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Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself?

Hello! My name is Karen. I work in IT support for a large company’s legal department, and am currently working on my Bachelors in Cybersecurity and Information Assurance.

I live near New Orleans, Louisiana, with my husband and two dogs - Daisy, A Pembroke Welsh Corgi, and Mia, a Chihuahua. Daisy is The Most Serious Corgi ever (tm), and Mia has the personality of an old lady who chain smokes, plays Bingo every week at the rec center, and still records her soap operas on a VHS daily. My husband is an avid maker (woodworking and 3D printing, mostly), video gamer, and has an extensive collection of board games that takes up the entire back wall of our livingroom.

As for me, outside of work, I’m a huge camera nerd and photographer. I love film photography, and recently learned how to develop my own negatives at home! I also do digital - I will never turn my nose up at one versus the other. I’ve always been into assorted fandoms, and used to volunteer at local sci-fi/fantasy/comic conventions up to a few years ago. I got into K-Pop back in 2022, and am now an active participant in the local New Orleans fan community, providing Instax photo booth services for events. I’ve also hosted K-Pop events here in NOLA as well. My ult K-Pop group is ATEEZ, but I’m a proud multi fan and listen to whatever groups or music catch my attention, including Stray Kids, SHINee, and Mamamoo. I also love 80s and 90s alternative, mainly Depeche Mode, Nine Inch Nails, and Garbage.

And yes, I may be named Karen but I refuse to BE a “Karen”. I don’t get upset when people use the term, I find it hilarious.

What's the story behind your blog?

So I have been blogging off and on since 2001 or so - back when they were still called “weblogs” and “online journals”. Originally, I was using LiveJournal, but even with a paid account, I wanted to learn more customization and make a site that was truly my own. My husband - then boyfriend - had their own server, and gave me some space on it. I started out creating sites in Microsoft Frontpage and Dreamweaver (BEFORE Adobe owned them!), and moved to using Greymatter blog software, which I loved and miss dearly.

I moved to Wordpress in - 2004 maybe? - and used that for all my personal sites until 2024. I’d been reading more and more about the Indieweb for a while and found Bear, and I loved the simplicity.

I’ve had sites ranging from a basic daily online journal, to a fashion blog, to a food blog, to a K-Pop and fandom-centric blog, to what it is today - my online space for everything and anything I like.

I taught myself HTML and CSS in order to customize and create my sites. No classes, no courses, no books, no certifications, just Google and looking at other people’s sites to see what I liked and how they did it. My previous job before this one, I was a web administrator for a local marketing company that built sites using DNN and Wordpress, and I’m proud to say that I got that job and my current one with my self-developed skills and being willing to learn and grow. I would not be where I am today, professionally, if it wasn’t for blogging.

What does your creative process look like when it comes to blogging?

I’ll be totally honest - I don’t have a writing process. I get inspiration from random thoughts, seeing things online, wanting to share the day-to-day of my life. I don’t draft or have someone proof read, I just type out what I feel like writing.

When I had blogs focusing on specific things - plus size fashion and K-Pop, respectively - I kept a list of topics and ideas to refer back to when I was stuck for ideas. That was when I was really focused on playing the SEO and search engine algorithm game, though, where I was trying to stick to the “two-three posts a week” rule in an attempt to boost my search engine results. I don’t do that now. I do still have a list of ideas on my phone, but it’s nothing I am feeling FORCED to stick to. It’s more along the lines of that I had an idea while I was out, and wanted to note it so I don’t forget. Memory is a fickle thing in your late 40s, LOL.

Do you have an ideal creative environment? Also do you believe the physical space influences your creativity?

My space absolutely influences my mindset for writing. I prefer to write in the early morning, because my brain operates best then. (I know I am an exception to the rule by being an early bird.) I love weekend mornings when I can get up really early and settle into my recliner with my laptop and coffee, and just listen to some lofi music and just feel topics and ideas out. I also made my office/guest bedroom into a cozy little space, with a daybed full of soft blankets and fluffy pillows and cushions, and a lap desk.

