Costs
Generational digital culture guide to label limits
A generational digital culture guide to why age labels mislead online, how their boundaries shift, and four access questions for comparison.
Desk
Value Desk
What the spending buys, over what period, and when it does not pay back.
Rules
Five recognizable gaps in internet culture archives, and how to spot them
Five archive gaps and what each looks like from outside: the login wall, the assembled page, missing media, an overwritten capture, a closed community.
Guides
Online status and identity guide: keeping audiences apart
An online status and identity guide to keeping audiences apart: context collapse, separate accounts, and what to do when audiences meet.
Guides
Teaching generational digital culture across the gap
A practical guide to generational digital culture: start with what was scarce, avoid the analogies that mislead, and read the questions as a diagnostic.
Features
Canada's news link rules: what US social media users actually lose
Meta's news block, dated August 1 2023, and Canada's Online News Act: what US users lose in feeds, link previews and shared Canadian news posts.
Reviews
Generational statistics keep disagreeing once age, cohort and period blur together
Statistics on generational digital culture disagree because the terms are defined differently, the self-reports drift, and the sampling frame is the subject.
Features
Section 230 and Canada: where the US shield stops
Section 230 is a US liability shield that Canadian law does not borrow. How Bill C-11 and the Online News Act reach US platforms serving Canadian users.
Features
Social media slang statistics 2027: how to source them
How to source social media slang statistics 2027: Google Trends, OED and Merriam-Webster dates, platform tag volumes, and Wayback Machine captures.
Features
Vine creator payouts: what the Internet Archive can and cannot show
Vine creator payouts left no public ledger. Here is what the Internet Archive, Archive Team and SEC filings do and do not show about Vine money.
Industry
Getting critiques of social media risks right the first time
A method for critiques of social media risks: name the mechanism, scope the claim, identify a remedy, and state what would change your mind.
Features
How to compare social media metrics honestly
The benefits of social media comparison depend on matching units, bases and definitions. Use this six-step method to decide what can be compared honestly.
Reviews
What makes a social media trend spread, drift in meaning and eventually die out
How the 2014 Ice Bucket Challenge and 2013 Harlem Shake spread, shifted in meaning, and faded from view across Facebook and YouTube.
Costs
Benefits of social media examples with the reasoning laid bare
Six named cases where social media benefits are real, from Black Twitter to the ALS ice bucket, with the property each needs and the cost it carries.
Rules
Online status and identity statistics are instrument readings, not proof
Online status and identity statistics are instrument readings: what a counter counts, why it stops describing anything, and why comparisons fail.
Rules
3 US platform rules that shape what stays online
US platform rules come down to three: Section 230, COPPA and California's AADC. Here is what each one lets a platform keep, restrict or remove.
Features
Social media slang research: what to collect and clear
Social media slang research is a collection problem: what to gather, how to strip identity at capture, and the service, community and publishing questions.
Costs
Social media slang platforms: signal versus noise
How social media slang platforms shape vocabulary: five constraints, the words each one produces, and why those words outlive the constraint that made them.
Costs
What did Section 230 protect in 1996?
What did Section 230 protect? The 1996 law's two protections, the text and context behind them, and how courts first interpreted the provision.
Industry
Understanding memes and virality comparison properly
A memes and virality comparison of five things people call the same word: format, trend, catchphrase, hoax and challenge, and what each demands.
Costs
Trends in early social networks: what a revival can and cannot restore
Trends returning early social networks to smaller rooms: what the revival trades away, how federation repeats an old shape, and what cannot come back.
Features
Internet communities updates: four transitions, named
Internet communities updates explained: four transitions — software, host, leadership, ownership — with named cases, what each one breaks, and a checklist.
Guides
Six meme archetypes, and why their examples age so quickly
Memes and virality examples described as six archetypes rather than instances, with the fixed part, the variable part and the failure each one runs into.
Guides
Platform timelines platforms: five design levers explained
Platform timelines platforms read through their design levers: forwarding, persistence, identity and feed ordering, with real platform changes as examples.
Industry
Platform timelines research: searching under old names
Platform timelines research often fails on names: how to build a name ledger, search each name in turn, and log what each search found or missed.
Rules
Platform Timeline Risks: A Six-Point Harm Audit
Use this platform timeline risks audit to catch false attribution, erased communities, invented causation, and silent edits before they shape a public history.