Riccardo Mori

Social paths and detours

November 25, 2022

(This should probably be titled Assorted musings on social media, part 2)

I have this writing habit where, even when I know what I want to talk about in an article, I first have to come up with a good title. The title for me is like the act of turning the car key and starting the engine. I knew I wanted to talk about Twitter, what to do with it right now, people’s behaviours, Twitter alternatives, but all these things didn’t form a cohesive spot I could shine a comprehensive light (the title) on, so I guess we’re stuck with this somewhat vague Social paths and detours.

Obligatory reference

One of the reasons why I can’t seem to write on this blog as often as I’d like is that certain tech topics I care about routinely resurface and I realise that the debate around them retreads the same ground and points discussed previously, and so I often stare at an article I’d like to respond to, and say to myself, I’ve already talked about this. They’re still talking about this, and nothing has changed or improved since the last time. I would only end up repeating myself. This is why you haven’t heard me talking about the iPad’s identity crisis in a while. It’s the same crisis as before. The iPad got lost around 2013 and it’s still lost in the woods, even if it can run faster now.

With Twitter and social media, I feel I have little to add to my previous piece Assorted musings on social media, written in October 2021. You should go and read that in its entirety. What I’m going to do here is just add a few updated notes and observations based on the most recent debate surrounding the current state of Twitter.

An involuntarily hypocritical position

Elon Musk is a polarising figure, and the questionable way he’s currently managing Twitter has led many people to look elsewhere for their social media needs. Some have already left Twitter for other platforms — mostly Mastodon. Some, like myself, are keeping accounts here and there in a wait-and-see approach. These days, in private, I’ve been asked directly why I’m still on Twitter, given how terrible and doomed and politically unbalanced it’s becoming under the new management. In coming up with a response, I really sounded like those people I had urged in the past to leave Facebook and close up their accounts. Yes, the main reason I’m not leaving Twitter behind at the moment is the network of people that has been building around me in the almost 15 years I’ve been on the platform.

The similarities between these two paths and dynamics — leaving Facebook behind and leaving Twitter behind — are quite strong. I contend that one important difference I always perceived and still perceive is that, while I think someone leaving Facebook could find solid alternatives to keep in touch with the people they interacted with within Facebook’s walls, I’m not equally sure someone leaving Twitter can find (at the moment) a solid alternative offering the same experience Twitter offers (I’m obviously talking about the positives, not the toxicity and aggravation).

I realise I’m probably sounding a bit hypocritical here, but the truth is that I’m conflicted. I still feel I was doing the right thing when I tried to evangelise friends and acquaintances against Facebook. (And when one of those acquaintances recently said to me, Now you fully understand how I was feeling when you criticised me for being reluctant to quit Facebook, I reacted by saying that actually even back then I understood how difficult it was). At the same time I’m (hopefully) known to be a man of principle, and given that I’m no fan of Mr Musk or the people he enables, I should just refuse on principle to keep staying on Twitter and I should seek out greener and less toxic pastures.

But it’s not that clear-cut. Especially for someone like me whose experience on Twitter has been consistently exceptionally positive over the years, without the slightest hint of toxicity.

Interesting behavioural phenomena

There are many points I can agree with in Jeff Johnson’s piece I don’t want to go back to social media, but there are some excerpts where I couldn’t be on a more different page.

He writes:

I’m old enough to have lived half my adult life before Twitter existed, and to be honest, I feel that life before Twitter was better. The untweeted life is worth living! When you become a DAU (Daily Active User), you give up a lot of your time and energy to Twitter. Keeping up with your feed and your notifications becomes a compulsion. Your schedule almost revolves around it. What I’ve found after quitting Twitter is that in some sense I have my life back. I feel less hurried. I can spend hours focusing on some activity without needing a break to check Twitter. I set my own agenda, according to my own interests, as opposed to my Twitter feed setting my agenda, according to the interests of my following.

Perhaps it’s because I’m not a developer and I haven’t had to use Twitter also as a means to promote a product (though I’m a writer, I’ve published some fiction, and I should promote it more), but my experience as a daily active user has always been and continues to be quite different. Again, perhaps it’s due to some habits I have developed early as a Twitter user, but I’ve never felt Twitter as a negative force that messed up my day-to-day schedule.

The first thing I learnt back when I noticed I was starting to follow a bit too many people, is Forget about keeping up with your feed/timeline. When you manage to do that, the rest is easy. I always check Twitter when I’m ready to give some of my time to it. There’s never been any sort of compulsion. I’ve never been out and about, or working at my desk, and feeling assaulted by a burning desire to know what’s happening on Twitter, what my network of people is talking about right now, etc. For me there has never been the dreaded ‘fear of missing out’ with Twitter. I pop up there when I can, I check my Mentions and reply to people when I can, and if I have some time to spare I’ll engage in a bit of doomscrolling. That’s it. It’s not that I’m lucky — it’s something I naturally adjusted to time ago and I still think anyone can do it if they really want. Especially if you follow and are followed by more people than in my case.

Another bit where I felt my experience and attitude to be drastically different than Johnson’s is where he writes:

I’ve felt that at times — many times! — Twitter brought out the worst in me. I struggled to be “my best self” on Twitter. Admittedly, I struggle to be my best self almost everywhere, but Twitter was the worst situation for that. The incentives on Twitter are perverse: the short character limits, the statistical counts of retweets and likes, the unknown followers and readers, the platform and publicity all conspire to corrupt you, to push you toward superficial tweets that incite the crowd. Twitter is an audience, which means that tweeting is a performance, and tweeters are actors. It’s unnatural. If you could design a system from scratch in order to produce the least friendly, least intelligent, least thoughtful “conversation” in the world, you’d probably come up with something a lot like Twitter.

