Reading Time: 2 min It’s sad but it’s true, and most of you have seen it on social media. The more animosity behind a post, the more engagement it gets. Specifically, if you directly attack an opposing political group, your post is much more likely to be shared. From a recent tweet by Jay Van Bavel: “Slamming a political […]
Social Media
Why can’t we just “shut down” child porn?
Reading Time: 2 min Child pornography and human trafficking are major problems across the world, and the web helps to facilitate both to a rather large degree. Whenever some website gets taken down (or blocked on a site like Facebook), you’ll often see memes like this start to float around: At first glance, it seems like a solid question. […]
Sharing the posts I write
Reading Time: 2 min Since I’ve started blogging regularly again, the way I share my posts each day has been slightly adjusted a number of times. I recently was asked for some details on that, so here you go. Before I tackle that, though, there are two important things to frame this with. First, you need to understand why […]
Three simple rules for sharing
Reading Time: 2 min Social media is often filled with memes and information that are just flat-out incorrect. Most of it comes from one type of sharing: “That fits my viewpoint, so I’ll pass it along!“. Truth becomes secondary to speed. That’s not to say you shouldn’t share things that you agree with, but taking a moment to verify […]
The public to private bridge
Reading Time: < 1 min Social media can be great, but as I’ve said on here many times, it’s not yours. Using social media to grow your audience can be a very beneficial thing, but moving your audience from that public network to a private channel (such as an email list) is essential to your long-term growth. We saw this […]
Why most blogs should allow comments
Reading Time: 3 min Over the past decade, I’ve seen more and more blogs get rid of their comment section and simply say something like “go discuss it on Facebook”. I think that’s a bad move, at least in most cases. At a high level, it’s because I still think we need to take back our content. Taking back […]
Tell me about your research
Reading Time: 2 min I’m seeing more and more people claiming to have “done the research” to support some kind of claim, and I suspect most of the “research” there is rather dubious. In most cases, they’re simply saying “I believe the views of person x instead of person y” — and that’s mostly ok. If you trust one […]
Building castles out of sand
Reading Time: < 1 min When it comes to building your presence online, you can build it out of rock or out of sand. Naval said it well on Twitter a few years ago after Alexander Cortes was kicked off of Twitter: Building a following on Twitter is building a castle out of sand, as the implacable tide shifts in […]
Facebook still isn’t listening to you
Reading Time: 2 min It’s a common joke (or sometimes a fear) to “be careful what you say, because Facebook (or Google) is listening to you“. While it may be often intended as a joke, there are many people that think it’s true and there are some decent reasons to believe that it might be. However, I don’t think […]
Where do you really get your news?
Reading Time: < 1 min Almost every day I see someone complaining about “the media”, and the lack of coverage on a particular story or the slant given to something that happened. Despite that, I still maintain that you are the media. It’s important to have professional news organizations out there, for sure, but they no longer have very much […]