Living in the Future

Tag: Reflection

  • My 2016 (As of January 29)

    My 2016 (As of January 29)

    When I set out to make more in 2016, I did so with the goal of finding work and fulfilling my creative pursuits. It’s only been 29 days so far this year, but I have already learned a ton from this experiment.

    I’ve been taking more pictures, making all kinds of podcasts, and writing every single day. I said I would do this project every day for a year, or for as long as I need to. I put that loophole in there specifically because I knew how much work that would be, and if I started working anywhere near full time again, it’s unlikely I would have the energy to keep up a daily pace (of posting stuff, not of making stuff).

    So far this year, I have done a few really great things:

    1. I hit my weight goal from the middle of last year (that’s 210 lbs, down 40) at the end of this week.
    2. I started writing every day, taking more pictures of cool things I see, and with friends.
    3. I’ve found some work that should be starting quite soon.

    Given all of that, and the fact that my creative endeavours aren’t going to stop right now, I am going to stop posting something here every day.

    I’m planning on continuing to take more pictures (probably posted on Instagram), writing as much as I can (including on this blog), and dedicating my efforts to working more on being creative. It’s been a great year so far, and it’s only going to get better!

  • My ‘New Media’ Obsession (January 24)

    My ‘New Media’ Obsession (January 24)

    These are just a few of the shows I used to watch.

    News broadcasts, TV shows, movies, podcasts, YouTube, Twitter, blogs, editorials, thinkpieces, press releases. There are so many different kinds of media, and there’s more than any one person could ever consume of any one of them.

    There are also sciences, sports, arts, technologies, crafts, cooking, celebrities, entertainment, and so much more to pay attention to. If you tried to absorb all the information out there about the tiniest niche subject, there would still be too much to consume to fill a lifetime.

    Most people have a few interests or hobbies that they spend time going fairly deep on. And those priorities are always changing and adjusting as lives change or circumstances evolve.

    For example, there was a time in my life where I watched 25 TV shows every week, in addition to re-watching some shows when I felt like it. Now, I have a hard enough time keeping up with just a few shows. Both It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and Mythbusters, have started new seasons, but i’m at now 2-3 episodes behind on each since I missed their debuts.

    Recently, I have moved much of the entertainment I get to fully digital platforms. I listen to a ton of podcasts, and watch a whole lot of YouTube videos. Both of these media have a single spot where I can go (either a website or an app) and see what’s new since I was last there, or what I haven’t watched or listened to yet.

    Compare that to the experience of trying to watch a TV show, where even if I wanted to watch later, I would have to go figure out which TV network aired a show, open the app where the show is, find the TV show, and see if there was a new episode. That model works for Saturday Night Live, because I know it’s on Saturday night, but other than that, I have no idea when shows air.

    So I’m left with digital media consumption, and there’s more than enough of it to fill my free time. I would LOVE to watch Mythbusters, and It’s Always Sunny is something I will almost certainly watch eventually. But their distribution just doesn’t hold a candle to new media like YouTube or podcasts, where you can keep a running list of the things you like and get notified immediately when a new one comes out, and click a link to watch it.

    ps. keep in mind that I currently have a cable subscription, and all the powers that come along with that, and yet I *still* find it impossible to try to keep up with television.

  • The Internet’s Gatekeepers can do better (January 18)

    The Internet’s Gatekeepers can do better (January 18)

    Another internet company took an unlimited plan and added asterisks to it. This time, it’s Karma Mobility.

    We made a mistake. We modeled Neverstop usage to be much higher than usage on Refuel. But we never anticipated that some customers would use over 1,000GB a month.

    They aren’t the first company to choose to throttle mobile data after a certain usage threshold, and they won’t be the last. But time and time again, these companies obviously overpromise, or there’s something horribly wrong with the whole cellular industry and the way mobile data works.

    In the company’s blog post, they note that some users were burning through 1000 GB of data, something they never envisioned happening on cellular hotspot. Certainly, that is a lot of data, and video presumably contributes most of that. I would imagine that if even a small percentage of your users are using 1000 GB of mobile data that you wouldn’t be able to make money overall unless you had a massive customer base.

    However, the infrastructure associated with cellular data is the hardest part. It doesn’t make any sense why the cap they would need to put in place would be so restrictive (they set it to 15 GB, before slowing speeds way down). If 1 TB is abusive on the system, then set reasonable limits. But if you’re selling a mobile hotspot company, and you’re pledging unlimited usage for customers, 15 GB is just not enough for a month.