My approach to Twitter, and the way I present myself on Twitter, are mostly shaped after the previous social environments I used to frequent: Usenet, mailing lists, and LiveJournal. I joined those places at a time when I was younger, less cynical, and fascinated by the ability to get in touch and engage with people from any place on Earth, sharing the same passions, exchanging experiences, discussing books, hobbies, outlooks on life, etc. Therefore my approach has always been to be myself, not some made-up online persona. I’ve always been genuine online, and Usenet in particular taught me how to defend myself and how to develop a thicker skin against trolls and time-wasters. And I’ve always dealt with the consequences of being myself: losing people after misunderstandings or disagreements, but also maintaining very long-time friendships because my being genuine attracted people who wanted to approach the online social space as genuinely. This has built a lot of trust and healthy relationships over time. On Twitter and elsewhere I’m still in contact with people I’ve ‘met’ online more than 20 years ago, and friends I’ve met in real life about 30 years ago.

So, when I joined Twitter in early 2008, and after a couple of false starts needed to better understand Twitter’s vibe and flow (for lack of better terms), the way I started interacting with people on Twitter was no different than the way I’d chosen to interact with people before elsewhere — truthfully and thoughtfully. What I choose to say/respond on Twitter is the same thing I’d say to someone if they were here with me. There is no acting or performance involved. Or premeditation: I’ve always used Twitter organically. I’ve written superficial stuff and bad jokes; I’ve ranted when there was something that upset me; I’ve shared resources, praised other people’s work, supported others, listened to them, kept secrets when told to; in a word, I’ve always tried to be as much transparent as one can nowadays online. And given what I sowed, I’m rather satisfied with what I’ve reaped. (This is the point where you should refer back to my afore-linked piece, Assorted musings on social media, specifically the section titled It’s what you make of it).

While I don’t recognise myself at all when Johnson writes, Twitter is an audience, which means that tweeting is a performance, and tweeters are actors. It’s unnatural, I’ve read others express similar feelings about what Twitter supposedly ‘makes you do’ and the way it reshapes your behaviour. This is fascinating to me — this kind of depersonalisation when dealing with something that, in my view, couldn’t be more personal than Twitter. Like I said in my previous article, I keep hearing people complain about their timeline as if it was some kind of demonic TV set that cannot be turned off and forces them to watch its programmes. And I also hear people talk about Twitter using terms you typically apply to drugs and drug usage. They say Twitter is ‘addictive’, that it works in ways that ‘cloud your judgment’, and so forth. Like alcoholics who blame their worst behaviour on the alcohol. The booze made me do it. These are poor excuses, especially among adults. Who resorted to the booze in the first place? You. Who behaved like a moron on Twitter? You. Don’t blame ‘the timeline’. No one made you behave poorly. It wasn’t the Twitter client what impaired your judgment. And if your last-resort excuse is something like, Well, other people on Twitter do the same shit, then you’re a child and you should go back living with your parents, or consider seeking a therapist, because you need help.

I could go on, but again at this point I would be repeating what I already wrote in my previous article, in the section titled It takes work if you care about your experience. What’s maybe worth reiterating is that I’m aware that Twitter can put you in a foul mood and can be overwhelming especially if you use it as a source to follow what’s happening in the world. The world can often be a shitty place, and even if you do everything you can to shield yourself from learning terrible, horrifying, depressing news, that news may reach you anyway because it gets retweeted and amplified by people you follow.

No one has full control over stuff like this. Sometimes you access your Twitter timeline and there it is, the aggravating episode of racism, sexism, gender violence, hate crime, and so forth. But as I’ve said other times, what you can do is try to contain this issue, especially if you realise it’s having a severe, cumulative impact on your mental health. You can’t expect this ‘Twitter entity’ you’ve depersonalised to fix itself or fix the problem for you. You have enough agency to carry out the first steps to filter or remove what you perceive as toxic. Just as you decide to unfollow that guy whom you thought you had more in common with but then just tweets about sports all the time, you can stop following that other dude whose tweets and retweets are always about politics, crime, and keeps going on about how shitty this world is. You don’t need to be subjected to such onslaught of negative (or moronic, or uninformed, or bigoted) thinking. That’s why people who just complain about how dreadful Twitter is, and yet do nothing about it, not even leaving it for good, and have this demanding attitude expecting someone else to make the place better, do not have my sympathy.

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”

Waiting and seeing

From this little Twitter hill in my little Twitter neighbourhood, I’m keeping an eye on Twitter city, and for the moment what Elon Musk is, does, or whom he enables are all irrelevant details with regard to my experience and my subnetwork of people. Am I minimising the mostly negative impact Musk is having on the platform now? No. But for now I can and will exercise all the control I can to mitigate toxicity if and when it reaches me. And how could it reach me, by the way? I’m wise enough to avoid picking fights with types of people who are way beyond any attempt at recoverability through a calm and rational exchange of views. It’s a waste of time, it won’t do anything good, it would probably end up making me a target of some zealot mob. I don’t need to pick these fights as a way of virtue-signalling. I’m not going to save the world by engaging in verbal guerrilla skirmishes on Twitter.

What would make me decide to leave Twitter or stop being active on it are less philosophical stances and more structural changes to the platform. In other words, I care more about the preservation of the Twitter experience than who owns ‘the building’. If the rules of the game change so dramatically and negatively as to make Twitter work in an unrecognisable fashion compared with the status quo, then I’ll make my decision.

Until then, I’m staying on Twitter — for the people, and for the amazing relationships I’ve developed there over the past 14 years.

