizations rather than worrying about compatibility.
For you visual learners and tinkerers, here’s the demo:
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