internet

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The nightmare of the Peggy Couch from West Elm

I don’t usually blog about furniture here, but this post by Anna Hezel at The Awl about the Peggy Couch from West Elm really got to me:

Around when the throw pillows finally arrived, the couch began to disintegrate in small ways. We would scooch across a cushion at the wrong angle, and a button would pop off, leaving a fraying hole behind. We would lean back slightly too far, and all of the cushions would shift forward and over the edge of the couch in unison. As soon as one button had fallen off of our couch, it was like a spigot had been turned, allowing all of the other buttons to fall off, too. I emailed customer service and asked if this was normal. They sent me a button-repair kit, indicating that this probably happens a lot. The kit was backordered, so it arrived two full months later and contained a wooden dowel, two buttons, and some directions that didn’t make sense. One direction was to “Hold the cushion properly and make sure the pointed end of the stick is all the way through, until you can see both ends of the stick on each side of the cushion.” I tried in earnest to follow the directions, but the wooden dowel would not fit into the buttonholes, and the entire exercise left me with fewer buttons than I started with.

Every component of this story is nuts, from the fleet of disaffected Peggy purchasers out there trying to warn people against this couch to the awful repair kit that West Elm sends out for people having problems. Most importantly: West Elm says the couch is supposed to last 1-3 years with light use. That is an insultingly short period of time, and not a meaningful upgrade from, say, an IKEA couch. In fact, it may actually be worse despite being more expensive.

I have friends who have had bad experiences at West Elm. After reading this article and taking that into account, I can’t imagine wanting to shop there for any expensive furniture. Instead, if you really want something that’s a big improvement over Craigslist/IKEA, I’d recommend a store like Room and Board. IKEA’s high end has also improved significantly over the years, and may be worth investigating.

Update: The Peggy Couch has now apparently been removed from West Elm’s site:

The stupefying odds

A spectacular data visualization by The Pudding shows how difficult it is for a band to break out and make it big:

The vast majority of bands never do make it. Acts break up, give up or decide they have other things they want to do with their lives.

For every Chance the Rapper there are thousands of rappers that never play a show with more than a couple hundred people. For every Lake Street Dive, there are hundreds of promising bands that break up because they lost on their members.

To see the NYC concert trajectory of different bands, below you can search for any of the 3,000 bands that played a show in 2013, and at least one more show from 2014 to 2016. Perhaps some of them are on their way to making it, and it just hasn’t happened yet.

What the world could look like without Net Neutrality

Kevin Collier from Vocativ speculates on how Trump’s regime could change the internet as we know it:

To start, internet providers not burdened by net neutrality could begin by offering deals and exclusives for their content. Comcast, consistently rated one of the most hated companies in America, is owned by NBCUniversal. NBC owns streaming rights the Olympics through 2032. Without the FCC’s rules, NBC could choose to only allow Comcast subscribers unfettered access to the games. People who used Spectrum to get online, for instance, would maybe have to pay for a special Olympic pass. Or if NBCUniversal wanted to get really nasty, it could bar anyone but Comcast subscribers from viewing their Olympic stream, period, daring customers of other providers to switch to Comcast […]

Internet providers could also squeeze websites, instead of consumers directly. Verizon could start a bidding war for streaming video services, for instance. Since YouTube is owned by Google and has a lot more money than Vimeo, YouTube could pay Verizon for faster or even exclusive service. YouTube would have an effective monopoly on streaming video for Verizon companies.

The Twitter Resistance

Kaitlyn Tiffany, writing for The Verge about how official social media accounts are going “underground” in light of government suppression:

Three people who claim to be employees of the National Park Service’s Mount Rainier Park in Washington have taken up where the official NPS and EPA Twitter accounts have been forced to leave off. Last night, they tweeted dozens of times from the handle @AltNatParkSer, promoting climate change facts and the upcoming Scientists’ March on Washington, interspersing jokes like “Parks and Rekt” and “can’t wait for President Trump to call us FAKE NEWS.” The spirit of rebellion is catching: this account has amassed over 300,000 followers overnight, paired with thousands of messages of support from people on Twitter eager to see someone, anyone take a stand against Trump’s despotic new policies.

 

The Odyssey empire

Over at BackChannel, Jane Porter has an interesting story about Odyssey and how it entices college students to churn out thousands of pieces for almost no money:

“These types of networks have petered out because it is resource intensive to work with contributors,” says Claire Wardle, research director at Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism.

That’s where Odyssey believes it has developed a secret sauce with its Invisible Hand. Despite the ominous name, it’s a workflow tool that organizes stories by subject matter and content, ranking their newsworthiness, topic, and popularity. Stories that come in are ordered and organized from most relevant to least depending on a range of factors, and then funneled to the editor focused on the pertinent topic, such as sports or politics.

First, the algorithm feeds stories to community editors—locally based individuals who are not paid for their job—to be edited. Then they’re sent off to content strategists — the company’s name for its in-house editors, who are all responsible for managing 20 communities each comprised of around 12 to 25 writers. That means a content strategist is editing anywhere between 240 to 500 stories per week. The Invisible Hand is what keeps these editors from losing their minds, managing their workflow so they don’t waste time sifting through stories to determine what their priority should be.

Theoretically, Odyssey’s model provides a nifty way to scale content production. In reality, as the piece gets into, it’s a lot harder to make people contribute high-quality content in perpetuity unless you’re paying them handsomely.

The Vine archive

Sarah Perez writing for TechCrunch:

Twitter just can’t seem to let go of Vine. The company announced last fall it would close the video-sharing community site and its accompanying mobile applications, which it then did just days ago. But it also has taken several steps to ensure that the content created in Vine would not be lost, by offering tools to export videos, both online and in its app. Today, in another move to preserve Vine content, Twitter has launched an online archive of Vine videos — basically a static website containing all the posts made from 2013 through 2016.

The archive is live now and I dig the clean organization. Vine was an incredible place for light, fun, memorable creativity — often by people of color. I was really sad to hear the service would be shutting down, but glad to hear it’ll be preserved in some form.

Also, below is my favorite Vine of all time. Check it out and read the oral history of it.

 

The Amazing Hour

Over at The Atlantic, James Hamblin suggests having an “amazing hour” before bed, devoid of screentime, to aid in getting a good night’s sleep. Some ways to use that time might include:

  • Packing your lunch for the next day
  • Writing letters to friends/family/celebrities
  • Read a book/magazine
  • Staring at a fake plastic phone and pretend you’re looking at a real phone

I should try this. But I probably won’t.

Building Slack Threads

Very interesting behind-the-scenes piece by Harry McCracken for Fast Company, on Slack’s new Threads feature:

Threads aren’t just a major new Slack feature. They’re also a case study in how its designers approach product development. The company has never operated under the guiding principle that Mark Zuckerberg once famously summed up as “move fast and break things.” Instead, it has thrived in part because it aspires to offer tools that feel fully baked from the get-go. Its fit and finish resemble those of the slickest consumer apps, in a world in which many business-centric tools still don’t feel like they were designed for use by human beings.

Even by Slack standards, threaded conversations got extra TLC, because their impact is so great and so many people had been asking for them for so long. “Threads are so close to the heart of what Slack is that they might be an escalated case,” says Joshua Goldenberg, head of design.

The key decisions: Allowing threads to only be one reply deep, and placing them on the right-hand “flex pane.”