consuming infosec news and social commentary

(This is just me publishing an incomplete post from the past.)

How do I consume and keep up with infosec news?

Twitter is an always-running stream of water. You walk up to it when you’re thirsty, take a drink, and then walk away. You don’t try to catch everything that falls through while you walked away.

Those of us who grew up with IRC don’t find that a weird or foreign concept, since it often operates the same. You walk away from IRC for a day, and then come back, but you don’t typically try to read the entire buffer of any busy chat. You look for a few topics of interest, perhaps, or highlighted key words, but otherwise you just sit back down, read a screen or two up, and plug yourself into the conversation as is. Busy Discords can work this same way when conversations are not split up into multiple channels.

Pet peeve: Breaking topics into too many channels too quickly. This setup works for very busy forums or messenger/chat locations. But it kills momentum for anything not super large. It splinters discussions down from a healthy rate to a trickle that won’t keep anyone engaged for long. It also requires its users to keep clicking through various channels for any chance to keep up with conversations. I think what happens is new Discords/Slacks/Forums see how the big established ones do it, and they try to emulate that structure immediately. But that doesn’t work in the end. You need traffic first before justifying the splintering. (As someone who has lived 90% of my adult life in some form of online community, and as someone who has run several of them years ago, I have plenty of opinions on this topic…)

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