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Hi! My name is Mills Baker. I’m from New Orleans and after more than a decade in the San Francisco Bay Area, I now live there again with my wife Abby, our daughter Keziah, our son Raines, our little dog, and our big cat. I’m the Head of Design at Substack, supporting an amazing team which serves writers and readers alike in a new model of distribution and monetization which we believe will foster a healthier, more sustainable online media ecosystem.

I've been online since eWorld and sent my first web site over FTP in 1997 after I learned HTML from Jonah Peretti in my hometown high school. Since then, I've worked for Quora, Facebook, a few small startups, a massive retailer, a veterinary hospital, and myself, doing freelance web design. My full CV is here.

I currently write at Sucks to Suck with my pals David Cole and Omar Khalid.

 

Quora (2016-2020)

At Quora I was a Product Design Manager, supporting an incredible team of designers working on: launching Spaces (our communities product), core product work, i18n, ads, video and images tools, Partners, and much, much more. I also worked to scale the team, helping to almost double its size, while improving processes, instantiating culture, and helping with product strategy.

I’m so proud of what the team at Quora accomplished and truly loved my time there.

Facebook (2015-2016)

I worked on Facebook’s Friend Sharing team, which was dedicated to increasing the degree to which people shared personal content on Facebook by (1) developing new formats, tools, and experiences and (2) addressing dynamics which made people feel uncomfortable sharing their lives with friends online, from “audience problems” to “context collapse” and much more.

I also shipped improvements to Notes, Facebook’s writing tool, and did onboarding for newly hired designers as part of Design Camp.

More:

I started a blog called Meta is Murder in 2007, and over the years it developed a surprisingly large readership; much of my writing is there, and people have liked posts on the imperative that design deliver value, how design and compromise relate, and the charisma of Steve Jobs. Here's a "best of" (puke, sorry, just trying to make this helpful!).

Objectivity and Art is one of a few posts I feel happy with. In it, I present what I believe is a fruitful, reliable means of approaching the evaluation of art's quality, and I try to relate the ultimate aims of all arts to coming virtual environments, assessing the affinity between art and technology. Nowadays I'm active on Quora, and much of my recent writing is there; I focus on topics from living with bipolar disorder (in treatment since 2000!) to music history to philosophy and, of course, technology. For even more writing, you can check out the Quora Design blog.

In general, I believe in applying pragmatism and critical rationalism to business, product, and organizational problems. I think epistemological caution —for example, distinguishing between different modes of thinking— is extremely important and should inform both how software is developed and how people should treat one another.

Recently I've been interested in the effects of technology on perennial human concerns and ignored or misunderstood instincts, needs, and feelings. I'm especially fascinated by online moralizing, othering, harassment, reduction, and similar norm-enforcing behaviors, and how network design influences them all. I'm also interested in UI innovation, especially involving the abstraction of complexity and the trade-offs involved in empowering users in various, sometimes non-obvious ways.

I've also appeared on Design Details, if you want to hear me rant!