robleathern.bsky.social
@robleathern.bsky.social
Reposted
It's a home and away series today! @robleathern.bsky.social and I have traded newsletters to continue our reaction to @jeffhorwitz.bsky.social article about Meta's shockingly high fraud rates. 1/3
November 14, 2025 at 2:00 PM
Anyone here?
April 26, 2025 at 11:33 AM
Fun, I submitted a very small Facebook mobile web bug which Meta fixed but it fell below their threshold for a bug bounty (I would have donated it to charity of course)
April 16, 2025 at 8:10 PM
Clownocracy day 79
April 9, 2025 at 1:39 PM
2025 is not like other recent years in so many ways
April 5, 2025 at 8:59 PM
A friend (very happily switched from another electric car brand and) just got a @Rivian and asked me, a longtime owner:

“Got my Rivian! Another Rivian driver waved as he passed by. Is that a thing like with Jeeps? Do I have to wave at everyone now?”
March 16, 2025 at 4:12 PM
More relevant than ever
“The Great Gatsby is dated and irrelevant.” You’re right. What could a novel about a generation of young men becoming hustlers and white nationalists because they were sold a lie about the American Dream possibly have to say about our current moment?
March 12, 2025 at 2:06 PM
The TV show Silicon Valley still holds up. Hilarious.

“I’m not going to be the one to tell him we’re 15 weeks behind, but feel free”
February 26, 2025 at 12:24 PM
“Thank you for registering your phone number with the National Do Not Call Registry. You successfully registered your phone number ending in XXXX on June 29, 2003.”
February 12, 2025 at 5:56 PM
The OAI o1 and DeepSeek r1 models are obviously not designed to play chess optimally (vs say Stockfish which is better than all human players) but this was LOL hilarious to watch with the kid youtu.be/JHq4EKMg7fI?...
ChatGPT vs DeepSeek: CRAZY Chess
YouTube video by GothamChess
youtu.be
January 31, 2025 at 1:00 PM
Extrapolating our behavior from search to AI, we underestimate how many more details (health, private, intimate) we will tell a machine than another person
January 31, 2025 at 12:52 PM
Have some sympathy for the comms teams scrambling to write DeepSeek into earnings call scripts
January 29, 2025 at 7:52 PM
I bet you you’ve never checked out the Apple Ad Repository!
January 29, 2025 at 3:50 PM
On your iPhone if you want more than one free “20 minute” wi-fi session on the plane eg American Airlines, just touch the (i) next to Wi-Fi network name and toggle the “Private Wi-Fi Address setting between off/fixed/rotating
January 24, 2025 at 6:44 PM
"The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place." - George Bernard Shaw
January 23, 2025 at 4:25 PM
I’d like to write more here about online privacy and trust - and I would love some help getting more followers. If you’ve seen my content elsewhere on X or Threads pls re-share this
January 22, 2025 at 10:36 PM
A friend to me last night: “So many people, on both sides, are trying to find ways to let this go. Bc no one knows what to do if it’s real. We just aren’t ready to resist.”
January 21, 2025 at 3:59 PM
9pm eastern - it begins
January 19, 2025 at 2:02 AM
Most people do not realize how opaque and privacy-problematic the advertising SDK world is. Multiply shitty ad networks, thousands of apps running ads & data brokers by exact location permissions (along with coarser geoIP in many cases too)
The biggest story in data privacy continues with a new piece about the Gravy Analytics hack covered in @404media.co (www.404media.co/candy-crush-...) + @wired.com (www.wired.com/story/gravy-...) --- i'm proud to have provided a few comments, but wanted to expand on it briefly in this thread:
January 15, 2025 at 4:22 PM
Another key skill is adding+ subtracting stakeholders. Sometimes you need to convince a knowledgeable exec to get more involved/interested in your project (sometimes it’s the opposite!) - but make sure they have enough bandwidth to engage or else they may slow things down.
Managing negotiations is a core PM skill. Two failure patterns stand out.

1. Mismatched mindsets: negotiations often fall into “Kansas style” (cooperative, trust-based) or “Chicago style” (aggressive, competitive). While I favor Kansas, adapting to the other side’s energy is crucial for success.
January 13, 2025 at 12:10 AM
Reposted
Read Dave, who helped build Facebook’s first content policies, on why this week represents such a big step backwards: “The specific examples I called out above have been prohibited on the site since I wrote the first set of hate speech standards in 2009.”
Folks are mostly missing the forest for the trees re: the recent Meta announcement. Specifically, the focus on the move from fact checking to community notes. There two different changes that are a much bigger deal that have received less focus. 🧵 1/11
January 10, 2025 at 5:45 AM
Reposted
Folks are mostly missing the forest for the trees re: the recent Meta announcement. Specifically, the focus on the move from fact checking to community notes. There two different changes that are a much bigger deal that have received less focus. 🧵 1/11
January 9, 2025 at 8:29 PM
Reposted
Here's my "fact check" on Meta's announcement that it is terminating its fact checking program. The TL;DR: Pay more attention to product changes than to political pandering. THREAD...
January 7, 2025 at 5:43 PM
@willoremus.com hi Will - I just joined bluesky recently. Good to see you here - in case you wanted to share something.. Here’s my latest blog post -> robleathern.substack.com/p/robs-notes...
Rob's Notes 17: A Custom Filtered Future?
Are we ready for an even more fragmented online experience?
robleathern.substack.com
January 9, 2025 at 4:48 PM
There is a chance actions like Meta's makes regulators even more eager to force platforms to act on less serious, potentially-harmful content. Which is why I think we might see platforms start to put the power of filtering directly into users’ hands -> robleathern.substack.com/p/robs-notes...
January 8, 2025 at 7:43 PM