Reading List

Written for designers but appropriate for product managers too.

Fake news is too big and messy to solve with algorithms or editors — because the problem is….us.

The social network finally unveils what its secretive Building 8 hardware lab has been working on for the past year. Communication might never be the same.

Last year, before Facebook realized it could just leverage its network to squash Snap, Mark Zuckerberg spent most of his presentation laying out a long-term vision for all the areas in which Facebook wanted to innovate. This year couldn’t have been more different: there was no vision, just the wholesale adoption of Snap’s, plus a whole bunch of tech demos that never bothered to tell a story of why they actually mattered for Facebook’s users.

Mat Honan is pessimistic about Facebook's grip on reality

Stories of older generation that has lost everything and hit the road to survive.

25,000 words on how media is using (and being used) on major digital distribution platforms.

danah boyd on the rise of social hacking

Trump’s younger supporters know he’s an incompetent joke; in fact, that’s why they support him.

A blockchain-powered social network.

The history of Gopher, the predecessor to the World Wide Web

It's tempting to blame the media for this, but the media is a reflection of our collective psyche magnified by modern technology. We need to value novelty less and learn how to delay gratification. Take a lesson from wine tasting and meditation. Accept that news happens and let it breathe undisturbed for a period of time. After all, hindsight is 20/20.

Programmatic advertising makes is improbable that brands can properly filter out where their ads run

The day after Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed, a teacher in a small town in Iowa tried a daring classroom experiment. She decided to treat children with blue eyes as superior to children with brown eyes.

To test the effects of political polarization on Facebook we asked ten US voters – five conservative and five liberal – to agree to take a scroll on the other side during the final month of the campaign.

The essence of algorithm design is not to eliminate all error, but to make results robust in the face of error. Where de Havillands tried in vain to engineer a plane where the materials were strong enough to resist all cracks and fatigue, Boeing realized that the right approach was to engineer a design that allowed cracks, but kept them from propagating so far that they led to catastrophic failure. That is also Facebook’s challenge.

“It is not the right look if you’re trying to say you’re a high-quality, upper-tier website — if you have something like this on it — and I think it’s time for us to be honest about that,” said Keith Hernandez, Slate’s president.

analysing the sentiment towards the 2016 presidential candidates in online media

Noah Weiss (FourSquare, Slack) shares lessons learned on design and measurement of notifications

Useful resource written by students, for students