There was a time when being on the Internet allowed you to reinvent yourself. You could be an acne-ridden fifteen year old sleeping in an unfinished basement, but to the folks in a chatroom, you could be anyone or anything. This was in the days when we didn’t have services like Facebook that tied in heavily with our offline life. With nothing tying our online identity to a real person except an IP address, and maybe an email address, we could re-invent ourselves. The practical upshot of this was that, in different communities online, we could be different people. In some corners of the Internet, we still can, but these are in the minority.

For those of us who came of age online in this period we know that, on one server or message board we were an upstanding citizen, and contributor. On another, we were the thorn in the moderator’s side. We knew what communities we valued, and we knew what we wanted to keep secret. If there’s anything we’ve lost in the transition to a social media dominated culture, it’s the idea that we can be different people in different places. Perhaps this is coming back with the decentralized and ephemeral photo and message services like Kik and Snapchat, popular with the kids, but there’s too much money to be made from preventing true anonymity. Facebook and Google have too much to benefit by tying out youthful indiscretions to our accounts. Of course, we could always just change our name.

As Facebook, Twitter, and Google become the identity backbone of the Internet, we will continue to lose the ability to switch our personalities depending on who we’re dealing with online and where. It’s true that anonymity comes with the price of providing cover for troublemakers—4chan’s /b/ board comes to mind. But not everyone wants to live in public, and the option should exist for us to have an alternate identity online for our shadow self, the one we don’t want our parents, employers, and government to see—and one that can’t be algorithmically tied to our legit, public identity for the purpose of selling advertisements (or worse). I know this can be done, though not easily. I worry that it will become harder in the future, and that the people who need access to it most will lose out. There’s no conspiracy theory thinking here. It’s economics.

Recently, I uninstalled Twitter from my iPhone and iPad. And Facebook. And my App.net client. And the few games I had installed on my phone, too. I’m not going as far as that guy who turned his iPhone into a dumbphone, but I understand his reasoning. With less things on my phone for me to pull out and check when the urge strikes me, I have more mental resources to focus on whatever the task is at hand. That’s what these things are for, which is why I also installed an app on my work and home Macs to block access to time-sink social networking sites when I really need to get down to work.

There’s an attraction to prosthetic distraction. I’m not going to talk about dopamine and neuroscience here. That’s far out of my area of expertise. For me, it’s just about knowing where my time is going. The more time I spend at my work computer with my phone in my hand instead of putting my fingers on the keys, the less I’m getting done. It’s math. When I had a mindless job that required me to sit and do repetitive tasks that a robot or shell script could do, I didn’t have to feel guilty about checking Facebook every half-hour. Now that I’m a knowledge worker, that kind of behavior isn’t as easy to justify.

There’s always a use case behind some of the prosthetic distractions we have on our person. After all, Facebook is the only way I can really keep in touch with some of my friends—they’re not going to switch to Path or whatever form of communication I prefer. I just question the need to always have it available. When there’s dead space in my life to fill, that’s a fine time to check in on Facebook, but that’s not when I should be working. [1] Anything that gives me the incentive to keep my phone in my pocket, my iPad in my bag, and my fingers making the clackity noise as I work is a net good.

Why do we choose distractions? They’re easier. It’s the path of least resistance when we face something harder for us. That’s the appeal. I’m certain some of us have the ability to resist the siren call of finding out what amusing bon mot that @BastardKeith tweeted out in the last hour. [2] Just like the big advice in productivity circles is to not check your email in the morning (something I’m guilty of doing), and scheduling times to get caught up, we should consider that approach to our social networks and other prosthetic distraction.

After all, we can only focus and be productive for so long at a time. After a half-hour or hour of legit work, checking in on Twitter and App.Net is the palate cleansing sherbet that prepares us for the next course of actual work. Keeping it off my phone and running Anti-Social is just my method for ensuring I don’t take the easy way out. It helps that I can update all these services without having to view my timelines, though, thanks to Drafts. Decide for yourself if your prosthetic distractions are more distracting than they should be. Then find a way to fix it.