In all honesty, my preferred location to write is at a coffeeshop first thing in the morning. I love sitting tucked in a booth with a coffee and muffin, headphones on and listening to music, when the sun is just on the cusp of rising and the shop is still a little too chilly. That’s when the creative ideas light up the brightest and the synapses are firing on all cylinders.

A question for the techie readers: can you run us through your tech stack?

Currently, my site is hosted on Bear.

I used to be a self-hosted Wordpress devotee, but in mid-late 2024, I got really tired of the bloat that the apps had become. In order to use it efficiently for me, I had to install entirely too many plugins to make it “simpler”. (Shout-out to the Indieweb Wordpress team, though - they work so hard on those plugins!) Of course, the more plugins you have, the less secure your site…

My domain is registered through Hostinger.

To write my posts, I use Bear Markdown Notes. I heard about this program after seeing a few others talking about using it for drafts, notes, etc.

Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do anything differently?

I honestly don’t think I’d change much! I really love using Bear Blog. It reminds me of the very old school LiveJournal days, or when I used Greymatter. It takes me back to the web being simpler, more straightforward, more fun. I also like Bear’s manifesto, and that he built the service for longevity.

I would probably structure my site differently, especially after seeing some personal sites set up with more of a “digital garden” format. I will eventually adjust my site at some point, but for now, I’m fine with it. (That and between school and work, it’s kind of low on the priority list.)

Financial question since the Web is obsessed with money: how much does it cost to run your blog? Is it just a cost, or does it generate some revenue? And what's your position on people monetising personal blogs?

I purchased a lifetime subscription to Bear after a week of using it, which ran around $200 - I don’t remember exactly. I knew that I was going to be using the service for a while and thought I should invest in a place that I believed in. My Hostinger domain renewals run around $8.99 annually.

My blog is just my personal site - I don’t generate any revenue or monetise in any way.

I don’t mind when people monetize their site - it’s their site and they can do what they choose. As long as it’s not invading others’ privacy or harmful, I have absolutely no issue. Make that money however you like.

Time for some recommendations: any blog you think is worth checking out? And also, who do you think I should be interviewing next?

Ooooh I have three really good suggestions for both checking out and interviewing!

Binary Digit - B is kind of an influence for me to play with my site again. They have just this super cool and early 2000s vibe and style that I really love. Their site reminds me of me when I first started blogging, when I was learning new things and implementing what I thought was cool on my site, joining fanlistings, making new online friends.

Kevin Spencer - I love Kevin’s writing and especially his photography. Not only that, he has fantastic taste in music. I’ve left many a comment on his site about 80s and 90s synthpop and industrial music.

A Parenthetical Departure - Sylvia was one of the first sites I started reading when I started looking up info on Bear Blog. They are EXTREMELY talented and have an excellent knack for playing with design, and showing others how it works.

Final question: is there anything you want to share with us?

One of my side projects is Burn Like A Flame, which is my local K-pop and fandom photography site. I actualy just started a project there that is more than slightly based on People and Blogs - The Fandom Story Project. I’m interviewing local fans to talk about what they love and what their feelings are on fandom culture now, and I’m accompanying that with a photoshoot with that person. It’s a way to introduce people to each other within the community.

Two of my favorite YouTube channels that I have recently been watching are focused on fashion discussion and history - Bliss Foster and understitch,. If you like learning and listening to information on fashion, I highly recommend these creators.

I know a TON of people have now seen K-Pop Demon Hunters (which I love, and the movie has a great message for not only kids, but adults). If you’ve seen this and are interested in getting into K-Pop, I suggest checking out my favorite group, ATEEZ. If you think that most K-Pop is all chirpy bubbly cutesy songs, let me suggest two by this group that aren’t what you’d expect: Guerrilla and Turbulence. I strongly suggesting watching without the translations, and then watching again with them. Their lyrics are the thing that really drew me into this group, and had me learning more about the deeper meaning behind a lot of K-Pop songs.

And finally, THANK YOU to Manu for People and Blogs! I always find some really great new sites to check out after reading these interviews, and I am truly honored to be asked to join this list of great bloggers. It’s inspiring me to work harder on my blog and to post more often.