    The Internet is composed mainly of video these days, traffic-wise. You need to expect that most users will want data, and cellular companies have been pushing 1080p and UHD screens into users hands for the last couple of years. This kind of computer is going to use more data than even the best iPhone could in 2008.

    When I was working outside my home last year, I consumed most of my media on the way to and from work, and sometimes while listening to music or podcasts at work. I used between 35 and 50 GB consistently for several months doing that, and I was not doing any kind of tethering or downloading of massive amounts of media. I used WiFi when I was at home, and I just went about my day normally. I wasn’t even trying to use massive amounts of data (although I was a proud nerd when I saw how much I’d used).

    If you offer or are planning to offer an unlimited plan, but want to set limits to prevent people from using a terabyte of data per month, that’s fine. But make sure your limits aren’t unreasonable, because people are using your product to connect to the internet.

    15 GB is incredibly low use for a mobile hotspot in a month. If you want to set reasonable limits, start off at 500 GB (half of what you considered “abusive”). If your network or business can’t handle that traffic, you’ve obviously made some miscalculations in offering “unlimited usage”. Even a limit like 100 GB would still solve customers problems while keep usage ‘reasonable’. We’ve seen internet companies make this same mistake again and again, but nobody seems to offer a useful solution outside of companies who keep people on restrictive grandfathered unlimited data plans (like the ones I’m on).

    I use a lot of data, I’m not doing anything nefarious, and I want to keep doing that. Nobody wants to get throttled, and slowing down the internet for your biggest customers is not a good experience for anybody.

    If you need a new generation of network to be able to cope with internet traffic like fiberoptic networks have been doing for a few years now, let’s work on that. But the solution to the internet’s biggest customers isn’t “use less”, it’s figuring out ways we can all coexist with more.

    The Internet is awesome, and everybody deserves to be able to access it at full speed on an unlimited plan.

  • Losing Weight, When You’re Lazy (January 13)

    Losing Weight, When You’re Lazy (January 13)

    “Play to your strengths” is the advice given to Harry Potter during the Triwizard Tournament, and it’s invaluable insight is applicable not just to facing dragons in a magical school.

    When I set out to improve my health last summer, I knew it would take more than some kind of amazing burst of willpower. I was going to have to change some of my habits, and try to control my worst impulses, like the one to eat an entire pizza in one sitting. I didn’t buy any expensive supplements or go on a strict nutrition plan. I didn’t count calories, or even consider any individual food as being off limits.

    What I did end up doing, starting in July of 2015, was make a commitment to eating less, and to exercising more. In making that commitment, I had a few things I liked doing built-in to my schedule to jump start my new diet and lifestyle. The biggest thing I did was to start biking to and from work every day, about 7 km each direction, unless it was pouring rain.

    Really, the only other major change I made was to purchase Soylent, the food replacement I’ve talked about to death here, and eat only that at work. I know that I tend to eat when I’m bored, and so I would bring snacks to work and eat them throughout the day, even if I wasn’t particularly hungry. By replacing that snack food with Soylent, which fills me up but which I did not crave, I was able to consume a lot less calories during the day.

    Since food wasn’t around, I didn’t feel any strong urge to eat, and if I did, Soylent would be there to fill me up. I started losing around two pounds a week on average, but I started to notice a pattern developing. During the week, I would lose about 4-6 pounds, and then Friday through Sunday, I would gain back about 2-4 of that. My weight loss came in cycles, because as I mentioned, I have no willpower, and so I wasn’t afraid to have a few slices of pizza when hanging out with friends.

    The secret to weight loss: math, patterns, and patience.

    After a couple of months of this pattern, where I would bike 4-5 times per week, play sports, and walk, my appetite, my waistline, and my stomach all shrank substantially. And through all of this, I never really had any strong cravings for food that I didn’t satisfy. When I did snack, I was less likely to indulge as much, mainly because I just wasn’t as hungry.

    That’s not to say I didn’t get hungry. Another important part of this lifestyle was learning that it’s OK to be hungry sometimes without eating. I started treating hydration more seriously, and my hunger lessened in kind. In total, from the end of August (after my honeymoon) to the beginning of December, I lost about 35 pounds.

