Commonplace

But it’s that time of year where we start seeing a ton of autoresponders and it’s got me thinking about it again. Personally, I don’t care to see them ever. I literally don’t care in any context. Hit me back when you hit me back, I’m not going to read what your autoresponder says anyway.

Yes!

There are some cases where an autoresponder can be useful. If you’re working with someone, it can be helpful to know that they won’t get to this for a few days (so you shouldn’t wait for a reply), or if they’ll be gone for a long time and you should speak to someone else.

I’ve also enjoyed some regularly updated autoresponders, too.

Maybe there’s a middle-ground. Perhaps your inbox checks the autoresponder to see if you’ve had that exact message before, then hides it?

Justin higlights two important thoughts on advice.

The first is from James Clear:

Everything is an oversimplification. Reality is messy and complex. The question is whether it is a useful simplification. Know the limitations of an idea and you can apply it to great effect—despite the messiness of reality.

The second is from Elizabeth Earnshaw:

I also like this idea from Elizabeth Earnshaw that a lot of popular wisdom has a “missing half.”

A few of her examples:

• “You can’t change other people… and you might influence them to change.”
• “Self-care isn’t selfish… and sometimes we call things ‘self care’ that actually are kind of selfish.”

These two ideas beautifully articulate something I increasingly struggled with when writing the Work Notes freelance guide. Everyone’s situation is different, their paths there are varied, we have different privileges and these things introduce nuance that can’t be accounted for, even if the advice is broadly accurate.

As Stewart Lee says, “context is not a myth”.

I’m reminded of Hilary Weiss’s takedown of the Charge What You’re Worth Mantra: another oversimplification with a missing side.

Today, Gmail is the most popular email service in the world, which has created a seemingly limitless number of what I collectively refer to as the Other Sara Morrisons: people who share my name and who, for whatever reason, enter my Gmail address when they mean to use their own. Their frequent invasions of my inbox have made me realize how much trust many of us put in a system that wasn’t designed to do some of the things we’ve come to use it for.

Email isn’t just a communication tool; it’s also an identifier and a security measure. Companies use it to create profiles of you when you start accounts with them and it often doubles as your username. Your email can also serve as your account recovery tool when you forget your username or password. All of this from something that doesn’t require you to verify your ID and that most people get to use for free, provided by a giant corporation that wants to harvest our data. In premium email provider Hey’s words, email is the “skeleton key to your digital life.” Well, I have a skeleton key to a lot of other people’s digital lives, too.

Emails sent to me that were meant for Other Sara Morrisons have given me a good deal of insight into — and a disturbing amount of access to — the lives of the many people who share my name. I know when and where their medical appointments are. I know when they give birth and am kept apprised about what their child ate and how often she pooped at daycare. I know when and where they’re going on vacation, what car they’re renting, and I get tickets to the theme parks they’ll visit when they get there.

I’ve been part of a monthslong job hunting process for one Other Sara Morrison and received the renewed occupational license for another … twice. I know their property tax payment issues. I know their addresses.

As someone who had an extremely guessable Gmail address, this is something I can relate to.

It’s amazing how many services still don’t require users to confirm their email addresses before creating accounts and purchasing goods or services. I’ve received order confirmations for everything from pizzas to car rentals all around the world, and endless accounts for other people using my email address.

And, despite my desire to completely rid myself of my personal Gmail account, I’ve come to realise I can never fully delete it as that could open up the possibility of identity theft.

In future, this could be an issue that masked email addresses solves, but widespread adoption of that will take a while.

Lots of quotes to pull from this piece:

The sale of a piece of crypto art consumed as much energy as the studio uses in two years.

The system is similar to the one that verifies Bitcoin, involving a network of computers that use advanced cryptography to decide whether transactions are valid—and in doing so uses energy on the scale of a small country.

How exactly that energy use translates to carbon emissions is a hotly contested subject. Some estimates suggest as much as 70 percent of mining operations may be powered by clean sources. But that number fluctuates seasonally, and in a global energy grid that mostly runs on fossil fuels, critics say energy use is energy use.