Keep exploring

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ChatGPT aggregates people the same way polls aggregate voters. Ignore individuality, unable to hear new ideas, allowing journalists to write the same horse race stories every year. It would be better if they found a way to report originality, they can set an example for AIs.#

There are a bunch of useful demo apps in the reallysimple package, which also is itself fairly useful. I used all these tools in implementing FeedLand and WordLand, so I'm pretty sure they'd be useful to other users and developers. The feeder app, one of the demos, is used to generate the Links page on scripting.com, and provides utilities to the scripting language in Drummer. #

Thanksgiving gratitude#

• Happy belated Thanksgiving. I was so busy yesterday, didn't have the time to do my usual Thanksgiving gratitude post. And I do have a few things to be thankful for this year. #
• First I want to thank all the non-technical peoople who read this blog every day. This has been one of the very nicest things about writing this blog, going back to 1994, there have been quite a few people who skim the technical posts, of which there have been many these days, as I am preparing to try to shake up the world of discourse on the net, hoping to get it back on the track it was on before the silos came along and monetized us. Ultimately, if it happens, we will all benefit, techies and non-techies alike. #
• I thank you all for your patience and indulgence. #
• Most of the non-tech readers I hear from are women, btw. My mother for example was a regular reader. For whatever reason, pleasing women is about 1,000,000 times more important to me than pleasing men. Possibly because I had a gutsy mother who programmed me that way. Almost nothing makes me happier.#
• Another thing that makes me unreasonably happy is to be back in touch with most of the developers who worked with me at UserLand on Frontier. Starting wtih Jake Savin, and then André Radke, Brent Simmons and Wes Felter. And esp with Brent, who went on to write NetNewsWire, the hugely popular feed reader for Mac OS. This means so much to me. I spent years bouncing ideas off Brent and listening to what he said very carefully. I also strived to pass on through each of them my values of software, computer networks, and our responsibilities to users. Each of them are different, have different strengths, but they are all lovely human beings. Reconnecting this year wasn't in any way a goal of mine, it just happened that way. #
• Another thing that makes me absolutely optimistic about the future is to discover the compatibility between the vision of the web that I shared with many of the early web developers, again going back to 1994 and the following years, and today's developers of WordPress. We occupy different spaces in tech, I'm a web developer who works in JavaScript in the browser and Node.js, and they work in PHP and their own platform, but as I opined yesterday, you can use the web to connect all flavors of things, by design. I used the criticism that Mastodon and WordPress are like apples and oranges, an American idiom that usually connotes incompatibility, but on the web, you can connect apples and oranges. Differences are negotiable, you have to remember that -- and taking advantage of the web that way is what it was created for. Like the internet it was built on, the web makes it possible for very different things to work together, and in doing so makes it possible for people to work together too. #
• I know I've thanked him before, but it's worth doing again -- thanks to Tim Berners-Lee for his very timely invention of the web, which set users and developers everywhere free, only to have the siloers re-emerge fourteen years after its advent to give power back to the bankers, with the predictable, disastrous results. Our political system suffered a massive virtual oil spill thanks to Twitter, which we have yet to begin to clean up. As a result health care is in a very precarious state. It has been used as an instrument of war. Who could have imagined that a cutely-named system like Twitter could do all that damage, but it did. #
• TBL gave us a taste of freedom. Many of the WordPress community leaders are too young to have had that taste, but they still believe in it. And that's probably the most important thing to be thankful for. And maybe it's not the only tech community that has that inspiration at its core. And maybe that feeling extends beyond tech?#
• We build bubbles to contain us, to make the communities we're part of smaller and thus more manageable. But if we do it right, we can be part of the Macintosh world and the WordPress world, and build the proper interfaces to our work so we're also part of the web. That's where the magic comes from. The unforseen connections that "just work" the first time. That's where I've chosen to work as I approach the end of my career -- on the intersections that route around the silos and return the power of the web to the people. #
• BTW, maybe this idea can connect to the story of AOC, Bernie Sanders and Heather Cox Richardson, three of my current-day examples for how we can use communication to get back on track to a world with purpose and a heart.#

Not because of some strange cosmic joke that made every house I visited yesterday messy. And not because it’s a Swedish thing to apologize for the mess, no matter how clean your home is.

