antipaucity

I learned about bufferapp.com this week – finally a way to not overload Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc with posts – and put them in relevant venues easily.

Thanks, Passive Panda.

I am very curious to know how people utilize social media in relation to work:

• blogging
• tweets
• etc

I know it’s not horribly scientific, but if you’d be willing to participate in this inquiry, please leave a comment.

I’ll be putting up a more formal poll in the coming days.

Thanks!

The news story making the rounds about Facebook the past few days indicates they’re working on a kind of “dislike” button.

The problem with the Facebook “like” button is the same problem Google has with Google+ and their “+1” button: it doesn’t tell you anything meaningful.

Voting on Reddit doesn’t really convey much meaning, either.

Stack Overflow tries to address this with its up/down voting and being able to see the gestalt votes as a ratio (if your rep is high enough (an admittedly low bar, but still a bar, and an aspect of the gamification of Stack Overflow)). But that doesn’t really cut it, either.

The problem with online “voting” (or “liking”, or “plussing”, etc) is that it is a dimensionless data point.

Does getting 300 “likes” on a post make it “good”? Does it reflect on its quality in any way? How about getting nearly 400 upvotes (and only a handful of downvotes) on a question about MySQL (along with 100+ “favorites”) mean the question is good? Does it show something is popular? Are people clicking the vote mechanism out of peer pressure, because they actually agree, or because they think it needs more visibility? Or something else entirely?

Dimensionless data that gets used as if it has meaning is a problem – one of many problems of social media and web sites in general.

Of course, you will object, quality is a potentially-subjective term – what does “quality” mean, exactly, when talking about a post, website, question, etc? Is it how well-written it is? Is it how long? How funny? How sad?

Take this question I asked on Stack Overflow, “CSS – how to trim text output?” It’s clearly-written, was answered excellently in 2 minutes, and is a “real” problem I had. Yet in the 4.5 years since asking, it’s only gotten 2 votes total (both “up”, but still only two).

Reddit has upvotes and downvotes – and your comment/post score is merely the sum of the ups and downs; below a certain [relative] threshold, you won’t see content unless you ask for it.

One of the biggest problems with all of these systems is that the “score” doesn’t actually tell you anything. An atheist subreddit, for example, will tend to downvote-into-oblivion comments that are theistic in nature (especially from Christians). Quora‘s voting system is highly untransparent – downvotes don’t really seem to mean much, and upvotes are pretty much just for show.

This derives from the fact that these sites use dimensionless data and try to give it a value or meaning outside of what it really is – a number.

What should be shown is the total number of “votes” a given post has gotten – positive negative, reshare, etc – but never combined. A ratio could be displayed, but the sum of the votes is a poor plan.

Facebook, Google+, and others should offer various voting options – “up”, “down”, “disagree”, “agree”, “share”, and possibly others – some of which may be mutually-exclusive (you cannot upvote and downvote the same thing), but you might downvote something you agree with (or upvote something you disagree with) just because of how it is written/presented, etc.

And the total of each type of click should be shown – show me 10,000 people disagreed with what I said, 15,000 agreed; 20,000 upvoted, and 30,000 downvoted; 12,000 reshared it (with, or without, comment).

Using voting as a means of hiding things (and trying to prevent others from seeing them) can be somewhat akin to online bullying – revenge voting has its problems; as does blindly upvoting anything a particular person says/does. Which is why assigning (and then displaying) dimensionless data anything more than a count is dangerous.

I know lots of folks who like to have everything they share on one social network (eg Google+) magically appear on all others they use, too (eg Twitter & Facebook).

While I sometimes share identical content out to several networks, I rarely want precisely the same thing going everywhere all the time. In fact, while I love employing Buffer and IFTTT (including using the latter to push content from G+ elsewhere), I rarely like having the same posts (which aren’t links) appear anywhere else.

Why? To ensure I don’t miss some of the conversation or points raised by splitting my attention between, say, Facebook and Google+.

I find that the communities represented on the social networks I use, while overlaps occur, tend to be relatively distinct.

I see this problem occur in communities I belong to, too – such as the BGLUG. There’s a Facebook group, and a Google+ community. When events are scheduled, they get posted both places: which is great for publicity .. but not so much for keeping continuity of community.