    If you look in detail at my progress, weighing myself every single day from August 20, 2015 to January 13, 2016, I have lost a total of 98 pounds in the 89 days I lost weight. On the remaining days, I gained a total of 64 pounds over 57 days. In that time, I’ve learned that eating a bunch of snack food, or just too much in general, like I did on many of those 57 “gain” days, is absolutely not worth the work I put in on the 89 “loss” days

    I am currently better, but far from perfect, at deciding when I’ve had enough. I still enjoy cookies, candy, pizza, delivery, chips, cheese, meat, etc., but I know a lot better how my body is going to react to those foods, and how much I eat will affect me.

    Now, it’s the middle of winter, and I can’t bike all over the place (also, my bike was stolen back in October 🙁 ), but I am doing exercise where I can to keep up with food, and managing my intake better.

    With the tracking system I’ve set up for myself, which I talk about here, I know that I can aim to weigh less today than I did yesterday, and less this week than I did the last, and I will be able to lose weight. It’s all about finding what works for you, and playing to your strengths. Stay healthy 🙂

    If you want to get a copy of the spreadsheet I’ve been using, let me know and I can make a clean copy available for download. I have been using the wireless Withings scale to track my weight and body fat percentage, if you want to check it out, I would strongly recommend it (full disclosure: if you use that link, I do get a commission) and it’s been a big help to me. I have also been using the Withings Health Mate app, which is free, and IFTTT to make keeping track of my weight in a spreadsheet unbelievably simple.

    You can do it, it’s all a matter of finding your own path.

  • A healthy dose of skepticism (January 11)

    A healthy dose of skepticism (January 11)

    Today, I got to be a real journalist (or pundit, I guess, depending on your perspective). I got to read a report from a source, think about it critically, and comment on it. And I turned out to be right in the end.

    On Saturday, there was a report in the Telegraph saying Apple was being asked to make a tool to let iOS users export their data so that they could switch away from iOS. It seemed like a pretty dumb story (and has now been confirmed false), so I thought about it. You can read the full piece over on MobileSyrup.

    Apple wouldn’t make a product to let their customers switch to Android, even if the EU was pressuring them to do so for anti-trust reasons. And even if they were, it wouldn’t be in the manner described.

    While a set of tools to allow iOS users to easily move their data to other platforms has seemingly obvious benefit, the actual implementation of such services are not straightforward. It’s worth keeping in mind that if users have access to a laptop or desktop computer, it is already trivial to export contacts, or copy music and photos to a new device.

    Contacts, music and photos are not the data keeping users on a given platform. Not to say there aren’t reasons to stick with what you have:

    Perhaps the most overlooked part of this entire story is the fact that data like photos and contacts are not actually the biggest concern for locked-in users on either iOS or Android. Apps, especially those that cost users money, are the biggest reason many users will stay in the ecosystem they’ve invested in. If a service from either Apple or Google could import third-party application data or download and purchase history, then perhaps the reasoning behind this argument would be more compelling.

    It’s a fun game to play, thinking and talking and writing about Apple, and other tech companies. But you have to take what you read with a grain of salt, and not believe everything you read. I’m not great at it, but I’m learning, and this was a really great experience for me.

  • Making More of 2016 (January 1)

    Making More of 2016 (January 1)

    The last few years of my life have been the best so far by a wide margin. On its own, 2015 was an incredible year for me, and I’m lucky to have been able to ring in the new year with *many* of my very good friends!

    A video posted by Rob Attrell (@robattrell) on Jan 1, 2016 at 1:04pm PST

    I’ve made a lot of different things for the Internet, starting around 2011, but this past year might have been my most prolific. Writing for my own blog, making podcasts with my network, Unwind Media, and videos for Sons of Pluto, and most recently, starting to write for MobileSyrup, has kept me in love with being creative and making things.

    In addition to the things I made this year, I also got married, and I weigh 35 pounds less than I did at the beginning of last year. The first ~6 months of marriage has been a supremely fun and enjoyable time, and I’m reassured every day that I made the right choice.

    My friends are also a huge part of my life, and I’m so thankful that they’re around for all the ups and downs life throws at each of us. I am supremely lucky to have met so many incredible people, and to get the chance to spend as much time with them as I get.

    For 2016, I have been mulling over a goal (as we all do this time of year), and since I’ve had so much success sharing my goals online, I’m going to do the same this year. I considered delaying the start of this challenge until my life stabilized a little bit, but that would defeat the whole purpose.