Nope.

It’s because everybody really does think their home is the worst. They imagine all the houses I visit to be neat and spotless, and theirs is terrible in comparison.

But it’s not. It’s pretty much the same everywhere, no matter what area I’m working in or who happens to live there.

We people are more alike than we think.

So the next time you feel like your life is a mess compared to others, trust me when I say your neighbor’s the same.

You’re doing fine. Don’t worry.

 

My last Torment Nexus piece was about how weak the FTC's antitrust case against Meta was, weak enough that it was thrown out by a federal court judge. But don't take that argument as evidence that I am a Meta fan — far from it. It may not be a monopoly, but that doesn't mean it isn't harmful and in some cases actually dangerous. The one I have the most experience with is the situation in Myanmar, where Facebook ignored the signs that its platform was being used to promote violence against the Rohingya population in that country, and ignored them for so long that a United Nations panel came to the conclusion that the company enabled a genocide that killed thousands and left thousands more maimed and homeless. Did Facebook deliberately do this? Of course not. They're not monsters (or at least not that specific kind of monster). Instead, they simply overlooked the evidence in front of them, or more likely decided it wasn't important enough to get in the way of the platform's growth and engagement goals.

Whenever something like this happens — not just with Facebook, but plenty of other tech companies — the response has become a kind of ritualized theater performance, a stylized exercise of going through the motions without any real outcome or change. In Meta's case, it involves Mark Zuckerberg or some other functionary from Facebook or Instagram commenting in the press about something hateful or dangerous that its platform enabled, and then in some cases appearing before Congress, shamefaced and sometimes truculent about the said wrongdoing. Zuckerberg or his stand-in will say that they are sorry, and that they had no idea that (insert hateful or dangerous conduct here) was being enabled by the platform. At some point, months or even years later, it will be revealed that Facebook or Instagram knew exactly what was happening and chose not to do anything about it, or at least nothing substantive anyway.

One of the examples of this that I am the most familiar with was when former Facebook staffer Frances Haugen blew the whistle on the company's behavior involving young and mostly female users of Instagram, in 2021. According to the thousands of pages of internal documents that Haugen took with her when she left the company — which were shared with the Wall Street Journal and other outlets, as well as with members of Congress — Meta senior executives knew from their internal research that Instagram was increasingly linked to emotional distress and body-image issues among young women. As Haugen described in an interview with me at the Mesh conference in 2023, she and a number of other staffers worked on ways of trying to reduce or even eliminate this problem, but time and again their work was ignored — because doing so might decrease engagement or interfere with Meta's growth and revenue targets. So did Meta know? Yes. Did they care? No. Or, at least not enough to do anything about it.

“We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls,” said one slide from 2019, summarizing research about teen girls who experience the issues. “Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression,” said another slide. “This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups.” Among teens who reported suicidal thoughts, 13% of British users and 6% of American users traced the desire to kill themselves to Instagram, one presentation showed. More than 40% of Instagram’s users are 22 years old and younger, and about 22 million teens log onto Instagram in the U.S. each day.

I should note here that I am on record as being skeptical of the more over-wrought analysis of social media's impact on the psychological well-being of teens, which I think has elements of moral panic, something I've written about before for Torment Nexus. Psychologist and author Jonathan Haidt has written many times about the epidemic of emotional harm that he says is being driven by smartphones and social tools like Instagram, but unfortunately social scientists say there is little or no tangible evidence of the kind of widespread harm he describes. I also think (as I wrote in a separate Torment Nexus piece) that banning teens from social media, as Australia has tried to do, is a mistake and will likely backfire. All that said, however, I believe that when evidence of harm is produced, it is incumbent on the company to try to mitigate those effects where possible, instead of turning a blind eye because it is focused on the bottom line.