Continuity of conversation and interaction is a Big Dealâ„¢, in my opinion.

Multiple conversation points are great – but fragmentation of discussion is not so great (eg comments on a blog post + comments on the social network link post of the blog post).

I asked a question about a subset of this problem a few years ago on Stack Overflow – and the best answer for integrating WordPress-to-Facebook commenting was to use a plugin. That’s awesome – but doesn’t begin to solve the problem of discussions across more than one network.

So, for now, I’ll continue to encourage all my socially-network friends, colleagues, family, and readers to keep conversations as separate as possible on the networks they frequent: improve your signal-to-noise ratio, and make the internet a better place.

I’ve recently been asked by several people to investigate websites (especially e-commerce ones) for reliability/legitimateness.

Thought someone else may find my process useful, and/or have some ideas on how to improve it ?

So here goes:

1. Pop a terminal window (I’m on a Mac, so I open Terminal – feel free to use your terminal emulator of choice (on Windows, you’ll need to have the Subsystem for Linux or Cygwin installed))
   1. Type whois <domain.tld> | less
      • I’ll use this domain (antipaucity.com) for an example
      • you may be able to use whois.com (eg whois.com/whois/antipaucity.com)
   2. Look at all of the following:
      • Creation (Creation Date: 2006-02-22T01:12:10Z)
      • Expiration (Registry Expiry Date: 2023-02-22T01:12:10Z)
      • Name server(s) (NS3.PAIRNIC.COM)
      • Registral URL (http://www.pairdomains.com)
      • Registrar (Pair Domains)
      • Contact info (should [generally] be anonymized in some manner)
   3. Possible flags:
      • If the domain’s under 2 years old, and/or the registration period is less than a year (we can talk about when short registrations may make sense in the comments)
      • If the name servers are “out of the country” (which, of course, will vary based on where you are)
      • If the contact info isn’t anonymized
2. Load the website in question in a browser (use an ingonito and/or proxied tab, if you like) and review the following types of pages:
   • Contact Us
     • Where are they located?
     • Does the location stated match what you expect based on the whois response?
   • About Us
     • Does it read “naturally” in the language it purports to be written in?
       • Ie, does it sound like a native speaker wrote it, or does it sound stiltedly/mechanically translated?
   • Does it match what is in the whois record and the Contact Us page?
   • Do they provide social media links (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc)?
     • What do their social media presence(s) say about them?
   • Return/Refund Policy (for ecommerce sites only)
     • What is the return window?
     • How much will be charged to send it back and/or restorck it?
   • Shipping Policy (for ecommerce sites only)
     • How long from submitting an order to when it ships to when it arrives?
     • Where is it shipping from?
   • Privacy Policy (only applies if you may be sharing data with them (ecommerce, creating accounts, etc)
     • What do they claim they will (and will not) do with your private information?
3. Is the site running over TLS/SSL?
   • You should see a little padlock icon in your browser’s address bar
   • Click that icon, and read what the browser reports about the SSL certificate used
   • Given that running over TLS is 100% free, there is absolutely NO reason for a site to NOT use SSL (double especially if they’re purporting to be an ecommerce site)

Reviewing these items usually takes me about 2-3 minutes.

It’s not foolproof (after all, better fools are invented every day), but it can give you a good overview and relative confidence level in the site in question.

you blogged as often as you tweeted, facebooked, linkedinned, instagrammed, plogged, pinterested, google plussed, mastodonned, etc?

For many of us, that would be 4, 10, 20, 100, or even more blog posts per day.

Wonder how differently we would view/utilize social media if we took that approach?

Just a thought.

…and a week to go.

Normally, I take about one big break for the book of the face every year – generally when my wife and I take a vacation somewhere 🙂

This year we’re upping the ante: while home – and accessible via SMS, email, Twitter, phone, Google+, etc – I’m on a two week Facebook break. And then, excluding some exceptions for special events and the like, both my wife and I are planning to also forgo Facebook on the weekends.

It’s far far too easy to get hooked on electronics and feel like you HAVE to reply instantly whenever that little iOS leash buzzes or your Android tether dings.

^{_{As a side note – I have been exceptionally happy with Buffer for maintaining some regularity of social media postings.}}