Tag Archives: twitter

Leadership, Empathy, and Burnout

A twitter thread on management, empathy, and burnout
First, a thread on management, empathy, and burnout. You should read this before (or instead of?) this post

I first ran across this thread in early 2021 a couple of months into the COVID pandemic response (and all the stress that came along with that), and I doubt a week has gone in the year since that I haven’t thought about it. It lives in the top of my consciousness, and I highly suggest you give it a read before (or instead of) this post.

The question that kicked it off is an astute one: is burnout for management inevitable for people who actually care about the wellbeing of other people? I have thoughts.
Continue reading Leadership, Empathy, and Burnout

Social Media Musings

It is with a degree of trepidation that I return to Twitter after a month-long hiatus. There are numerous reasons, but my primary justification is that they’ve finally started banning shitbags like Alex Jones, and you reward good behavior, even if it’s late and reluctant.

A more direct reason, though, is that for all of its faults, Twitter fills a gap that neither Facebook nor Mastodon can yet manage. Facebook is obvious; from a ethical standpoint it is no better than Twitter (and might manage to be worse in many ways). More impactful to me is Facebook’s lack of topic muting coupled with it just being the wrong crowd. Facebook is where I’ve aggregated friends, family, colleagues, and acquaintances for life updates and event planning. It turns out that the politics of many people in those groups tends toward horrifying.

Mastodon though, in my experience, is almost worse. Whereas Facebook and Twitter are those racist cousins that you visit briefly until they drop an n-bomb in front of your kids, Mastodon is that seemingly polite aunt or uncle that seems sweet until you find out that 20% of their income goes to the Westboro Baptist Church and they lobby to keep “certain types” out of their neighborhoods. The former gives you the option of beating a hasty retreat or standing your ground and fighting. The latter just makes you wonder how much your presence in their life is advocacy of their beliefs.

Mastodon just feels uncomfortably like everyone is wearing their most presentable mask…but as Wil Wheaton saw, the faces beneath look awfully similar. Sure, it’s nice when it’s your “side” doing the dogpiling, but when you think of the ramifications it does cool the enthusiasm a bit.

But Mastodon is supposed to be safer than Twitter, so at least everyone is protected from that abuse, right? While Mastodon bills itself as more like a roll-your-own, artisanal social media experience–just pick an instance with whose ethos you’re aligned today, and if they abuse your trust you can just cart it all to a different instance–but that merely serves to distribute the burden simultaneously too broadly and not broadly enough. Wil was dumped from his instance because he was getting dogpiled and it was excessively burdensome on the admin. Mastodon, in a nutshell.

I hold out hope that we as an electronic community can come together and figure out a solution to the egregious abuses, but I’ve come to believe that the problem isn’t the network; the problem is the people. We have to solve our social problem, not our technology problem.

Until that time, I won’t cut off one potential abuser in favor of another, this time…although if we do run the into the problem of failing to ban painfully obvious abusers again, it’ll again be time to go.

Tweets of 2015

Things I Said on Twitter in 2015

As I say each year: The year in review, in micro-blog form. This is mostly for my own reference, but, you might be bored enough to look at this as well. Who knows!

Tweets of 2012 • Tweets of 2013 • Tweets of 2014

I continue to hover in the “just shy of 1k tweets” club for the second year in a row, dropping slightly to around 870 tweets. I assume most are about teenage drama shows. Continue reading Tweets of 2015

Twilight “New Moon” in 73 Tweets

After having snarked my way through the entire first movie, “Twilight”, with just my wife to share my pain, I decided to share a bit more…expansively?…with the Intarwebs. Randy, Sheryl, Ger and I set up camp at the Castle and plodded our way through the flick while I live-tweeted my snark. The result is what is found below posted—in order—with time stamps based on movie-start (so that, if you happened to be a masochist, you could follow along).

Oh, my mini review? It sucked. It sucked only marginally less than did the first movie, which is like saying the Spanish Inquisition sucked less than the Crusades, because of the classy red hats (clearly, my knowledge of history is plucked straight from Monty Python, so please don’t confuse me by supplying corrections.) This movie sucked in a way that only another movie that closely adheres to a book that sucks could suck. It sucks in epic, painful, and entirely unfunny ways. Even if it were a sucky B-movie, I could stand watch again with friends to mock…I am unlikely to ever give this movie such treatment. It is more than it deserves. It is decidedly not good. I give it 13 thumbs down. Even if it were reshot with Kristen Stewart nude throughout, it would not be watchable.

Okay, the last bit is uncalled for…I would totally watch that. I love your Kristen Stewart, you and your emotionless face. I forgive you.

Anyway…without further ado, let’s get to the tweets: Continue reading Twilight “New Moon” in 73 Tweets