New post: When's The Last Time You Went On A Website And Smiled
When's The Last Time You Went On A Website And Smiled
Remember when websites felt like destinations, when you went online to go to a place. Some still are, Craigslist is fun to browse and exceedingly useful, McMaster-Carr is fun when you are daydreaming about mechanical engineering projects, Wattpad was... wild, still is. There was either gold or trash. But it was freeing in a way, to see the unpolished internet.
When websites were places
Before you get your South Park memberberries GIF out and accuse me of nostalgia baiting you, think about the why, why is the internet so concentrated on so few websites now. We don't go online so much as we are online, all the time.
We barely open our browsers on our phones anymore. We have the Google app, the ChatGPT app, we go on Twitter, Facebook, or whatever.
Dopamine loops and hostile design
We hardly treat the internet as this vast expanse to explore, and we know we know the why, dopamine engagement loops, the attention grabbing design. In all honesty using certain sites is starting to feel like a chore, perhaps it has felt like that for a long time.
Facebook is a pain to use on desktop, it's overwhelming in the worst of ways, clawing at the psyche to keep you there, looking at ads and slop, and ads that are slop. LinkedIn is no better, fear mongering to sell people on their paid services, DMs from so-called universities selling courses that might as well be outdated when you enroll. We used to have home pages, a home base, for a lot of people that used to be Google but now... now it sucks. The AI summary is as useful as the case that comes with the Nokia 3310, aka the brick. Their models are decent but the search function doesn't need AI like that, not when it hallucinates so much. We get so caught up in the cycle of engagement. Every site is an idle clicker at this point, every app on mobile, they at least feel that way.
And somewhere on the internet right now someone will go on about Neocities, or Nekoweb about how we can do this and that's valid, it's important, it's only the first step. The truth is our time online is now monopolized by the ghost of productivity, the specter of hustle.
Being online isn't a choice anymore, it's not an act, it is now a default. From iPad kids to exhausted adults coming home and doomscrolling, to complete destruction of spaces where teenagers can exist in peace. Have you ever wondered why kids don't go outside no more? Go look at the outside, in their eyes. What do you do with no spending cash? What happens when just for being young and sitting down, you are considered to be loitering, when architecture itself becomes hostile to anyone taking a seat.
This tiny corner of teh interwebz
When I write this blog I do so with no expectations, I do so hoping you subscribe to the newsletter/email thing, and that if app itself sounds fun to you, you sign up for that too. I made this from shared joy with friends, I told the whole story on Why vibecoder.date and Yoloing the Product Hunt Launch Because I'm Done Caring About The What If and it dawned on me, spaces where conversations happen are a must, and truth is we are losing those. Sure Discord is bigger than ever but it's also hard to navigate sometimes. It's overwhelming to a point, and it is so insidious in its want to integrate itself into your every activity. This sentiment, this idea that we must broadcast to the world at any time, our status feels... it feels wrong, and it is dystopian. We are beyond the panopticon, we do TikTok dances in its face and demand it keep looking.
I could and maybe should optimize this blog for SEO, crank out a million articles, do tutorials that go viral, and I want none of that. I'm not some nostalgia huffing entity who preaches a return to old ways.
Personal websites for fun are a start, purposeful browsing is a start, but we need an entry point, what directories used to be before search, we need new search too, non-commercial search. Google is still a good search engine no matter how much they try to make it suck with AI and ads. I get it, I get that we must do monetization to survive but just for once can we do something that isn't trying to advertise or sell? can we do something for ourselves? As much as this site has paid features, I'd be deeply alarmed if revenue went above a certain number. That's not me eschewing success. I'm just letting go of grindset on every little thing. I have activities that make money, and then I have this blog, this tiny corner of 'teh interwebz' as we used to call it.
Some people, and I've seen it on YouTube a lot have this idea of quitting the smartphone and to a certain degree they have some success. One YouTuber I want to highlight here is Bread on penguins, she handles the nuance of things very well and can speak way better than I can about being offline in a meaningful way. That's the crux of it isn't it, as the Claude models would put it, the shape of it, the core idea. It all feels rather meaningless and induces fatigue.
Even now, you're reading this article, are you thinking, "Oh, where's the actionable advice?" are you wondering when I will get to the damn point? Do you feel ashamed that you have spent time reading something unoptimized?
Touch grass won't cut it
I'm not some hypocrite who will say touch grass and leave it at that. I know the impulses, the need to be online, the discomfort that comes from the isolation without it, and the isolation you feel anyway under the veneer of socializing that happens on platforms like Twitter. So what's the big idea? What's the solution here?
Stop looking for ready-made answers
There is a song, Epiphany by Bad Religion, I recommend, and I might start doing this more, referencing music and talking about it. Every newsletter I see is about adding value, lessons learned, and it boils my blood that that is all we think of ourselves. I call it being procedurally jaded. Life is more than that. I keep thinking about that song and how no answer is absolute or permanent, and the only actionable thing I can say is to stop looking for the ready made answers, and come up with some for yourself. As much as it hurts to think manually, as much as we are tempted and rewarded for offloading it. We all need to face the fact that answers are found in creating them, researching, forming hypotheses and testing them, observing, and listening. Answers are made by combining action and observation, and right now, right now we want answers from mere consumption.
Buzzwords into nothingness
Twitter lately has this obsession with the word clarity, and the word signal. I get it, they are good words but they seem to become mere flanderizations of themselves, they get bastardized and buzzworded into nothingness. Everyone wants clarity, but who is picking leaves out of the pool, who is doing the cleanup? There is this pervasive contradiction where we only value effort with ROI attached, it makes sense for some things but it corrupts so much else. I don't want to close this article by making you feel hopeless, I'm not telling you to go open a Tumblr or start your own personal site (but do ping me if you do, I'm serious—I'd love to see it).
Form your own conclusions
Ultimately, what my opinion is doesn't matter much beyond making you form your own—disagree, agree, or whatever in between—the point of today is to think, to form your own conclusions and express them if you wish. We can choose what we offload and why, and we should look deep inside and reflect on what we want those choices to be and why.