SitePoint Weekly #18
The Section 230 Trap

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The Loop
Just published on SitePoint

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The Rundown
Top technology stories this week

Section 230 has been at the forefront of the discourse again as of late, reprising a typecast role as the culprit enabling Big Tech’s bad behaviour — at least according to many politicians and too many tech journalists.

In It’s Not 230 You Hate, It’s Oligopolies from Katharine Trendacosta at the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

As we continue to hear calls to repeal or change Section 230, it appears that many people have conflated a law that affects the tech giants (among many others) with Big Tech as a whole. Section 230 is not a gift to Big Tech, nor is repealing it a panacea for the problems Big Tech is causing—to the contrary repealing it will only exacerbate those problems. The thing you hate is not 230. It’s lack of competition.

The EFF has published a clear piece on why it’s not, and why killing it will make the problem worse. As usual, I recommend Cory Doctorow for a big picture perspective on the problems in tech.

It’s easy to see why Facebook endorses changes to Section 230 — it'll be in the most secure and entrenched position it's ever been in. The cure should never be worse than the disease — but more importantly, it should actually be a cure.

Related Reads

• Stop Talking About Section 230. Start Talking About The Business Model.
• Social-Media Algorithms Rule How We See the World. Good Luck Trying to Stop Them.
• How Social Media’s Obsession with Scale Supercharged Disinformation
• Online speech and publishing
• Twitter and Interoperability: Some Thoughts From the Peanut Gallery

In Millions Flock to Telegram and Signal as Fears Grow Over Big Tech in The New York Times:

"Over the past week, tens of millions of people have downloaded Signal and Telegram, making them the two hottest apps in the world. Signal allows messages to be sent with “end-to-end encryption,” meaning no one but the sender and receiver can read its contents. Telegram offers some encrypted messaging options, but is largely popular for its group-based chat rooms where people can discuss a variety of subjects."

Telegram and Signal are solid apps that have been growing steadily for years. The article focuses on recent partisan events, but this sonic boom of growth comes as Big Tech distrust reaches a fever pitch with the public across the political spectrum. Signal and Telegram are better options than WhatsApp no matter how you slice it. For starters, we can verify that the end-to-end encryption in each is as described rather than having to trust Facebook.

But as Anirudh Oppiliappan writes, we can do better than Signal. Signal and (to a lesser extent) Telegram eliminate this problem of trust by open sourcing code. Knowing how the rig works is great, but what we’re powerless over is the operation of that machinery. Our access to something as fundamental as messaging is still in someone else’s hands, and often subject to very different data privacy legislation.

Centralized systems leave us chasing our tails, always looking for the next benevolent king as those who win the market complete the clockwork descent into stale corporate sociopathy. For something as essential as messaging, I hope open, decentralised systems are the future, and Anirudh mentions a couple that are worth checking out.

• Send this to anyone who wants to know WTF is up with GameStop stock
• Could meme stocks like GameStop kill bitcoin’s rise?
• Google threatens to remove its search engine from Australia if new law goes into effect
• Web's inventor says news media bargaining code could break the internet. He's right — but there's a fix
• Twitter’s Birdwatch fights misinformation with community notes
• Brave browser takes step toward enabling a decentralized web: First browser to fully integrate the new IPFS protocol.
• Instacart is firing every employee who voted to unionize
• Treasury nominee Yellen is looking to curtail use of cryptocurrency: Yellen argues many cryptocurrencies are used "mainly for illicit financing."
• They claimed the Covid-19 vaccine made them ill. Then they went viral.

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Versioning
Web development, design, and tooling

• If you’ve been wondering what the state of things is, it’s the season to find out. Check out the State of JS 2020 and State of Design in 2021 — both impressively executed projects.
• Accepting it may be the hardest thing you’ve ever done. But the reality remains: your code needs comments.
• Get acquainted with Aleph, a new framework for building web apps powered by React and Deno. 
• Learn how to power up your Eleventy site with Environment Variables.
• In Enterprise UX is amazing. Change my mind, Yichen He describes the field's unique challenges.
• Sophia Enakpoya explains how to remove a sensitive file from your commit history on GitHub.
• Build a scalable GraphQL server with NestJS, MongoDB, and TypeScript.
• How to design REST APIs using Express, MongoDB, and TypeScript.
• Daniel Bartholomae looks at test-driven development in a React frontend.
• I almost got fired for choosing React in our enterprise app: "React was supposed to ease our development. Instead, it created roadblocks."
• Safari 14 added WebExtensions support. So where are the extensions?
• Michael Tsai answers: behind a gauntlet of barriers to entry.

You have to adapt it for WebKit, join Apple’s $99/year developer program, learn how to use Xcode and App Store Connect, and distribute via the Mac App Store.

On the Tools

• If you’re looking for a workflow automation tool, give Integromat a go. Zapier is the big name in the space, but the pricing on tasks per month is too high to be all that appealing for personal use. I’ve enjoyed building workflows with Integromat recently without ever feeling like the basic $9 plan was on borrowed time — a refreshing change.
• shopify-theme-lab is a Shopify theme development environment using Liquid, Vue and Tailwind CSS.
• Meli is a platform for deploying static sites and frontend applications easily. Automatic SSL, deploy previews, reverse proxy, and more.
• Pal provides no-code user onboarding for your Flutter apps.

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The Roadmap
Product, strategy, and execution

• Jon Yongfook of Bannerbear takes a look at his journey to $10k MRR in a breezy illustrated format.
• The scary future of Instagram is a case study in the manipulative user experience strategies you should avoid if you care about user intent-driven design.
• Designmodo’s Nataly Birch shares insights on important email marketing trends for 2021.
• Too many data points can quickly become more confusing than helpful as a new project grows. Ahref’s Michal Pecánek shares 7 marketing KPIs actually worth tracking applicable to most SaaS and digital product businesses.

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Logic Flow
Computing, automation, productivity​, and tools for thought

• Dan Shipper in Superorganizers: How hard should I push myself? What the science of stress tells us about peak performance.
• Deskreen turns any device with a web browser into a second screen for your computer.
• These 9 YouTube URL tricks will help you make GIFs, loop videos, and more.
• Wonder what’s going on inside the AirPods Max — and how user serviceable they might be? iFixit answers all your questions with its AirPods Max teardown.
• VSCode Notion lets you browse Notion pages without leaving Visual Studio Code.
• Learn how to take smart notes in Roam Research.
• Feeling cornered by the new reality in the portable CPU market? ARM virtualisation company Corellium has gotten Ubuntu 20.04 to work on the Apple Silicon M1.
• It’s FOSS has published a KDE Customization Guide that explains 11 ways you can modify KDE’s appearance.

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Connect with the community

That's it for this week's issue. We'll see you in the next one — in the meantime, connect with us for a chat through our various communities:

• the SitePoint forums
• our Discord server
• read new articles
• or via Twitter

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Until next time,

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Joel Falconer
Managing Editor