Whoa! It's been a little while since I've written on here!

I think people are starting to realize that algorithmic consumption is quite different from the original paradigm of the internet and has several negative side effects (it's Shane and me, we're people). One used to have to do significant work (and get lucky) to discover new sites and creators since there wasn't a hub maintaining all the relationships. Social media sites are hubs, with their invention of concepts like "user" and the "following" relationship. A user is basically a data template which is accessible to nontechnical folks—one just logs in and executes database operations (SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE) through a pre-packaged, sandboxed GUI (upload, delete, like, save, follow...). This makes it possible for virtually everyone to have "their own" pseudopage¹ and grow the social network to objectively bonkers proportions (millions to billions of users). And, once there are enough users, the centralized company serving the website can glean some seriously powerful trends by watching everyone bustle about, tapping and clicking without restraint; thus leading to The Algorithm.

Maybe in the "old web" paradigm, before social media sites and even search engines, network sizes would be naturally limited (although, secretly, they are limited in the modern paradigm).

On the 1990s web it wasn't so easy to share content and connect with people online. Geocities helped, but it still took effort to upload media and get eyes on it.

I think I'm drawn to this more deliberate form of content creation and consumption, for nostalgic and mental-health-y reasons: endless scrolling is actually addicting, typically sucking up hours of my day and leaving me with an irritable mood and shortened attention span. And I don't really like the idea that my attention is bought and sold for meaningless or nefarious advertising schemes (if the product is free, then you are the product...); not that the business is bad, it just makes me see myself as a kind of sucker, like, what am I really getting out of this?

So I'll be moving some of my content from instagram to this site for archival purposes and making more regular updates. Careful observers of my instagram page will recall that I love sharing music, often putting up random images for the sole purpose of having something to attach a song to, so the design of a system to continue doing that is a high priority (thankfully spotify's API is quite good).

I don't really need 1,000 instagram followers. Maybe some people do, but not me. I AFFIRM! I would rather have a dozen close friends of mutual give-a-damn levels with whom I can interact on a more authentic channel. So, if you read this far: thanks! and I'm glad you're here.

¹ Scare quotes because you don't own the data; "pseudo" because you don't get complete control of the front end.