Scott Boehmer

Tag: A Better Web

  • A Notional Design Studio

    Because, yes: this “America by Design” page is shoddily made, and poorly written. But the authoritarian impulse — to erase histories, to control a narrative, to single-mindedly focus on image and aesthetics — shapes not just the site’s text, but its design as well. Its text erases the history and work of the people who quietly labored to create better digital services for the public; in their place, it proposes that one man alone can define “design” for the country. And we find that new definition in the way the site’s constructed: it is digital design intended for the privileged few, one that actively excludes people who don’t conform to a specific, discriminatory definition of “eligible.”

    All of this should and must be rebuked by the design community; it must also be actively, urgently dismantled.

    Ethan Marcotte

    A notional design studio. (Ethan Marcotte)

  • You Should Use RSS

    Perhaps you’ve heard of RSS. It stands for “Really Simple Syndication” and it allows websites like blogs, newsletters, and news sites to make their content available in “feeds” for outside services called “RSS readers” or “feed readers”. Far from being the new hotness attracting glitzy feature stories in tech media or billions in venture funding, RSS has been around for 25 years.

    …

    I’ve been heavily using RSS for over a decade, and it’s a travesty more people aren’t familiar with it.

    Molly White

    Curate your own newspaper with RSS (citation needed)

  • The Internet is Shrinking

    This isn’t just nostalgia talking. It’s about power. While we scroll through sanitized feeds and click through curated content, a handful of companies are quietly reshaping humanity’s digital destiny. The real question is: are we okay with letting them?​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

    Joan Westenberg

    The Internet is Shrinking (Westenberg)

  • Why I Shut Off Comments for Millions of People

    Keeping comments up on our site was a guarantee of misinformation, because with an annual editorial budget as small as ours, one shrinking each quarter, we couldn’t afford the personnel required to patrol even one day’s articles for misleading comments, much less those attached to articles going back years that kept finding traction in Google search results. Social media companies, which were clearly replacing the role of magazines like mine, were the only ones with the money necessary to fight what I considered a holy fight against deception. And until recently, the heads of those companies did make some attempt to moderate dangerous misinformation.

    Jacob Ward

    Why I Shut Off Comments for Millions of People (The Rip Current)

  • You Should Have a Website

    When you post on social media, you are subject to the whims of whoever runs it. If you get banned, no one knows how to find you. If the website gets sold to someone who sucks, you cannot transfer your identity somewhere else. If the main algorithm that people use to find your posts starts suppressing your posts, you have no backup plan.

    Social media leaves you bouncing from one enshittified, corporate-owned app to another.

    …

    When your favorite social media website gets bought by some asshole with more money than sense, you are going to be left holding the bag. If you have a website, you can link your social media profiles on the website, and build up a reputation as having that website so people know where to find you if your current social media implodes.

    Nora Reed

    You should have a website (Nora Zone)