Clay Shirky on Ello, ~Club, and Meatspace. These services aren't a new way of creating FB-like value. They're a new way of being valuable in a world that already has Facebook.

The internet and the digital world are not pathologies, the cultures that develop there are not symptoms to be gazed at, to titillate us and make us feel both in the know, bravely in touch with the challenging truth, and superior to the freaks.

It's not too late to ditch the ad-based business model and build a better web.

Today we're unveiling a new theme option for MetaFilter. Yes, it's a new design option for MetaFilter for the first time in over a decade, which we are dubbing the "Modern" theme. … Early this summer, matthewmcvickar coded up some prototypes to test out and started building the rest of the templates in earnest.

In terms of the internet, nothing has happened yet. The internet is still at the beginning of its beginning. If we could climb into a time machine and journey 30 years into the future, and from that vantage look back to today, we’d realize that most of the greatest products running the lives of citizens in 2044 were not invented until after 2014.

Think about how social networks might improve if—as on the gaming sites and in real life—users had more power to reject abusive behavior. Of course, different online spaces will require different solutions, but the outlines are roughly the same: Involve users in the moderation process, set defaults that create hurdles to abuse, give clearer feedback for people who misbehave, and—above all—create a norm in which harassment simply isn’t tolerated.

Peak ads, MetaFilter’s Google Problems, and the need to scale back.

Surveillance as a business model is the only thing that makes a site like Facebook possible.

We cannot champion Network Neutrality without admitting that the Internet is no Utopia.

Here’s one way to help create the “right to be forgotten”: Have your online utterances vanish after a period of time.

I found what I believe is the very first true “me irl” published on the Internet. And it’s a doozy.

Thanks to Twitter, the hashtag has become an important linguistic shortcut. But while everyone from Robin Thicke to Beyoncé has used the symbol as part of their art, only a few have truly taken advantage of its culture-jamming possibilities.

Heartbleed is as bad as it is possible for a security flaw to be.

'Racism bad. Eat kale.'

A meditation on the surveillance state, interface design, tech culture, and the dangers of thinking you know what will happen next, told through the astonishing life of Lev Termen.

What I’m talking about here is how addictive the righteousness that comes from that condemnation is, and how we will apparently turn to any source we can find for it — even when that source is not evil or harmful or part of any world we exist in or understand.

With a flood of dark memes and viral horror stories, the internet is mapping the contours of modern fear.

Ignore the barrage of violent threats and harassing messages that confront you online every day.” That’s what women are told. But these relentless messages are an assault on women’s careers, their psychological bandwidth, and their freedom to live online. We have been thinking about Internet harassment all wrong.

Beyoncé seized the powers of a medium characterized by its short attention span to force the world to pay attention. Leave it to the posterchild of convention to brush convention aside and leave both sides feeling victorious.

Why You Shouldn't Feel Guilty for Using Spotify

What newsroom design shops have needed is a renewed interest in research and development, and that’s exactly what these pieces are delivering.

“‘Archives are not just places people go for information; they can and do change our approach to, and determine the questions we ask of, music, the music industry and musical scenes.’”

"PBR&B" spread because lots of people were talking about these particular artists, but the artists themselves were left out of such conversations. That's how it usually happens: Their work is left to be sorted like cereal boxes, independent of their own agency. Artists are sometimes asked by fans and inexperienced journalists to describe the "type of music" they make, and they’re often rightfully itchy about making these distinctions themselves. It’s not so much that there’s a right or wrong to genres, but it’s more the case that genres are power moves, able to define music far beyond any artist’s own wishes.

Love is a dog from hell, as it's said, and real emotion is ugly and uncomfortable, and it’s why some people giggle when they see a man keening or screaming or crying -- but Drake knows that all this has to be tempered and digestible to be disseminated and reach as many people as possible.

Jacob Bakkila could have made his own Twitter account to post gibberish to. But the point was to appropriate something people were already paying attention to. What we thought was marketing rediscovered as art has turned out to be art rediscovered as marketing.

A directory of direct links to delete your account from web services.

Am I fetishizing the ephemeral, the present, the current moment? To a degree, yes. Social media is young, and I hope it grows out of this assumed permanence of our data. A corrective, an injection of ephemerality, is badly needed and overdue. The present doesn’t always need to be owned, held still and fixed; sometimes it might be best left alone to simply be what it is, letting more moments pass not undocumented and unshared, but just without enforced documentary boxes and categories with corresponding metrics filed away in growing databases. Instead, temporary social media treats the present as less like something that aspires to be curated into a museum but as something that can be unknown, unclassified, not put to work.

What might be keeping the music industry from developing successful new networked models is the centralized holding of a majority of existing music rights in the hands of a very few. Apple, Spotify, Pandora, and all those to come in their wake have only to negotiate with the major labels before launching products that the rest of us have to accept or reject. A true 21st-century partnership for the music business would include musicians and music fans in a far more substantive role.

I endured repeated listens of a record I could not understand or stand because I had nothing else to do but work out why it mattered to someone I worshiped and not to me. That will never happen again, not the way we’re set up. You will click away the second a song loses you, and you’ll never learn anything about yourself. I mean it: you will never unlock or awaken new neural paths in your brain if you continue to gravitate toward music that satisfies your expectations. That is Easy Listening.

Rap Genius is the newest example in a long tradition of black music explained for whites, now with a neoliberal twist.