    Starting today, with this blog post, I am challenging myself to make something EVERY SINGLE DAY, for a year, or for as long as I can or feel I need to. Some days, it will be a video. Others, probably a podcast episode. On a day like today, it will be a written blog entry like this (even though each day’s creation will be logged here on robattrell.com).

    I thought this morning about the arbitrary nature of starting the year on January 1st, and thought that in light of recording an episode of Feedback tomorrow, and Future Chat the day after, and Ottawhat on the 5th, maybe I could just wait and start next week. But this whole project is going to be about not making any excuses.

    There’s always an excuse, and I’ve made a lot of them to myself. Part of this project is also going to be about finding employment. I plan to showcase some of the skills I’ve learned in the last few years, and perhaps even highlight and discuss in more detail why I think I would make a good addition to any company or organization.

    Some days, I may address, answer, or discuss a question or topic, but in general I will just be sharing some of my thoughts and feelings about the world and my place in it. There is a lot of bad and a lot of good in the world, and I want to make the good better, and the bad less so.

    This is going to be all over the place. I’m excited. Follow along on my journey by subscribing to this blog, to any of my podcasts at unwindmedia.com, or just follow me on Twitter @RobAttrell.

  • A Big Day

    A Big Day

    It only makes sense that exactly three years (to the day) after doing my very first video on YouTube, I would cross the threshold of actually earning real money from Google. Let me tell you the story.

    For a little over a year, starting on July 4, 2011, I had been writing on my blog (which still exists to this day). December 1st, 2012, I made my first YouTube video, a Google+ Hangout live chat with my good friend, Carolyn Higman. You can go watch it, the quality of the video is relatively embarrassing, and a lot has changed since then.

    The first time I exposed my face to the world, three years ago to the day.

    As a point of comparison, here is the latest episode of Future Chat, recorded this past weekend:

    Over the years, a lot has changed. But one thing that hasn’t changed is that I still love teaching, helping, writing, and learning about technology. Here’s a brief timeline of my milestones on the internet.

    July 4, 2011 – I start Living In The Future, my blog, on my birthday. I published the first post the following day.

    December 1, 2012 – My first Google+ Hangout on Air.

    January 14, 2013 – I agree to begin work with Sons of Pluto, a band with my friends. Work includes recording their practices, shows, building their website, making promo videos, and running their social media accounts. Those guys are now working on an EP!

    February 7, 2014 – The first Future Tech Chat takes place. This is the spiritual successor to the first Hangout on Air from 2012, and the podcast continues on a weekly basis to this day under the more general “Future Chat“.

    March 27, 2014 – I make the first Attrell Update video. My sister and I go on to exchange videos on a weekly (or almost weekly) basis until December of 2014.

    May 20, 2014 – The first episode of Ottawhat is released, after Keegan, Amaan and I decide we should start an Ottawa-themed podcast about people.

    December 14-16, 2014 – East Meets West and Feedback debut, also marking the formal launch of UnwindMedia.com, a media network that is the home of my Internet-related work so far.

    November 5, 2015 – Ottawhat News, a satirical look at events around Ottawa, has it’s first viral post. In just a few days, over 65,000 people read about Peter Hayes and the Bier Markt.

    December 1, 2015 (Today) – In an inevitability of time, math, and fortune, Unwind Media finally passes the threshold for being paid real money for ads on the sites I run. It is now just a matter of time  now until a cheque from Google arrives. It’s not a lot of money, but it feels extremely good to hit that threshold.

    I really love making things, and being creative. I’ve been doing it for over 4 years and I’m more excited now than I ever have been. I’m looking really hard for a job right now, and the stuff I do on the side is the only thing keeping me sane at the moment, as it’s one creative outlet I have amidst filling out applications and writing cover letters.

  • Election Day

    Election Day

    This weekend, we had an international podcast on East Meets West. Matt “Tom” Staroste joined us from Australia to discuss the election that’s upon us today. And while you might not have time to listen to the whole 2 hour podcast today before polls close, I really encourage you to listen to Matt’s and Nick’s 3-4 minute endorsements of the NDP and Liberal parties at the very end of the episode. It’s how I decided my vote, and it’s really worth your ears.

    This part of the conversation starts at 1:44:00 of the 10th episode, which you can jump to right here. The full episode can be found below as well.

  • Losing Weight Isn’t Hard

    Losing weight is easy, and let me tell you why (and how!).