Ethereum’s developers have planned a shift to a less carbon-intensive form of security, called proof-of-stake, via a blueprint called Ethereum 2.0. But this has been in the works for years, and there is no clear deadline for the switch.

“If you look at how much energy we are going to spend in the meantime, it’s ridiculous,” says Fanny Lakoubay, a crypto art collector and adviser.

“People say that hopefully it will be fixed in a year or two so it’s OK to be exploitative right now,” says Akten.

A few weeks ago, my credit card provider wrote to me to tell me that they were switching me back from paperless to postal billing because I’d “not been receiving their emails”.

Even if you can somehow justify using tracking technologies (which don’t work reliably) to make general, statistical decisions (“fewer people open our emails when the subject contains the word ‘overdraft’!”), you can’t make individual decisions based on them. That’s just wrong.

Absolutely. Not only is this a poor UX, but another example of companies/organisations who don’t realise they shouldn’t be sending spy pixels in the first place

If the outputs generated by tracking turn out to be inaccurate, then shouldn’t they lose their status?

But that line of reasoning shouldn’t even by necessary. We shouldn’t stop tracking users because it’s inaccurate. We should stop stop tracking users because it’s wrong.

Too right.

What’s interesting to me about the changes to Apple Mail are that they might be the factor that finally forces companies and marketers to stop building logs of user location + other things

Chris Coyier wrote a follow-up on CSS Tricks:

I’m interested not just in the ethical concerns and my long-time complacency with industry norms, but also as someone who very literally sells advertising. I can tell you these things are true:

• I have meetings about pricing where the decisions are based on the historical performance of what is being sold, meaning impressions and clicks.
• The vast majority of first conversations between bag-of-money-holding advertisers and publishers like me, the very first questions I’m asked are about performance metrics.

That feels largely OK to me. When I go to the store to buy walnuts, I want to know how many walnuts I’m going to get for my dollar. I expect the store to price the walnuts based on normal economic factors, like how much they cost and the supply/demand for walnuts. The advertising buyers are the walnut buyers — they want to know what kind of performance an ad is likely to get for their dollar.

What if I said: I don’t know? I don’t know how many people see these ads. I don’t know how many people click these ads. I don’t know where they are from. I don’t know anything at all. And more, you aren’t allowed to know either. You can give me a URL to send them to, but it cannot have tracking params on it and we won’t be tracking the clicks on it.

Would I lose money? I gotta tell you readers: yes. In the short-term, anyway. It’s hard enough to land advertisers as it is. Coming off as standoffish and unwilling to tell them how many walnuts they are going to get for their dollar is going to make them roll their eyes and move on. Long-term, I bet it could be done. Tell advertisers (and the world) up front, very clearly, your stance on user tracking and how it means that you don’t have and won’t provide numbers via tracking. Lean on supply and demand entirely. Price spots at $X to start. If other people have interest in the spot, raise the price until it stops selling, lower the price if it does.

This highlights the dilemma for publishers. If we agree that advertisers are valuing the wrong metrics, how do you change the narrative?

It’ll get there but there are first-mover costs. And by the way, UTMs are probably the best privacy-respecting metric right now.

Jason Kint puts it roughly like this: targeting and measuring ads is possible in a way that’s privacy-focused and within consumer’s expectations (reasonable people can disagree on whether email spy pixels fall under this, but the ICO is quite clear that users need to consent).

“Tracking” across vendors/services, that users wouldn’t know about or expect, falls outside of this. (Apologies to Jason if this mischaracterises his position in any way).

And there’s more to this. Many people don’t realise what’s going on under the hood. Email spy pixels are a good example: marketers know they can collect the data, but might not realise what data is collected, how or the implications of it.

From Chris’s piece:

As I write this, I’m poking around in the reporting section to see what else I can see. Ughghk, guess what? I can literally see exactly who opened the email (by the person’s email address) and which links they clicked. I didn’t even realize that until now, but wow, that’s very super personally identifiable analytics information. I’m going to look into how I can turn that off because it does cross an ethical line for me.

