Links #4

Interesting bits from around the web.

Visit for a surprise. A great example of thinking deeply about the nuances involved in ensuring the web is accessible to as many people as possible without just ticking “accessibility” checkboxes. Context is key.

AARRR. A nice pirate-y acronym to help you remember “acquisition, activation, retention, referral, and revenue”. I find this useful when looking at a client’s site and other touch-points to try and find opportunities to leverage improvements. You can be certain that there’s always one point that can benefit from more attention.

Before YouTube’s algorithm there were “coolhunters”. An article in The Atlantic about the way the YouTube homepage was curated by hand. I think there’s a lot to be said for having a strongly opinionated editorial direction on the web, I try to encourage this with homepages and merchandising online shops. There are some potential downsides (you can’t please everyone and you run the risk of gatekeeping) but human elements in a digital world stand out.

How YouTube killed IE6. I was reminded of this article in The Verge about the actions of a small group of engineers at YouTube in the early days that helped accelerate the demise of Internet Explorer 6, and I don’t blame them one bit. Bonus, there’s a picture of a client in the screen grab of YouTube’s homepage. There’s also a Twitter thread somewhere that I can’t find for the life of me, but was an interesting tale of Pinterest’s human curated homepage in the early days.

AI is not the problem. Obviously, it’s the hot topic, and there’s plenty of opinions around, but this one struck a chord. I recently listened to the 2021 Reith Lectures on the BBC which had some interesting discussion around the ethics of AI from a time before ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion become part of the discourse.