Four short links: 19 March 2020
Open Source, Content Moderation, Community Calls, and Self-Isolation
- Dos and Don’ts in Open Source (Olaf Geirsson) — really useful advice to would-be contributors and project owners. It’s tempting to respond to a welcome contribution with a quick, “This looks amazing, I will review tomorrow!” Consider giving a thumbs-up reaction instead and wait with commenting until you complete the review. Promises are estimates and estimates are hard. Unless I’m bound by a paid contract, I try to avoid promising my future time no matter how confident I am about delivering on the promise.
- Thread on AI Content Moderation (Sarah T. Roberts) — content moderators can’t work from home (she explains why), so Facebook is leaning hard on its AI systems, which are triggering false positives (censoring things it shouldn’t) and people are noticing. It will be interesting to see how the systems improve, how people react, and whether we go back to human teams of moderators at the same scale we had before (with the accompanying mental damage to them).
- Zoom Community Calls (Alex L. Miller) — how to configure your Zoom session for maximum audience fun but minimal exposure to trolling.
- How to Survive Self-Isolating Without Losing It (Kate Montgomery) — from someone with years of experience. There are now many of these guides to maintaining mental health during isolation, and you should read a few (before the isolation starts, if you’re in a position to do so, to prep for it). They’re also worth reading if you now work from home, because it can end up being remarkably similar.