    I have something to tell you that could either be unbelievably hard to believe, or possibly instantly understood, depending on your own experiences. I’ve been talking a LOT about my weight and my health in the last 3 months or so, and I’ve started posting my weight on Twitter every day as a way to motivate myself to eat more responsibly.


    This is how I feel now, stepping on the scale.

    The thing that I’ve learned in losing almost 30 pounds in the last 7 months or so (and 25 lbs in the last 2 months) is that starting to eat isn’t the problem. In losing this weight, I really haven’t limited myself in the food that I have been eating. That’s not to say I haven’t changed my habits, but I still eat burgers, and pizza, and nachos, and all kinds of other delicious foods. I can probably even say I basically eat about as much of those things as I always have.

    The MOST important thing I have learned when losing weight is this: stop eating. Don’t let your hunger decide how much you should eat for the first little while. Restaurants are the worst for this. You have no control over the portion of food you get, and it can be difficult to control your intake this way, especially if you despise the inconvenience of doggy bags as much as I do. When I go to a restaurant now, I get the main dish I really want (be it a big, juicy burger, or a pizza, or whatever other thing I might want), and then get a side that has very little food in it. Fries are a terrible example of this, because there is a LOT of food in fries. I’m not trying to survive a year and a half on Mars, so I probably don’t need to eat several hundred grams of potatoes along with my meal.

    Once I accepted that I could eat less than I had been, I was fine missing “meals” and just eating a little bit when I felt like it. It is darn near impossible to gain weight while eating only fat and protein. Carbohydrates (sugars) are the real problem here. And in our modern grocery stores, everything is full of carbs. The simple reason for this is that carbs are incredibly cheap calories. Dipping those carbs in fat and covering them in salt is an easy and cheap way to make them DELICIOUS.

    The other really important part of weight loss is your metabolism (to put it simply, that’s the amount of food energy your body burns when it’s just sitting there doing nothing else). I’ve been biking or walking 1-2 times per day since I really started focusing on my health. Because my bike ride is to work, that means I get 25-30 minutes of pretty intense exercise about 8 hours apart, splitting the day up nicely for my metabolism. It’s a pretty common excuse that around 20-25 years old your metabolism drops off and you stop being able to eat whatever you want and maintain your health, but I really think the “change” isn’t in your metabolism, but in the average adult’s activity level.

    With the activity that I’ve been trying to do every single day regardless of other circumstance, my good metabolism that I had written off as having “lost” in my late teens is back, and I can eat a good amount while still losing or at least maintaining my weight. For a little more background on this, Nick and I discuss active transportation and its impact on healthy weight in last week’s episode of East Meets West (the discussion of health and such starts around 44:15, but I encourage you to listen to the whole thing).

    Anyhow, to simplify things, or if you’re looking for an easy set of guidelines that have been working for me so far, here are the easiest things I can recommend:

    • Have a food around that you can sustainably eat every day, and can prepare in a few minutes (no more, and no less; that is Soylent for me). Any more prep and you will do something easier. Any less prep and you will already be eating before you’re hungry enough.
    • Exercise at least a half hour every day, twice throughout the day if you can, to keep your body burning energy.
    • Try not to order fries at a restaurant, unless that’s all you’re having (soup, salad, etc. is much easier to control the total amount you eat).
    • Stop thinking that fat will make you fat. Carbs will make you fat, but don’t necessarily avoid them completely (you will need quick energy sometimes). Keep in mind that not all sugars are created equal, and simple sugars (like in candy) will spike your blood sugar and make you crash.
    • Stop using dinner plates (and stop eating “dinner” at all at home, if possible). The modern meal, and the size of dinner plates, means that on average we tend to eat way more than we need. Eat when you are hungry, and give it 15 minutes before deciding you need more.
    • Eat eggs. However you like them cooked, they are a great source of life stuff (vitamins, minerals, fats, protein, etc.). There’s a reason you can grow a whole chick from an egg. It has everything you need for life. And stop thinking that eating cholesterol will make you have high cholesterol (it won’t).
    • Last, I forgot one of the very important things, drink water! Not lots of water, but definitely some water. It keeps you from feeling hungry when you’re not actually hungry.

    It honestly wasn’t that hard for me to lose a lot of weight just keeping these simple principles in mind, but if you have had trouble on “diets”, I’d recommend keeping track of your weight every day. It will give you a good sense of how your habits are affecting your weight (and overall health, in general) and you will be able to stay ahead of bad habits (like eating too much on weekends). You can follow the steps here and download a useful spreadsheet to track your weight (ask me about it if you’re interested in the modifications I’ve made to my version). And you can follow along with my weight loss journey here.