You can find me on Mastodon as well

I’m not a ‘Twitter refugee’ on Mastodon. I’ve opened my account there back in 2018, because after App.Net shut down (the best social network I’ve been in), many of the most loyal members ended up on Mastodon, and I followed suit to avoid losing people on the way. And in fact the instance I’m in — appdot.net — was created by an ex App.Net member for other ‘App.Net refugees’. My handle is https://appdot.net/@morrick.

Is Mastodon better than Twitter? I don’t know, honestly. When Twitter was business as usual, Mastodon felt like a quieter spot where I could follow and interact with people who were exclusively on Mastodon after having had enough with other social networks. Now that Twitter is emanating an aura of fear, uncertainty, and doubt, and that dozens of people are trying out Mastodon, the atmosphere there is more buzzy. On the one hand, I’m happy to see people reconnecting through new social paths and detours (hey, I managed to use the title of this piece here); on the other, there’s also more ‘noise’, with people boosting other people’s toots (retweeting other people’s tweets, in Twitter parlance) as a means to make new people known across the fediverse. The result is that, despite I only follow 50+ people on Mastodon, my timeline feels messier and slightly more chaotic than Twitter’s at the moment. Things need to stabilise in a way or another before I can say whether one network is ‘better’ than the other for me personally. They are certainly two different animals (no pun intended), and there’s a lot to like about Mastodon, and for the most part it’s about its structure.

The decentralised nature of Mastodon is the core feature I genuinely love. Not being a centralised network, not being owned by a public company or by a billionaire private citizen, is definitely the healthier option in this day and age where every single person seems to have a different concept of ‘free speech’. From a user experience standpoint, however, Mastodon still feels like a ‘nerd-first’ place, and there’s still a bit more friction for the uninitiated, whereas Twitter is seamless immediacy in comparison. Even an experienced netizen like myself has had his Huh? moment — someone I follow on Twitter said they were definitely relocating to Mastodon, and left a clickable link to their profile. I clicked on it, and was taken to a Mastodon-formatted webpage with the profile of this person. I instinctively clicked on the Follow button; since I wasn’t logged into Mastodon, a Login page appeared. I entered my credentials but were refused. After some unsuccessful attempts, I realised what was going on: I was trying to log into the same Mastodon instance that person was on, which is different from the instance I am on. So I opened my Mastodon client, clicked on Search, pasted the full account address of that person, found them and added them.

Wait, Rick — I hear you say — What’s a Mastodon instance? As you can see, we already have the first bit of friction. Since Mastodon is not a centralised site like Twitter, accounts must be handled by several different servers. That’s also why your Mastodon handle hasn’t got a simple syntax like on Twitter, but something that looks almost like an email address. You’re not just @someone on Mastodon: you’re @someone@somewhere.domain. The ingenious part is that once you open an account on a Mastodon server (and your credentials are only valid on that server) you nevertheless can reach anyone anywhere in the Mastodon federated universe (fediverse) and you can be reached in turn. This also explain why you have Local and Global Timelines.

For a novice, another bit of friction at this point is where to sign up. There’s of course a central point of reference, probably the most populated instance: Mastodon.social, which is the original server operated by the Mastodon non-profit entity. But there are many others. You may know about one by word of mouth; you may be invited to join an instance by other contacts who migrated there; you may search online for places that keep Mastodon lists of instances, such as this one; if you are savvy enough, you can even create your own Mastodon instance on your own server, and you can be the only user in that instance in case you don’t want to open access to other people.

As you can see, this doesn’t feel as simple and immediate as Twitter. Fortunately, the friction with Mastodon comes largely in the preparatory stage. Once you’ve overcome this quite literal barrier to entry, once you have your Mastodon profile and have downloaded a client, the mechanics and experience are rather similar to Twitter. You follow people, you post updates, you can favourite other people’s posts, and/or boost them (like when you retweet something on Twitter). Another advantage of Mastodon’s decentralisation is that moderation happens locally, since every server is operated by volunteers and single users. Instead of having to monitor a single network of millions of users, every instance may have to deal with ‘just’ dozens, hundreds, or thousands of users, depending on the scope established by the instance’s maintainer. Instances seem to have a strong focus on being protective communities, and this is tremendously helpful for marginalised people. If you’re queer, trans, non-binary, you may look for LGBTQ-friendly instances and feel safer there.

Cautiously optimistic

Despite all the devastation hurricane Musk has brought to Twitter in such a short period of time, I’m not entirely convinced that the Twitter cruise ship is sinking. I’m not a Musk fan and I don’t consider him a genius, but I keep thinking he must have some semblance of a plan that doesn’t involve the complete annihilation of his latest, quite costly purchase. I think that what’s currently happening on Twitter is what Musk in his head considers a stress test, a sort of experiment where he’s trying to assess just how much he can prune the tree before the organism starts breaking up. I certainly don’t condone his attitude and methods here, don’t get me wrong; I’m just trying to understand what’s going on while hoping for the best (and begrudgingly preparing for the worst).

Before making grand proclamations about the future of Twitter or rage-quitting the platform, I want to see what’s going to happen. If the ‘Twitter experience’ as we know it is going to survive, I’ll keep staying on Twitter while maintaining my presence on Mastodon and other networks. Otherwise I’ll choose a new home online. As a final note, I don’t like the attitude of those who are very fast at pointing fingers and saying that all Twitter ‘remainers’ are endorsing Musk. If I decide not to leave Twitter isn’t because I’m happy to serve master Musk and contribute to making him richer than he is already. If I stay it will only be for the sake of preserving my current ‘neighbourhood’ and network of people. It goes without saying that if the majority of ‘my people’ decide to leave Twitter en masse one day, I’ll go where they go — ‘Twitter experience’ be damned.

