1. RE: mastodon.social/@kottke/117547283379588024

    My gut response was “Bookfusion is fine,” and it is, but there’s some interesting stuff going on in here.

    The thing I like about my Boox reader is that it supports Bookfusion, Kindle, and Kobo, and it’ll support this.

  2. My least favorite part of online editorial in the 2000s was the way the business side dictated basic design and site operations.

    I mean, of course it did, and it always has: When I worked for a small town newspaper, the layout days went in this order: The ad team took the space they needed, then the galleys came to editorial to fit the news into what was left.

    In my ideal world, I guess newspapers would have been magical objects that let you fit everything of note editorial was able to produce that week, and I remember arriving to web publishing and thinking they were, now.

    The web publisher I worked for took it in a different direction:

    We got a mandate to keep articles to around 400 words or less because “the sidebar ad placements usually end around 300 words, so what’s the point of more words?”

    The design team there was running a factory, constantly acquiring blogs and independent websites, redesigning them to shift from display ads to lead generation, and moving on to the next. So they weren’t in a mood to listen.

    I wrote a pointed email to the outgoing editor of The Oregonian a few years ago talking about the ways oregonlive — the Oregonian’s site — is user hostile and unhelpful: Heds and deks that don’t inform, pages and pages of “business news” rewritten from Wendy’s press releases, a stunning amount of gambling news, and of course the ad networks. It’s truly a bad and discrediting website that is the way it is because Google disciplined web publishers into prioritizing churn over quality.

    The editor was polite but utterly dismissive, reminding me that the editorial side of the house has almost nothing to say about a lot of the design decisions. In The Oregonian’s website, you can see that the business side has decided its work is finished, and editorial is its willing accomplice. It’s junk. As someone who lived through the utter destruction of online editorial at the hands of content farms 15 or 20 years ago, I am less freaked out about “AI slop” than many because to my mind we crossed a boundary years and years ago. The rest is just the business side perfecting the model.

    Keep reading →

    ↪ lexontech.org/someone-tell-the-new-york-times-i-have-more-than-o …

  5. I initially read the headline to mean local bars were hiding their guns from city hall.

  6. I’m in IT so I spend all day clicking around in Google’s conception of an admin interface knowing I’ve been bad in past lives and have it coming.

    I see now the user hostility of the whole thing was just a dress rehearsal for making it harder to protect your privacy. See also Facebook moving these settings every six months just to make you sick of caring.

  7. “Sorry about your existential struggle, but the terms are the terms” is giving a lot of Hitchhiker’s Guide energy.

  8. By “get rid of” I mean “separate with generous severances and free vocational school,” not “trial by Luigi,” in case your pre-election anxieties might have you reaching for a darker reading.

  9. “Where companies like Hershey used to be family owned or shepherded by people with a real stake in the product, they’re increasingly run by people who just like to be in charge of companies.”

    I mean, I’d have to really like the existence of “companies” — family-owned or other — to fist-pump and yell “yes” about this sentiment, but if we have to have companies, making them get rid of the people who just like to be in charge of them in favor of people who care about what they do seems like a thing we should consider.