Note: In case you are a first-time reader, or you forgot that you signed up for this newsletter, this is The Torment Nexus. You can find out more about me and this newsletter in this post. This newsletter survives solely on your contributions, so please sign up for a paying subscription or visit my Patreon, which you can find here. I also publish a daily email newsletter of odd or interesting links called When The Going Gets Weird, which is here.

Strike 17 and you're out

All of this was triggered by some recent revelations from documents filed in relation to a lawsuit against Meta and several other social-media companies (including TikTok and Snapchat), a case that aggregates thousands of separate lawsuits launched by US school districts, dating back to 2023, alleging that the social-media apps are damaging the mental health of their students. To take just one of the allegations contained in the brief, Instagram’s former head of safety Vaishnavi Jayakumar testified that when she joined Meta in 2020 she was shocked to learn that the company had a “17x” strike policy for accounts that reportedly engaged in the “trafficking of humans for sex.” In other words, a user could incur 16 violations for prostitution and sexual solicitation, and only after the 17th violation would their account be suspended.

As Time describes, the brief was filed by plaintiffs in the Northern District of California, and "alleges that Meta was aware of serious harms on its platform and engaged in a broad pattern of deceit to downplay risks to young users." It says that — among other things — Meta was aware that millions of adult strangers were contacting minors via its sites and social apps; that its products potentially exacerbated mental-health issues in teen users; and that content related to eating disorders, suicide, and child sexual abuse was frequently detected by the company's internal controls, but was rarely removed. The brief alleges that the company failed to disclose these harms to the public or to Congress, and refused to implement fixes that could have protected users. From Time:

“Meta has designed social media products and platforms that it is aware are addictive to kids, and they’re aware that those addictions lead to a whole host of serious mental health issues,” says Previn Warren, the co-lead attorney for the plaintiffs in the case. “Like tobacco, this is a situation where there are dangerous products that were marketed to kids,” Warren adds. “They did it anyway, because more usage meant more profits for the company.” 

The brief is based on what the legal team behind the case says are sworn depositions by current and former Meta executives, internal communications, and company research and presentations obtained during the lawsuit’s discovery process. It includes quotes and excerpts from thousands of pages of testimony and internal company documents. According to Time, the plaintiffs claim that since 2017, Meta has "aggressively pursued young users, even as its internal research suggested its social media products could be addictive and dangerous to kids." Despite the fact that Meta employees proposed multiple ways to mitigate these harms, any proposed changes were repeatedly blocked by executives who feared that new safety features would hamper teen engagement or user growth (just as Frances Haugen argued that hers were).

A Meta spokesperson told Time that the company "strongly disagrees" with the allegations, which "rely on cherry-picked quotes and misinformed opinions to paint a misleading picture." The company also points out that it has implemented new safety features for younger users, including the introduction of a new category of Instagram Teen Accounts, which put any user between 13 and 18 years of age in a special class of accounts that are private by default, limit sensitive content, and don't allow messages from adults who aren't already connected to the user. However, these features weren't added until last year. The testimony included in the brief quotes a former Meta vice-president of partnerships as saying: “My feeling then and my feeling now is that they don’t meaningfully care about user safety. It’s not something that they spend a lot of time on. It’s not something they think about. And I really think they don’t care.”

Headline goes here

According to the brief, in late 2019, Meta did a "deactivation study," which looked at users who stopped using Facebook and Instagram for a week, and found that they showed lower rates of anxiety, depression, and loneliness. The company didn't publicly disclose the results, stating that the research was unsound, in part because it was biased by the “existing media narratives around the company.” And in 2020, when Facebook was asked to appear before the members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the panel asked the company whether it was able to determine whether increased use of its platform among teenage girls has any correlation with increased signs of depression or increased signs of anxiety, and the company said no, it was not able to do so.

Why did the company not pursue this line of inquiry? The brief in the current lawsuit states that by 2020, the growth team had come to the conclusion that making the accounts of younger users private by default would mean losing about 1.5 million monthly active teens every year on Instagram. Over the next several months, staffers in the policy, legal, and well-being teams all recommended that the company should make teen accounts private by default. But Meta did not. Subsequently, according to the brief, inappropriate interactions between adults and kids on Instagram rose to 38 times the level of problematic interactions on Facebook Messenger, and the launch of Instagram Reels allegedly compounded the problem, because it .allowed young teenagers to broadcast short videos to a wide audience, including adult strangers.