Social paths and detours was first published by Riccardo Mori on Morrick.me on 25 November 2022.

Another period of tech fatigue

November 18, 2022

by Riccardo Mori

Tech Life

It’s been almost a month since the last update here. Not that I usually update this blog with great frequency, but this has been another period of ‘low tide’ for me. Just like it happened four years ago, as I wrote in Tech’s high speed, and my low tide. If you don’t want to read that piece before proceeding with this one, make sure you read it afterwards. Nothing has changed in four years. As I re-read that piece myself before starting to write this, I realised it’s something I could have written today.

In that piece I wrote, As for technology, it’s one of those periods when I’m feeling overwhelmed by everything revolving around it. Debates are exhausting. Debates are exhausting indeed. You see, on 28 October I started a draft in iA Writer with this working title: ‘My next Mac might be the last’ follow-up: discussing feedback and a few notes on User experience homogenisation. The idea was to talk about the many email messages I have been receiving since publishing that article (I haven’t replied to anybody privately, my apologies; work and personal stuff got in the way).

And also to talk about one particular aspect — User experience homogenisation — that was touched on in Episode 841 of MacBreak Weekly, when Leo Laporte quoted my article, which seems to have resonated with him, blowing my mind in the process. As I was watching the episode, I feared the worse, like These veterans are going to make fun of me or something like that. They didn’t, but they also didn’t give much importance to my observations. This was the part Laporte quoted for discussion:

I actually quite like most of what Apple is doing with the Mac, hardware-wise. The problem is I just can’t stand the software anymore. The problem is that I feel there is a troubling ungluing going on between Mac hardware and Mac OS, a substantial difference in quality between the two components, that doesn’t make me feel what I used to feel in previous versions of Mac OS X: seamless integration.

I think it all stems from Apple’s desire to simplify things for themselves, architecture-wise — Apple Silicon is quite innovative in bringing the advantages of iOS devices to Macs (performance + power efficiency). The terrible decision, in my view, has been to also want to bring the iOS look and feel to the Mac. It was unnecessary, it has broken so many tried-and-true Mac interface guidelines, and it has delivered a massive blow to the whole operating system’s identity. Just to make the Mac what, more fashionable?

The consensus among the MacBreak Weekly regular guests was that actually what Apple is doing to Mac OS is a good thing, that maybe some UI changes go a bit too far, but that typically Apple corrects them afterwards in case the pushback is strong. That a more visually cohesive look between the various Apple platforms is good for the ecosystem.

What I originally planned to write in the follow-up article, then, were a few observations stemming from this core question: Should the user experience on Mac OS be as similar as possible to iOS for the Apple ecosystem’s sake?

But then I dropped everything. This nagging voice inside me kept repeating: Is it worth it? Will anyone care? And I know that someone somewhere would care, but then I was overcome with the feeling that whatever I say, I will end up being treated like that famous Simpsons meme — “Old Man Yells At Cloud”.

This is where we are today in the ever-exhausting tech debate: either you happily embrace whatever kind of shit tech throws at you, or you’re an Old Man Yelling At Cloud. I may be wrong about this, because it’s based on personal, subjective experience, but more and more I end up feeling like these debates go nowhere. I still think it’s worth criticising and pointing out what I think is wrong — especially, crucially, when it comes to Apple — but there are periods just like this one in which it all feels so tiring and pointless. My observations and criticism will resonate with like-minded people, we’ll talk about them for a bit, and then everything will be business as usual. At the beginning of November, I blurted out this tweet: Funny how so many people tell me in private how they enjoy my blog and my tech commentary, but they so often forget to mention it in public when sharing recommendations on who to read in tech. 35+ years of experience in this stupid field and [I’m] still made to feel not good enough. “teknisktsett” replied that Some people don’t dare to agree on “hot topics”, publicly. I received a similar, longer response, via private email: “Don’t expect prominent writers and figures in tech to amplify your (always excellent and on-point) criticisms. They may agree with you ‘at home’, but ‘at work’ they’ll keep their facade because it’s counterproductive for them to agree with you”.

So here we are.

By the way, of course my answer to that question — Should the user experience on Mac OS be as similar as possible to iOS for the Apple ecosystem’s sake? — was going to be No. The short, simple example is that Mac OS and iOS have coexisted for years without problems, each interface taking advantage of each platform’s strengths and user interaction paradigms, and people didn’t seem to protest. Mac sales didn’t wane because Mac OS was sooo unfamiliar when coming from iOS. Macs didn’t sell well whenever there was something more immediately wrong with them, like Touch Bars replacing an entire row of useful keys, or MacBooks with keyboards that broke down on their own due to atrocious design decisions, or Macs with poorly-designed thermal management.

I’m not entirely against the spirit of bringing a more unified look to all the different operating systems within a bigger ecosystem like Apple’s, mind you, but I find worrying and incompetent to just cut certain parts (or certain visual aspects) of the UI of iOS and paste them onto Mac OS. The user interaction on a traditional computer with mouse/trackpad and keyboard is different from the interaction you find on a touch-based and Multi-touch interface. What severely annoys me about Mac OS Ventura’s new System Settings is that

They don’t solve what was supposedly a problem with the earlier implementation of System Preferences, i.e. making settings easier to find. In my opinion, things have actually worsened on this front. If you removed the Search feature in both the older System Preferences and the new System Settings, I’m pretty sure you’d still find stuff more quickly in the older System Preferences.
The interface of System Settings is just ‘off’ and inadequate on a traditional computer. Since it’s copy-pasted from iOS, the whole look & feel of it invites you to navigate it by touch, suddenly making interactions with mouse + keyboard more awkward. I saw with my own eyes someone at the local Apple Store trying to change the system appearance from light to dark by directly touching the MacBook Air’s display. Yes, for a moment one smiles at things like this. Then you realise just how bad the UI/UX situation has become on Mac OS.

