Linked List: July 31, 2023

Monday, 31 July 2023

Naomi Nix and Will Oremus, reporting for The Washington Post:

With a mandate from Zuckerberg to take a big risk, Mosseri assembled a lean, engineer-heavy team of fewer than 60 people to hack together a bare-bones app on a breakneck timetable more reminiscent of a start-up than an entrenched tech giant. Speaking to investors this week after Meta reported strong earnings, Zuckerberg held up Threads as vindication of his “year of efficiency,” in which he sheared tens of thousands of jobs in a bid for more agile teams that would ship products quickly.

That Threads was created by such a small group in such a short amount of time has become something of a marvel inside Meta, according to current and former employees who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters, as well as private messages viewed by The Post. Many see its quick rise as a reminder that well-executed product launches might not need all the bureaucratic trappings that a company with some 66,000 employees had grown accustomed to.

“Quick execution. Nothing fancy,” one person wrote on Blind, an anonymous workplace app. “Just solid engineering that most of our ICs [individual contributors] can do but unfortunately are shackled.”

It continues to astound me that anyone with any experience whatsoever would express surprise that a small-ish talented team was so effective. (I say “ish” because 50-60 people isn’t all that small.) Fred Brooks’s The Mythical Man-Month is somehow simultaneously famous and widely-ignored. A larger team would likely have delayed Threads, not accelerated its launch. A much larger team might have doomed the project to failure.

To keep things moving, the Threads team punted thorny decisions and eschewed difficult features, including private messages and the ability to search for content or view the feeds of people you don’t follow. The company also opted not to launch in the European Union, where regulators are preparing to enforce new rules next year requiring tech companies to provide more information to regulators about their algorithms.

“You do the simple thing first,” Mosseri said. “And I think that also helps reduce the scope, because often what happens is scope creep and you want to add all these things because they’re all great.”

Get something good out, even if it’s missing obvious important features, and start iterating. That’s the recipe. I’m very curious what the story is going to be for private messages on Threads, though — yet another new messaging silo, or something tied to Instagram’s? Whatever it is, I sure hope it uses E2EE.

(Twitter DMs, infamously, do not use E2EE, so every single ostensibly private message ever sent on Twitter is readable by Twitter employees with access privileges, and thus potentially exposable to the public by either a bug or spite. The same goes for Mastodon, which offers “mentioned people only” messaging, a feature that should not exist, in my opinion, because it creates the illusion of privacy. Better to offer no private messaging at all than offer it without E2EE.)

Research Suggests Facebook’s Algorithm Is ‘Influential’ but Doesn’t Necessarily Change Beliefs ★

Mike Isaac and Sheera Frenkel, reporting last week for The New York Times:

In the papers, researchers from the University of Texas, New York University, Princeton and other institutions found that removing some key functions of the social platforms’ algorithms had “no measurable effects” on people’s political beliefs. In one experiment on Facebook’s algorithm, people’s knowledge of political news declined when their ability to reshare posts was removed, the researchers said.

At the same time, the consumption of political news on Facebook and Instagram was highly segregated by ideology, according to another study. More than 97 percent of the links to news stories rated as false by fact checkers on the apps during the 2020 election drew more conservative readers than liberal readers, the research found. [...] Still, the proportion of false news articles that Facebook users read was low compared with all news articles viewed, researchers said.

False news articles were low overall, but the articles deemed false were overwhelming consumed by conservatives. That’s no surprise, but to me, gets to the heart of the controversy. A hypothetical social media algorithm that promotes true stories and suppresses false ones, with perfect accuracy, is going to be accused by conservatives of being biased against conservatives, because conservatives are drawn to false stories.

Jeff Horwitz, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (News+ link), on Facebook overstating the degree to which these new studies exonerate its platforms’ influence:

Science warned Meta earlier this week that it would publicly dispute an assertion that the published studies should be read as largely exonerating Meta of a contributing role in societal divisions, said Meagan Phelan, who oversees the communication of Science’s findings.

“The findings of the research suggest Meta algorithms are an important part of what is keeping people divided,” Phelan told Meta’s communications team on Monday, according to an excerpt of her message she shared with The Wall Street Journal. She added that one of the studies found that “compared to liberals, politically conservative users were far more siloed in their news sources, driven in part by algorithmic processes, and especially apparent on Facebook’s Pages and Groups.”

Update: Kai Kupferschmidt’s summary of the four studies for Science.

Twitter Finally Turns to ‘X’ in App Store Listing ★

Tim Hardwick, reporting for MacRumors:

X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, has updated its official app on Apple’s App Store to conform with the new branding that was announced last weekend by billionaire owner Elon Musk. Instead of “Let’s talk” — Twitter’s original tagline — “Blaze your glory!” is the curious subtitle on X’s iOS App Store listing, which describes the app as “the trusted digital town square for everyone.”

You know how people in the South use “Bless your heart” derisively? Well, now we have such a phrase for Musk’s shenanigans.

Anyway, it would appear that getting this single-character name in their App Store listing required an exemption from Apple. Blaze their glory, I say.

Counterpoint Says U.S. Smartphone Sales Are Down, But Mostly on the Android Side ★

Matthew Orf, writing for Counterpoint Research:

US smartphone shipments declined 24% YoY in Q2 2023, according to Counterpoint Research’s Market Monitor data. This was the third consecutive quarter of YoY declines. Android brands like Samsung, Motorola and TCL-Alcatel saw the steepest declines in shipments, while Apple’s shipments were more resilient. As a result, Apple’s share of shipments increased YoY.

Android smartphone shipments declined 38% while Apple shipments fell 6% YoY.

Samsung’s sales — according to Counterpoint — were exactly in line with Android overall, down 37 percent overall. You’d think they’d be up, not down, with all those foldables they sell. Another interesting tidbit: Counterpoint claims Google Pixel sales are up 48 percent year-over-year. If true, maybe, finally, Pixels are starting to get traction? I have to give Google credit for doggedly sticking with it.

Apple’s share of shipments in Counterpoint’s tallying has been 50+ percent for 4 consecutive quarters.

Kolide ★

My thanks to Kolide for sponsoring last week at DF. Getting OS updates installed on end user devices should be easy. After all, it’s one of the simplest yet most impactful ways that every employee can practice good security. On top of that, every MDM solution promises that it will automate the process and install updates with no user interaction needed. Yet in the real world, it doesn’t play out like that. Users don’t install updates and IT admins won’t force installs via forced restart.

With Kolide, when a user’s device — be it Mac, Windows, Linux, or mobile — is out of compliance, Kolide reaches out to them with instructions on how to fix it. The user chooses when to restart, but if they don’t fix the problem by a predetermined deadline, they’re unable to authenticate with Okta.

Watch Kolide’s on-demand demo to learn more about how it enforces device compliance for companies with Okta.