Now, Chris is a smart cookie. He knows code, he knows marketing, he understands how the web works in a way that many people don’t. And he didn’t know this stuff is going on.

This isn’t to say that naïvety makes this fine, but there will be lots of people innocently collecting this data without realising it.

[tracking] is just a prettier word for surveillance.

As Jeremy highlights in his piece, “analytics” can often be substituted for “tracking”. And, as Bob Hoffman notes, “[tracking] is just a prettier word for surveillance.”

No prizes for guessing which of these words features in most SaaS advertising…

This is part of the drive behind Below Radar: help business owners, marketers, freelancers make better choices, understand the options. Yes, it’s grassroots stuff, but we have to start somewhere.

Cory Doctorow on GDPR:

Enter the GDPR. Under Europe’s landmark privacy regulation, companies have to ask you a plain-language question confirming your consent to every piece of data they collect and every use they plan on making of that data. They can’t punish you for refusing consent – by locking you out of a service or degrading its quality – and you can withdraw your consent at any time.

This is deliberately burdensome. It takes the position that consent is a weighty and serious thing, that personal data is genuinely valuable, and that the transactions in which data is gathered and processed should be solemnized by a thoughtful, substantial ceremony. It calls ad-tech’s bluff: “If you think people are really OK with all that spying you’ve done, let’s ask them, in depth, before you do it.”

Cory also references this study

Behavioral ads are only more profitable than context ads if all the costs of surveillance – the emotional burden of being watched; the risk of breach, identity-theft and fraud; the potential for government seizure of surveillance data – is pushed onto internet users. If companies have to bear those costs, behavioral ads are a total failure, because no one in the history of the human race would actually grant consent to all the things that gets done with our data.

Absolutely on point.

From Lush’s CEO:

“I just thought ‘That’s their own research and they’re ignoring it and we are attracting people to their platform.’ We had no choice whatsoever. Lush attracts an awful lot of girls of that age.”

The article also includes this line:

He offers up the excuse that social media is as addictive to companies as individuals.

Certainly true and something to think about.

Digressive victimhood:

• Charged with discrimination, dominant groups often claim victimhood.
• These claims can be digressive, shifting the topic of conversation.

h/t Rasmus Kleis Nielsen

The NFT explainer I’ve been looking for from Cory Doctorow:

On Oct 26, an NFT bro calling himself Midwit Milhouse coined the term “right-clicker mentality” to refer to these spoilsports who insist on pointing out the inconvenient truth of his white-hot ponzi scheme.

Milhouse used the term to disparage an amateur chef who made his own version of a $2,000 “Salt Bae” steak for $90. Salt Bae is a trendy London chef who charges tens of thousands for gold-leaf-covered steaks that he showers with salt in a kind of tableside piece of performance art.

Milhouse called this person “a great example of right-clicker mentality,” whose homemade steak didn’t deliver “the satisfaction, flex, clout that comes from having eaten at Salt Bae’s restaurant.”

https://twitter.com/kenlowery/status/1455662848345055232

Milhouse went on: “The value is not in the cost of the steak. Go ahead, make yourself a gold-coated steak at home. Post a picture of it on Instagram. See how much clout it gets you.”

And then, displaying galactic-scale lack-of-self-awareness, “Salt Bae’s dish costs around 1500GBP because people want to pay 1500 GBP to show off that they can afford to pay that much. It’s all about the flex.”

You really couldn’t ask for a better encapsulation of the NFT bezzle: buy an NFT to “flex” and “show off you can afford to pay that much.” Ignore the intrinsic value or satisfaction of the underlying work. You’re doing this for “clout.”

Right-clicker-mentality is a value we should all aspire to. As Matthew Gault wrote on Motherboard: “Sometimes a word or phrase comes along that’s so perfect it almost makes you angry.”

“To right-click is one thing, but to have a right-clicker mentality implies an ontological break between crypto-fans and critics. Indeed, it implies the person saving the JPEG to their hard drive isn’t just wrong, they’re broken in some way.”