There, I said it. This will have zero impact on anything, naturally, but it’s out of my system now.

Aside 1 — In After WWDC 2020: bittersweet Mac, written in July 2020, I said:

I’d hate to see a progressive oversimplification of the Mac’s UI that could potentially introduce the same discoverability issues that are still present in iPadOS.

I’ve always considered the look of an operating system to be a by-product of how it works, rather than a goal to achieve, if you know what I mean. If something is well-designed in the sense that it works well, provides little to no friction during use, and makes you work better, it’s very rare that it also ends up being something ugly or inelegant from a visual standpoint. How it works shapes how it looks. If you put the look before the how-it-works, you may end up with a gorgeous-looking interface that doesn’t work as well as it looks.

Or, as it’s happening more frequently now, a gorgeous-looking interface that misleads you because it’s made to look and feel like another user interface which was designed for an entirely different kind of device.

Aside 2 — In What about the M1 Macs?, written in December 2020, I said:

So, what about the M1 Macs? They’re unbelievably good machines, and everything that is genuinely good about them and future Apple Silicon-based Macs — sheer performance, astounding power-efficiency, and great backward compatibility with Intel software thanks to Rosetta 2 — will also allow Apple to get away with a lot of things with regard to platform control, design decisions, and so forth.

Guess what happened.

I’m just tired of seeing this passive attitude a lot of people seem to have towards tech companies and Apple in particular; the constant excuses made in Apple’s defence even when changes to the interface design break or interfere with their workflow. So much so that when you point out all those changes for change’s sake, they look at you as if you were the weird one; as if you were less smart for not wanting to adapt every single time and at every Apple designer’s whim.

I’m tired of hearing the same old song, Apple keeps beating financial records at every quarter, so they must be doing something right. Yes, yes, they make desirable products. Yes, the hardware is still attractive enough to make enough people want to purchase Apple’s products. And yes, Apple Silicon is groundbreaking, an undeniable innovation — but as I’ve kept saying for a while now, this groundbreaking technological advance is used to do the same things we used to do before, only faster and more efficiently. For some, this is enough progress. For me, it’s wasted potential.

I’ve already said it — I’ve never seen such stagnancy in software like in the past decade or so. What I do on my 2020 eighth-generation iPad I can do on my 2012 third-generation iPad. And sure, the eighth-generation iPad is faster and more efficient, but its sole software advantage is that a lot of the services behind certain apps work on iOS 16 but are deprecated on iOS 9. What I do on my 2015 13-inch retina MacBook Pro running Mac OS Monterey is essentially the same that I can do on my 2009 15-inch MacBook Pro with OS X 10.11 El Capitan. Here, some things are faster on the more recent MacBook Pro with Monterey, but from an interface standpoint in many situations I just work better under El Capitan on the older MacBook Pro.

Where’s the innovation here? Instead of researching and pushing out new software ideas to truly make people’s lives better, the latest Mac OS release’s highlights are… yet another way of working with application windows, redesigned System Preferences, and some other minor things I’m having a hard time recalling. But even if I’m forgetting a cute new feature, or the new Freeform app, my beloved pedants, what matters here is the big picture. And the big picture is that there simply is no real vision behind this technology. Even with something as big as Apple Silicon. What’s the plan? What I see from here boils down to, Let’s make these devices faster and more efficient. Okay, and… That’s it. Let’s make their operating systems look more homogeneous, too. It’s like watching an artist who has basically exhausted their inspiration or creativity and just keeps touching and retouching their last artwork.

That’s why, when people take the time to email me to tell me I’m an Old Man Yelling At Cloud because I don’t want things to change in tech, I laugh out loud in the privacy of my studio. What change!? Nothing has fundamentally changed in tech for a good while. I see ‘faster horses’ everywhere. What irritates me are the unnecessary changes inflicted on things and designs that were provably already working well, just to make them look different and behave differently; just to have the excuse that you’re now offering something ‘new and improved’ where in reality in most cases your lack of ideas and vision is making things worse.

I’m tired of seeing sloppy, borderline incompetent design work. I’m tired of seeing lowering standards when it comes to the user interface. (Jeff Johnson said it well back at the beginning of 2021: The selling point of the Macintosh was never the hardware, it was the user interface. So if the selling point now is the hardware, that’s a damning indictment of the current user interface. I cannot emphasize enough how everyone seems to have lowered their standards with regard to the user interface. He was right then — inspiring me to write The reshaped Mac experience — and he’s right now). I’m also tired of all these pundits and tech journalists who don’t want to openly criticise Apple for fear of ‘losing access’ with the company. Where’s the journalistic ‘speaking truth to power’ here?

Anyway, this is just the tip of the tech fatigue iceberg I’ve been experiencing as of late, and all these things do tire me, but they also make me mad, and that’s why I ultimately keep writing. I probably care more than I should, really.

Another period of tech fatigue was first published by Riccardo Mori on Morrick.me on 18 November 2022.

My next Mac might be the last

October 24, 2022

by Riccardo Mori

Tech Life

I’m aware that the title of this article could be viewed as clickbait. Sorry about that. It is, however, a very sincere snapshot of how I’m currently feeling about the Mac and Mac OS platform.