  • I Still Hate Facebook

    I Still Hate Facebook

    I have written a LOT ragging on the various things I hate about Facebook, and though some of my concerns have been addressed over the years, there is still a lot I just really don’t like about the social network. Today, I’m going to detail what has always been one of my biggest nuisances with the website, and try to articulate exactly why it’s so bad, and what they can do about it.

    Part of me knows that the biggest “problem” with Facebook, the one I’m going to describe below, isn’t actually a problem with Facebook. The problem lies with us, the idiotic users who are using it (or not using it) in ways its designers never expected. But as any good engineer knows, anticipating your users’ needs and interactions is arguably even more important than creating an internally consistent and compelling product.

    Pictured: Facebook Users

    To put it simply, Facebook exists to make money for itself. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, it’s a business after all, but in that pursuit the company ends up making decisions that are openly hostile to new and experienced users. I think this hurts the platform and actually ends up meaning that people will use Facebook less.

    When you open Facebook, you’re presented with a timeline called the News Feed, a stack of cards that can show status updates, photos, videos, links to websites, blog posts, events, pages, or crucially, advertisements. When the social network was just getting started, the thing that became the News Feed was essentially a linear timeline of the things people were saying to one another. You couldn’t really “miss” an update because everything was in order and scrolling more, or clicking through to the next page, would simply show you the next item chronologically.

    Today, that timeline has been completely distorted by Facebook trying to make money for itself. In case you haven’t looked on the right side of the Facebook website lately, there are ads all over it. Facebook is fundamentally an advertising network now, because all semblance of time and chronology is lost when you are on the website today. Now, I’m not saying I mind ads on the side of my timeline, or even in between stories from my friends or sites I follow. I don’t even mind Facebook highlighting stories it thinks I might want to see from friends its algorithm considers close to me.

    The problem I have with how Facebook operates is that it plays fast and loose with the updates my friends, family and acquaintances actually want me to see. This is never more painfully obvious when I am talking to two people, and one of them tells the other about something they posted on Facebook. As is so often the case, I frequently haven’t seen the story in question, even though historically I have enjoyed roughly 95% of the stories that those two friends have shared with one another.

    This leads me to one of the problems with Facebook’s treatment of relationships between humans. Even if you go through the effort to catalogue your friendships, and put your friends into groups, becomes obsolete shortly after you finish the initial grouping. Our relationships are in a constant state of flux, and our connections are constantly changing and increasing in number. No human alive with a job and a life could possibly keep up with fine adjustments of their friends list in order to actually monitor what they see first on Facebook, and since many people can end up posting several things to the network every day, there are just too many stories to realistically see all of them.

    When you make a new friend and add them to Facebook, the site or app could easily prompt you to categorize them as a friend, acquaintance, co-worker, etc., and perhaps even ask you if you want to see all, most, or none of their updates. This would be a completely voluntary grouping procedure, but it would be really helpful to be able to keep your Facebook friends organized.

    One of the results of the network as it is today is a phenomenon called a ‘filter bubble’. This is when you spend so much time communicating with a subset of people that you tend to fall into a group where the views of the people in it all tend to be the same or very similar. As an example, if you’re friends with a bunch of Conservatives on Facebook, over time you will see more and more conservative viewpoints and posts. Eventually, you can start to develop a bubble around you, and more liberal viewpoints will stop showing up in your feed, even though those viewpoints still exist around you.

    Now, many people may actually WANT this, as most people don’t want their viewpoints challenged, but when this happens totally invisibly to the user, it would be easy to start to think that maybe other viewpoints just don’t exist, or are the extreme minority of the overall culture. Unfortunately, at the moment, it seems like Facebook’s algorithms tend to favour this kind of extremist and filtering, and most people aren’t aware this is happening.

    Using a linear timeline (something that is not available on Facebook’s main site by default) and exposing users to the built-in grouping tools would go a long way towards removing some of the friction people have when seeing ALL the things their Facebook friends post, as well as making it much more transparent to users that this kind of filtering and sorting of posts is happening. Facebook will continue to make money off its ads, and off Facebook Pages paying to show their posts in others’ feeds, but I think all parties will benefit if everyone is aware of what’s actually going on.