Enemy Gate Down

A few weeks ago I stopped by the Social Design Club and gave folks a tour of the Stack Overflow/Stack Exchange Q&A engine. After a few years away, it was fascinating to dig into the details of an...

https://enemygatedown.com/2020/09/10/making-stack-overflow-work/

Recently I sat down with a leader at a tech company building a community platform to offer input on running Support and Trust & Safety teams. Later, I sent a followup email and then realized its ...

https://enemygatedown.com/2019/05/22/on-humane-trust-safety-teams/

The cost of information transmission has collapsed. As a result of the profit opportunity this presented, human interaction has been centralized in platforms of truly enormous scale. Centralizati...

https://enemygatedown.com/2019/04/03/after-the-flood/

“If it’s really a revolution, it doesn’t take us from point A to point B, it takes us from point A to chaos. – Clay Shirky, 2005 In 2019, we reel from a series of improbable outcomes. Whe...

https://enemygatedown.com/2019/03/29/from-point-a-to-chaos-the-inversion-of-information-economics/

Parable of the Radium Girls In 1917, a factory owned by United States Radium in Orange, New Jersey hired workers to paint watchfaces with self-luminescent radium paint for military-issue, glow-in...

https://enemygatedown.com/2019/03/01/facebook-moderation-and-the-unforeseen-consequences-of-scale/

Organizations need both Implementers and Integrators. Implementers are those who specialize in nuts and bolts execution work. Migrating a database, making color and font choices for a landing pag...

https://enemygatedown.com/2019/02/20/implementers-and-integrators/

Conway’s Law states that: “organizations which design systems … are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.” In other words...

https://enemygatedown.com/2018/10/18/exploring-the-human-implications-of-conways-law/

Word came out earlier this week that Facebook is running an experiment, giving a small number of users in New Zealand upvote/downvote buttons on comments. I’m wondering what Facebook is looking...

https://enemygatedown.com/2018/05/01/will-voting-functionality-on-facebook-solve/

This is primarily an exercise in record keeping. Two years ago I wrote a post about burnout and went silent. Here are some things which have transpired since: I found work which fits the paramete...

https://enemygatedown.com/2015/10/08/commit-history/

About three weeks ago, I said goodbye to my team. I’ve been in need of a break and after spending a year and a half working on technical infrastructure for the dev community, the company is inc...

https://enemygatedown.com/2013/08/30/reset/