We have closed user registration, and we plan to shut the public site down in two weeks. We started working on this project for ourselves and our friends, and we use The Old Reader on a daily basis, so we will launch a separate private site that will keep running. It will have faster refresh rate, more posts per feed, and properly working full-text search — we are sure that we can provide all this at a smaller scale without that much drama, just like we were doing before March.

— Desperate times call for desperate measures

I’ve been using The Old Reader for my work-related RSS stuff, until their sudden downtime last week. It’s a great product, and a labor of love, but it seems they just couldn’t keep up with the influx of refugees from Google. The database issues, though unrelated, clearly didn’t help with this decision. I wish them luck, and hope they can make a go of The Old Reader with their small, private network. In the meantime, I’ve pulled my work RSS feeds, and have been making a go of it with Digg Reader, which is reliable, but that’s the most I can say for it.

I recently came across an article by Kevin Morris on DailyDot about how the Wikimedia Commons has become a hub of amateur pornography. [1] It’s better if you read the piece yourself, but to summarize the summary: people have been posting porn to the Commons, and any attempt to regulate it by the larger Wikimedia organization have been rebuffed by the Commons own leadership. While I have no problem with pornography in general, the piece struck me as illustrating an interesting dichotomy in the conceptualization of “free speech” on the Internet, and the spaces for it. The goal of Wikimedia Commons is to be a repository of freely licensed images that would be of value to the educational role of Wikimedia, which is an admirable endeavor. This also means that, by any measure, using it as a host for amateur pornography is mission creep to say the least.

However, there’s a larger discussion to be had about the organizational structures that surround large Internet communities, which includes Wikimedia and its projects. There is a considerable organizational structure within Wikimedia. Though any person can edit anything (with certain exceptions), other users are given power to be administrators, locking down controversial articles, establishing editorial guidelines and more. There are also “Bureaucrats” who appoint administrators, and exert greater control over a project’s mission. A Commons user with the screen name Russavia, who supports the mass of porn on the Commons, is one of those elected “Bureaucrats” and has a lot of support from other Commons users—enough so that Jimmy Wales, the “God-King” of Wikimedia has no control or say in the project. It’s politics, Internet-style, pure and simple, and it all comes down to a sense of what the “mission” of the project is.

By all accounts, Wikimedia as a whole is a very Libertarian (with a capital “L”) endeavor. They have established a baseline set of guidelines for what can, and cannot be done, and allowed extreme freedom within them. There’s no room on Wikitravel for an article about rock music, except in the context of famous rock clubs in a city. On the other hand, there’s no room in Wikipedia for a crowdsourced guide to the best rock clubs in that city. The people who have taken an interest in these non-Commons Wikimedia projects have an interest in building something with a specific mission in mind, and if you want to do something else, they’ll nudge you towards where it belongs. It seems that the Commons, for some reason, has attracted the “small-l” libertarian camp, for whom the rule of the system are suspect—and have leveraged those rules to pull off a coup.

This is an example in how not to do community moderation. By any measure, at some point in the Wikimedia Commons past, there was an inflection point where pornography was becoming an increasingly large part of the content generated. Someone, somewhere, didn’t either seize the moment, or tried to seize it too late. The end result is the mess you see before you. However, I can understand how it happened. In a community of geeks and by geeks, and particularly geeks with a bent towards libertarian attitudes, it’s often better to take a soft approach to addressing issues of inappropriate content. Further muddying the waters is that the line between educational materials and pornography can be fuzzy. Ask any thirteen year old boy in the pre-Internet age who found a National Geographic magazine with pictures of topless women, or the “What’s Happening to my Body?” Book for Girls in the library.