Ever since the misguided visual redesign of Mac OS when it transitioned from 10.15 Catalina to 11 Big Sur, and the questionable UI choices embedded in such redesign, I’ve been disheartened to see my favourite environment for work and leisure enter a downward spiral. And while engineering-minded folks like Howard Oakley have been praising certain security-related underpinnings of the latest three versions of Mac OS, I simply feel they’re over-engineered solutions that make things needlessly more intricate for the end user. I’m not going into details here not because I don’t know what I’m talking about, but because, more pragmatically, the list of examples would constitute an article on its own, and would definitely exceed the scope and focus of this piece.

Before you think I’m going to say things like Apple can’t innovate any more, again, no. It’s not that. I actually quite like most of what Apple is doing with the Mac, hardware-wise. The problem is I just can’t stand the software anymore. The problem is that I feel there is a troubling ungluing going on between Mac hardware and Mac OS, a substantial difference in quality between the two components, that doesn’t make me feel what I used to feel in previous versions of Mac OS X: seamless integration.

I think it all stems from Apple’s desire to simplify things for themselves, architecture-wise — Apple Silicon is quite innovative in bringing the advantages of iOS devices to Macs (performance + power efficiency). The terrible decision, in my view, has been to also want to bring the iOS look and feel to the Mac. It was unnecessary, it has broken so many tried-and-true Mac interface guidelines, and it has delivered a massive blow to the whole operating system’s identity. Just to make the Mac what, more fashionable?

The new System Settings and Stage Manager in Mac OS Ventura, to put it bluntly, are a fucking joke. They look and feel like implementation attempts you would see in an early beta release of Mac OS X, to be quickly scrapped or rectified in a subsequent release. And they sadly mirror the way Apple software & UI engineers think about this stuff. And this, in turn, sadly mirrors what Apple seems to prioritise when it comes to Mac OS. Instead of working on new ways to make the system more powerful, more versatile, taking advantage of the unbelievable performance of the M‑class processors, they’re retouching — and terribly so — certain parts of the system in a way that’s little more than cosmetic. And they’re fixing or adding to what was never broken: multitasking. To me, Stage Manager is as useful and practical an addition to Mac OS as putting a USB numeric keypad inside the packaging of a new MacBook Pro.

With this (and more) in mind, you can see how difficult and painful upgrading to a new Mac becomes for me. On the one hand, the hardware is great and so is the performance. On the other, getting a new Mac today means it comes with Ventura or Monterey preinstalled, which is unfortunate, and of course there is no downgrade path.

I still haven’t decided if my next Mac is going to be a laptop or desktop machine. If I choose desktop, I may bite the bullet and go for a Mac Studio, which should be future-proof enough for my needs. As a laptop solution, the M1 MacBook Air is what I find most appealing at the moment. Not only for the excellent price/performance ratio, but also because the M1 Air’s display doesn’t feature the stupid notch of the M2 Air and the 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros. And it’s a model that originally came with Big Sur which, while still not being my favourite Mac OS version, at least it’s not Ventura, and I’m not forced to live with it from the start. Yes, you heard me well: I have no intention to go past Big Sur, unless some specific work-related reasons ultimately force my hand.

But why? — If you’ve read this far, you should have understood it by now, but in case I haven’t been clear enough: I loathe what Apple is doing with Mac OS now. The visuals, the UI… I simply don’t enjoy it. I tolerate it. Whenever I need to test a Mac OS app that has system requirements higher than Mac OS 10.13 High Sierra or 10.14 Mojave, and I switch to my 2015 13-inch retina MacBook Pro with a more up-to-date Mac OS version, my session doesn’t last one minute more than it needs to. It’s the same feeling an Apple fanboy would feel if they were forced to use Windows at work.

But what about security? Are you sure you want to stay on an older version of Mac OS? — Thankfully I’m tech-savvy enough to know what I’m doing. The two Macs I use most are still on High Sierra and Mojave, and haven’t received security updates in quite a while. I haven’t had any security-related problem whatsoever. Let me be clear: I’m not suggesting you shouldn’t care about security. I’m simply sharing what I’m doing, my choices, and my preferences. As it is, I currently much prefer to work and have fun in an operating system environment (High Sierra and Mojave) I love and enjoy using. An environment in which I am fast and productive. An environment which still reflects good UI and usability decisions that make it consistent, predictable, and a pleasure to use. And at the moment, I’m honestly more concerned by third-party apps dropping support of these older system versions rather than vague security threats. And if the worst happens, well, I’ll shoulder the consequences of my decision.

You’re weird / averse to change / just don’t get it — Feel free to think so. I’m not trying to convince anybody that my personal preferences are the way to go. But the point I’ve been repeatedly trying to present here and on social media in recent years is that Apple has done a profound disservice to Mac OS. In a misguided effort to ‘modernise’ it, they have made it more disjointed, more brittle, buggier, with baffling UI regressions that have often made me wonder whether there’s still a conductor on this Mac OS train(wreck). The decrease in overall quality is worrisome enough, but I also keep feeling a lack of focus and direction that keeps Mac OS functionally stagnant.

And as a result I, as a long-time Mac user, feel a bit left to my own devices — pun intended. Mac OS is a platform that’s deserving of going from mature to exceptional at this point. Yet I feel that the software tools Apple wants me to use today are getting worse and shallower, created or modified according to an equally shallower design concept that prioritises eye-candy over pretty much anything else. And pretty, ‘designer’ tools are great to showcase, not so great for those who need to use them for several hours every day and clash against their puzzling quirks. Then we wonder why so many people are nostalgic about Mac OS X Snow Leopard. I’m sure that, if a hypothetical ‘super-patch’ could be issued to bring Snow Leopard up-to-date with regard to Internet protocols and the like, many would gladly go back to use it. The fact that it could still be used to do 95% of the things a Mac does today should tell you enough about how much Mac OS has truly evolved in the past eleven years or so.

