6 Comments
Feb 10, 2021Liked by Casey Newton

Such a brilliant piece, Casey. Timely, thorough & enlightening.

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Feb 10, 2021Liked by Casey Newton

Great entry today, I like the deeper thinking about a particular feature, with a current event as a lens. The ways of retreating from wide open social networks has been on my mind lately. I really do wonder if the scale of things we’re comfortable with is just incompatible with the scale that social tech affords us. Global discovery of interesting people isn’t the same as being globally addressable, and it’s why I see various ways of assembling smaller social spaces. I’ve been thinking of it in terms of the Danish word hygge which roughly means the art of being cozy (no doubt the cold snap in normally temperate Vancouver is adding to that). The block button is just another hygge move, though as you say it is a blunt one.

A secondary story about Snap reminding people to prune friend lists feels adjacent to this and exemplifies what I like about them: getting ahead of situations before they need things like block buttons to remedy. Anywho great reading, thanks Casey.

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Really solid contribution this week. You are really bringing a lot more depth to your writing efforts than the normal level of byline with two or three bullets deep type of coverage that you see in most news articles.

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Kind of hard to blame Horowitz for not trusting journalists when any comment he makes is willfully misconstrued for an outrage machine. If journalists don't want to be blocked, they should do their jobs better.

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the future of moderation isn't more moderation, it's less.

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