At some point, however, it becomes clear that users are posting pictures that contain explicit material less for the educational value. After a certain point, you’ve learned all you can about human sexual anatomy that you can from still images or short videos. The questions are: how does one handle an abuse of the service, and do the structures in place allow for users with authority to take control of the situation? Without being involved, it may be likely that the answer to the latter is “No.” To paraphrase Douglas Adams, "A common mistake that people make when trying to design rules to keep people from being assholes is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete assholes.” [2]

When we create rules and organizational structures, in real life and online, we tend to assume that everyone involved will be a rational actor—or at least as rational as the people creating those rules and structures. In doing so, we too often fail to plan for the irrational people who seek to bend, fold, spindle, and mutilate those rules and structures for their own gain. Let alone those who just want to watch the world burn. It’s what leads to political corruption, nepotism, gerrymandering, and embezzlement in real political structures, and what leads to “small-l” libertarian coups in the digital world.

One of the great things about the Internet, and its democratizing effect on communication, is how easy and inexpensive it is to create your own Utopian Paradise (no matter your sociopolitical leanings) and invite your like-minded friends. However, there’s no glory as a rabble-rouser in taking your ball and going “home”. I expect as online communities become more commonplace, we’ll see both heavier-handed moderation, and revolts and revolutions in the style of Wikimedia Commons. The communities that succeed will have to strike a balance between guiding its members towards a defined and common goal, while still allowing autonomy and a voice to the dissenting—and an open door for those who want to tear it down to be shunted out through. The details are in the implementation, of course.

If you haven’t heard, you’ve been living under a rock, or you don’t follow stuff on the Internet. In either case, I have to wonder how you got to be reading this. The big news is that Tumblr, the easy-to-use blogging platform that hosts hundreds of millions of blogs, has been purchased by Yahoo! for the sum of $1.1 billion dollars, a sum worthy of Dr. Evil. It’s an interesting development, because Tumblr is the service that has done more to help the average user build a presence on the web since Geocities—a free web site hosting service that was also bought by Yahoo!, and then shut down. Fortunately, that doesn’t seem to be the worry of anyone but the most paranoid.

More than a mere victory for a service that has struggled to monetize despite a huge audience, it’s also a vindication of user-generated content services that do more than social networks. Twitter, Facebook, et al give you a place to communicate, with people, but you have to do it on their terms: a 140 character limit, “likes”, coerced public posting, and ads based on your “interests”. [1] What makes Tumblr so successful, from a user-adoption standpoint, is that it’s easy to set up and use, has good discovery tools, and precious few restrictions. Tumblr is very much a blank slate, allowing almost full customizability of the profile, and open posting of content. The only real limits are a ban on porn videos, which may be for bandwidth reasons, and actual illegal content. No other service gives you so much for so little effort. It’s a testament to the brilliance of David Karp, who has been smartly retained by Yahoo! for the next four years, that Tumblr has been so widely adopted by geeks and non-geeks alike. If you want to have a real presence on the Internet—not just a profile—you can sign up for Tumblr, for free, and start posting almost anything inside of five minutes.

The Internet is that its a vacuum that demands to be filled with something. With the endless human desire to make things, modify and recombine things, and share things, a service like Tumblr is not only a good idea, it is a necessity. Reducing the amount of friction between someone wanting to share a picture, a video, or anything else they desire, with the world—or just an audience of their friends—is a worthwhile endeavor. Yahoo! has freed Karp, and Tumblr, from those things preventing it from progressing in this mission. They can pay off their investors, hire more engineers, and keep the braintrust behind the service comfortable, so they can focus on the product and not where the next round of funding will come from. It’s really the best thing that could have happened to Tumblr, and by extension, the Internet as a medium of creative expression.

For those who are upset that Tumblr has “sold out,” the opportunity now exists for someone to try and improve on Tumblr’s model. Someone out there has the potential to something better, faster, easier and more compelling than Tumblr, and the cycle will start anew. When the time comes, the people behind that project should be handsomely rewarded as well.