When I say that my next Mac might be the last, in the end, it means that unless Mac OS starts getting better — a process that would require making a few steps back and a serious course-correction — I don’t plan to invest more in this platform. That trepidation and sinking feeling of What are they going to break this time? every time the WWDC’s date approaches, has been wearing me down in the past few years. What one should feel, instead, is: Apple got this. I’m in good hands. I see no reason not to upgrade straight away. And I haven’t felt this in a long time.

Still, don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying I’m dumping the Mac and switching to Windows or Linux. I had stopped being Mac-only circa 2016 anyway. I’ve already been using Windows (and some Linux distro) with other hardware for a while now. What I plan to do is simply to get one more Mac that is new enough to ‘keep me in the loop’ for a while longer, while I keep using the Macs I have with the Mac OS releases I prefer working in. After that, I’ll keep investing in the Mac only if I find that Apple is moving in a direction I feel more compatible with and more in tune with my needs. In the tech world, we don’t owe loyalty to anyone.

My next Mac might be the last was first published by Riccardo Mori on Morrick.me on 24 October 2022.

EU mandates USB-C as standard for charging ports. Good.

October 10, 2022

by Riccardo Mori

Tech Life

Josh Centers at TidBITS:

It’s finally official. After years of discussion and failed attempts to get the industry to standardize, the European Union has mandated that new rechargeable electronic devices sold in the EU must have USB‑C charging ports by the end of 2024. The law applies to mobile phones, tablets, digital cameras, headphones and headsets, handheld videogame consoles, portable speakers, e‑readers, keyboards, mice, portable navigation systems, and earbuds, and it will extend to laptops in early 2026. The new law’s’ goal is to encourage more reuse of chargers and reduce electronic waste.

I have been loving the controversy about this in the tech sphere. If you follow me closely on Twitter, I apologise in advance for rehashing stuff I already wrote there. Sometimes I use this space to collect thoughts also to the benefit of those who just read my blog and don’t care about following people on social media.

I find sadly ironical how so many people seem to be just fine with whatever tech (and Big Tech) companies impose on them and on their experience as customers and users of their products, but the moment the EU mandates USB‑C as charging standard, this becomes a scandal.

Of all the silly arguments I’ve heard against this mandate, the silliest is perhaps the one that goes like, This stifles innovation, implying that tech companies — and Apple specifically — should be left free to decide what’s best for their customers.

Should we take a look at a few decisions Apple took in recent years to offer a ‘better’ experience in the name of innovation?

Starting from the release of the iPhone 7 in 2016, Apple arbitrarily decided to remove the headphone jack from iPhones, forcing people to either get wireless headsets or use wired headsets via a Lightning-to‑3.5mm jack adapter; or resort to a different adapter in case they want to use headphones while charging the iPhone. I’m sure Apple is otherwise pleased with the success of their AirPods. The AirPods’ design doesn’t allow for the tiny internal batteries to be replaced, which means more e‑waste at the end of their relatively short life-cycle.
In their effort to make thin laptops for thinness’s sake, Apple introduced a new type of keyboard with a redesigned key mechanism called butterfly mechanism. The idea was to improve things, but it turned out to be a poorly-designed solution that resulted in a high rate of failing keyboards, with many many customers having to bring their MacBooks to get their keyboard replaced at least once — but I know of many instances where people had to have their MacBook’s keyboard replaced two or even three times, and sometimes even out of warranty. This of course for customers meant additional expenses, not just headaches.
With the new MacBooks introduced in 2016, Apple dropped any port that wasn’t USB‑C/Thunderbolt, leading users to resort to USB adapters for anything — the infamous ‘dongle life’: want to connect a flash drive? Use an adapter. Want to read the SD or CF card of your camera? Use an adapter. Want to connect the MacBook via Ethernet to a wired network? Use an adapter. Want to connect a video projector for a presentation? Use an adapter. And so forth.

Some technophiles are quick in labelling the EU politicians as being idiots, ignorant bureaucrats that don’t know how technology works. Given the examples above, are we so sure tech companies really know what’s best for their customers?

And what sort of benefits would bring keeping Lightning around, exactly? What’s the ‘innovation’ there? In theory, the Lightning specification would allow for more uses than just charging, but even Apple itself has been under-utilising Lightning. So, if Lightning is essentially reduced to just being an alternative, proprietary charging solution, then I think it makes pragmatic sense to want to standardise charging solutions. Let’s don’t forget that mandating USB‑C will also make Micro-USB connectors and cables hopefully disappear. Along with all those cheap AC adapters (Lightning or Micro-USB) that come with non-detachable cables.

But anyway, what kind of innovation in charging technology this EU mandate is impeding? The only bit of innovation I’ve seen in this field in recent times is wireless charging and fast charging. With fast charging, we’re at a point that a smartphone is mostly recharged in little more than half an hour. Wireless charging still has room for improvement, in my opinion, but mandating a USB‑C port on the device won’t certainly impede progress in perfecting how wireless charging is implemented.

In other words, I think charging isn’t exactly a fast-moving aspect of technology that warrants being immune from standardisation attempts. If it were for the Silicon Valley types, people would have to change their power plugs and outlets every 5 years or so because ‘innovation’.

But even if we embrace the innovation argument, consider the following scenario: one year from now, Samsung comes out with a new charging technology and a new charging port. A proprietary port, of course. The astounding performance of this technology is touted as yet another feature to convince people to switch to Samsung devices. Now we have yet another charging port to deal with. Imagine those professionals who — either for personal or work reasons — are typically multi-device and multi-platform. When travelling they would have to deal with Lightning cables, USB‑C cables, different AC adapters, and the new Samsung cables on top of all that.

