Thoughts from John Karahalis
On social media, communication is not about learning. It's not about listening. It's certainly not about changing our minds. Instead, communication serves to score points, to show others how smart and how moral we are, to perform. It's no wonder we can't get along when we use it.
A keynote speaker once made an interesting observation that I hadn't previously considered. “The dirty little secret of social media,” she said, “is that people mainly use it to brag about themselves and only incidentally see what others are up to.”
I think she's right.
I believe that social media is making us profoundly antisocial, profoundly unhappy, and profoundly stupid. By using it, we are becoming ineffective, misinformed, and narrow-minded. I believe that we would be better off without social media or with a radically different form of it.
This micro-blog won't focus exclusively on social media. However, given that the service that powers it*, thoughts.page, offers a compelling alternative to the enchanting digital battlegrounds of Twitter and Facebook, it only seemed appropriate to share those thoughts first.
* This content has since been migrated to another platform. That said, I do still very much admire thoughts.page.
I believe that social media is the cigarette smoke of our time. Some day, our grandchildren will demand answers.
“You knew it was bad for you. Why did you keep doing it?”
(For whatever it's worth, I tweeted that sentiment in 2019, before it was cool to compare social media to cigarettes. Of course, I later deleted my account.)
Last week, I read the bizarre story of Governor Mike Parson of Missouri vowing to prosecute local journalists who notified his office of a data leak in a state website. In a press conference, he claimed that the reporters “decoded” the site's HTML in a “multi-step process,” struggling to pronounce the unfamiliar abbreviation and testing the credulity of his technologically-literate audience. (Does clicking View source involve more than one step? Perhaps among those who find mice to be confusing.)
As someone who started a career by clicking View source, I couldn't let this weird, funny, aggravating news story go. After calling the governor's office to call his actions, “respectfully, moronic,” I decided to create a change.org petition asking him to apologize, which I have copied below.
I was laid off last week. Officially, I was impacted by “significant restructuring”. I never expected to become so conversant with corporate lingo. It's one of the lesser skills I acquired during my 8 years at Mozilla, mostly after Firefox OS was announced as a priority. Another lesson: companies change.
Driven by COVID-19 and the resulting economic downturn, the layoffs affected fully 25% of all employees, including long-time teammates and friends. As in the previous round of layoffs, some of the people affected were among the most passionate and talented people I have ever known. It's unfortunate that they could not all be retained.
I have come to appreciate ESLint very much in recent years. A robust and reliable JavaScript linter, ESLint can be used not only to detect common programming mistakes, but also to enforce a consistent code style. Its utility cannot be overstated. Your teammates and your future self will thank you for using it.
I recommend that ESLint be enabled before any code is written, but what about existing projects? A developer who runs ESLint on an existing codebase will certainly be overwhelmed; it will warn about scores of issues which had not been noticed until that point. Is there any way to gradually adopt its recommendations? More importantly, is there any way to prevent the number of problems from growing? Running the linter on CI is no solution. It will simply fail and annoy others.
I recently started work on a project at Mozilla which I’m calling Ensemble. Ensemble will be a minimalist data-sharing platform. It will allow data scientists to quickly and easily create public dashboards with no web development experience.
In the process of writing a project README, I realized I had accidentally written something like my software development manifesto, the distillation of my thoughts on creating valuable software. The document does discuss some specifics of this project, but the broader points apply more generally.
When writing software, we should approach our own ideas with skepticism. We have more ideas than users have needs.
Features do not guarantee success. If they did, we would line up to trade smartphones for punch cards. Myspace would acquire Twitter. Picasa would be the new Instagram. This doesn’t happen. The history of software is the history of simplicity and elegance winning. We succeed when we attend to what really matters, not when we build every feature imaginable.