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“What do you get when you mix all the colors together?” “You get a neutral, blah grey” This is one of those musings that you don’t put on social media: Democratizing everythings makes nothing special. This is another version of Syndrome’s line: I guess when I look back on the things that I’ve really enjoyed in life, once they became really mainstream they just became less “fun” Computers: Once the realm of the hobbyist and early adopters, computers are omnipresent. As phones, they have considerably more power than a Cray Supercomputer from the 80’s and no “window” into the inner workings of the machine. It’s a streamlined, sealed case that provides a perfect abstraction away from 1s and 0s. Or: “This is why I like my Raspberry Pi so much” Photography: Taking good pictures used to be hard. Taking great pictures used to be a real art, requiring a balance of correct equipment, film, aperture, shutter speed, lighting, composition, and dumb luck. Oh, and you had 12, 24, or 36 pictures per 35mm roll. That’s a 7-dimensional matrix to achieve Ansel Adams. (Oh, and darkroom processing, but I never unlocked that level of wizardry.) Now: (1) Pull out phone, (2) click. There’s still a retro group of people that use film, but this is incredibly rare. Cars: Gearheads never die, but “gears” may well. We’re tip-toeing to a full electric future. The cars are big computers (see #1). Programming: “I’m a PM and I don’t know coding, but that didn’t stop me from getting my app in the AppStore.” WRITING: AI Slop. It’s all I see now. And here, we care about writing. I can’t imagine working somewhere that writing is an afterthought. At the end of the day: Is there some sociological/psychological name for “Something started to get very ‘mid’ when everone adopted it”? ...

“The day….the Music Threads…Died” Zuck gave us a present this morning. It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression and giving people voice on our platforms. Here’s what we’re going to do: Replace fact-checkers with Community Notes, starting in the US. Simplify our content policies and remove restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are out of touch with mainstream discourse. Change how we enforce our policies to remove the vast majority of censorship mistakes by focusing our filters on tackling illegal and high-severity violations and requiring higher confidence for our filters to take action. Bring back civic content. We’re getting feedback that people want to see this content again, so we’ll phase it back into Facebook, Instagram and Threads while working to keep the communities friendly and positive. Move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and our US content review to Texas. This will help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content. Work with President Trump to push back against foreign governments going after American companies to censor more. The US has the strongest constitutional protections for free expression in the world and the best way to defend against the trend of government overreach on censorship is with the support of the US government. It’ll take time to get this all right and these are complex systems so they’ll never be perfect. But this is an important step forward and I’m looking forward to this next chapter! ...