Having only USB‑C to deal with simplifies things a lot, and if some people bothered to look beyond their personal use cases, they would understand this. Having only USB‑C means that if you’re travelling with a MacBook, an iPhone, an iPad, and a modern camera, you’re most likely fine by just taking two USB‑C cables with you, and not even additional adapters other than the MacBook AC adapter, if you really want to travel light.

The reduction of e‑waste is something that isn’t admittedly apparent straight away; and that’s why, I assume, many people complain that this EU mandate solves next to nothing in this regard. The efficiency of having only USB‑C for charging starts being noticeable over time, though. When a device or appliance that uses Micro-USB, Lightning, or even other proprietary cables for charging, fails or you get rid of it otherwise, you’ll have to throw the corresponding cable or adapter as well (unless you find a way to reuse it with something else). If a device or appliance that charges via USB‑C fails or get thrown away or sold, both the cable and the AC adapter can be reused with every other USB-C-powered device. You don’t have to throw away proprietary cables/chargers, and you don’t have to buy new ones either. This, over a certain amount of time, and at scale, could be compelling. Less wasteful. Responsible.

Perhaps even innovative, in a sense.

EU mandates USB‑C as standard for charging ports. Good. was first published by Riccardo Mori on Morrick.me on 10 October 2022.

Not a great strategy

September 30, 2022

by Riccardo Mori

Handpicked

Via Nick Heer, I’ve learnt that a third-party Instagram client that launched as recently as a week ago was removed from the App Store.

TechCrunch:

Last week, a startup called Un1feed launched an Instagram client called The OG App, which promised an ad-free and suggestion-free home feed along with features like creating custom feeds like Twitter lists. The app raked up almost 10,000 downloads in a few days, but Apple removed the app from the App Store for violating its rules earlier this week.

Separately, Un1feed said that Meta disabled all team members’ personal Instagram and Facebook accounts.

[…]

“This app violates our policies and we’re taking all appropriate enforcement actions,” a Meta spokesperson told TechCrunch. The company also pointed to a blog post about clone sites.

Nick Heer:

Thereby illustrating the difference between what some users value about Instagram and what Meta values. Users want to view friends’ photos and videos on their own terms; Meta wants them to watch suggested Reels and shop.

I’ve titled this brief post Not a great strategy because it’s what I would say to both the Un1feed guys and Facebook/Meta.

Launching a clean Instagram third-party client that actually makes the Instagram experience better, is praiseworthy; but expecting that Facebook/Meta would be okay with it, that’s naïve. By the way, in an update to the story, TechCrunch adds:

Apple told TechCrunch that it removed The OG App as it was accessing Instagram’s service in an unauthorized manner, which violated the Meta-owned platform’s terms. The company cited section 5.2.2 of its App Store review guidelines, which states that if an app is displaying content from a third-party service, it should do it in accordance with the service’s terms of use.

So yes, this client wasn’t bound to last for very long.

But what about Facebook/Meta’s strategy? They have been progressively morphing Instagram into something, some thing that wants to keep being relevant by mimicking what a more successful competitor — TikTok — has already nailed.

It’s very unlikely that those who are already addicted to TikTok decide to drop it and switch to Instagram. Maybe they’ll watch a reel or two if it’s from one of their friends (which isn’t super-easy in itself, given just how much Instagram pushes content created by people you don’t know), but that’s it. And it’s very unlikely that someone wanting to express themselves and create stuff in TikTok format would favour Instagram over TikTok. It’s simply too late to think you can beat TikTok at what it does best.

Meanwhile Facebook/Meta is leaving behind what Instagram has done best for quite a long time: a place to share photos and moments from everyday life, and also a place to even showcase your work in a more professional and commercial manner.

No one among my friends and acquaintances likes Instagram now. And it’s not just early days nostalgia. It’s that the experience within the platform has become confusing and user-hostile. A friend commented that it’s like watching a TV channel where the contents are 5% movies and 95% TV commercials, and you never know when you’ll be able to watch the movies.

Sometimes I think that all the extraneous suggested reels and promoted content and non-linear timeline are a way to keep users doomscrolling so that they spend much more time within the platform that they normally would. The problem is that the ratio is wrong — the extraneous content is simply too overwhelming, and as a consequence people get frustrated and exit the app.

Or stop using Instagram altogether. I used to be a heavy Instagram user until Facebook acquired it. At the time, I didn’t want to delete my account, but I stopped uploading photos and kept my account active so that I could continue to comment and connect on other friends and follower’s photos/videos/stories. But even this kind of activity has become difficult and unpleasant simply because Facebook/Meta have decided to throw unwanted content in my face as I scroll the fucked-up timeline in the hope of finding a friend’s photo or moment to react to. As a result, I’m finding myself accessing Instagram more and more infrequently. And I’m definitely not alone in this.

Tech companies today are obsessed with evolving because the idea of keep doing what you do best doesn’t seem viable in the long run. But I disagree. Of course I’m not saying that one shouldn’t change anything at all and stay still, but deviating too much from the formula that made you extremely successful isn’t a great strategy either, as we can see in Instagram’s case. Despite its missteps and flaws, Twitter has done a better job at this. Twitter today is very different from what it was in 2006, it has certainly become richer and more complex, but the core idea is the same. Twitter, too, has been adding intrusions to the timeline and has pushed for a non-linear timeline, but the non-linearity is fortunately still optional, and the intrusions aren’t overwhelming to the point that you stop seeing tweets from your friends and people you follow.

Instagram on the other hand has made insecurity its instability and volatility.