clay_shirky

4 ms·

1. 1.▲
   by clay_shirky 10mo ago

   Perl hacker who tried to switch to Ruby before adopting Python here: Of _course_ boring is better. How could it not be? If you are trying to solve a problem, the last thing you want to be thinking about is the language itself. The language
2. 2.▲
   by clay_shirky 4y ago

   You cannot possibly know how much this delights me! Most of my writing was about social media, back when the web was young, but "Ontology is Overrated" is actually my favorite thing I ever wrote, and it makes me happy beyond measu
3. 3.▲
   by clay_shirky 4y ago

   Yep, it became a spot for all your erectile dysfunction needs. And the constant pattern of "I fix it, spammers break it' wore me out, so, despite media savvy, I just stopped caring (though this thread convinces me that was the wro
4. 4.▲
   by clay_shirky 4y ago

   Was this it: https://www.wired.com/2006/11/meganiche/ "Now that more than a billion people have access to the Web, there is no longer a trade-off between size and specificity. The basic math is simple: A
5. 5.▲
   by clay_shirky 4y ago

   This whole thread is giving me feels, but to the basics, I'll tell you how it happened. I'd been writing about what we came to call social media since the early 90s (alt.culture.usenet and alt.folklore.urban ftw), but by the middl