Meta's policy states that users under 13 are not allowed on its platforms, and yet the brief notes that it is common knowledge that millions of children under that age regularly use Facebook and Instagram. Time points out that internal research cited in the brief suggests there were 4 million users under 13 on Instagram in 2015 and by 2018, roughly 40% of children aged 9 to 12 said they used Instagram daily. In part, that's because Meta clearly started targeting younger users, while at the same time ignoring evidence of harm, and deliberately ignoring its own policies around those under 13. The brief describes a coordinated effort exploring new products designed for "users as young as 5-10," and says that some employees internally expressed disgust at the attempt. "Oh good, we’re going after <13 year olds now?" one wrote. "Targeting 11 year olds feels like tobacco companies... like we’re seriously saying ‘we have to hook them young.’"

While Meta developed AI tools to monitor the platforms for harmful content, the company didn’t automatically delete that content even when it determined with 100% confidence that it violated Meta’s policies against child sexual-abuse material or eating-disorder content. Meta’s AI classifiers did not automatically delete posts that glorified self-harm unless they were 94% certain they violated platform policy, according to the plaintiffs’ brief. As a result, most of that content remained on the platform, where teenage users often discovered it. In a 2021 internal company survey cited by plaintiffs, more than 8% of respondents aged 13 to 15 reported having seen someone harm themselves, or threaten to do so, on Instagram during the past week.

As mentioned above, this isn't a problem just with Meta — many other tech companies have been faced with similar issues. Casey Newton described in a recent edition of his Platformer newsletter that Roblox, which offers kids tools to build online virtual worlds, has been routinely criticized for the fact that its service enables problematic behavior on a large scale, and yet has done little or nothing to prevent harms to the young users it courts — primarily because limiting this kind of interaction would harm its growth. OpenAI has also faced the decision whether to implement controls on its AI tools, or continue with features that are problematic but result in greater growth and engagement. So do these companies know about the problems their products create? In most cases, yes. Do they care? No — or not enough to do anything meaningful.

Got any thoughts or comments? Feel free to either leave them here, or post them on Substack or on my website, or you can also reach me on Twitter, Threads, BlueSky or Mastodon. And thanks for being a reader.

It’s Thanksgiving, and so the vast majority of my team and wider colleagues – who are based in the US – are off. That’s fine, I figured: a chance to me to get my heads down for some undistracted coding time.

The Universe had a different idea:

On the upside, today I learned a lot about the internals of the system that was at fault. 🤪

🤘 You're subscribed to DanQ.me using the RSS feed. You rock! 🎸

The same thing happens with baty.blog vs baty.net. Simple means just typing stuff and hitting “Publish”, right? WordPress makes that so easy, I should just use that. But then Zola is just markdown files generating a static website, so that’s what I mean by simple.

And photography? Digital photography is the simple option. I don’t have to deal with film and scanning or darkroom printing or any of that. Or maybe film photography is simpler. Really, using a small, manual Leica means all I need is a roll of film, a light bulb, and some chemicals. A fully manual camera is simple because there are no settings to fiddle with and it doesn’t even need a battery! Or wait, a modern digital camera is even simpler because I can just point and shoot without thinking about focus or exposure or ISO, etc.

Taking notes using markdown files in a folder couldn’t be simpler. I can use anything to edit them. And maybe Obsidian to manage everything. No, that gets too complex. Instead, my stable and very personal Emacs configuration is the simplest thing, right? Everything is right there in Emacs. All my notes for the past 10 years or so are in org-mode files. Simple!

Thing is, I switch between all of those options so often it makes me dizzy. No matter what I’m using or how I’m using it, the other thing eventually looks simpler to me, so I switch.

You know what would be the simple solution to simplicity? Stop changing everything all the time! If I would just lean into Emacs and be done with it, my writing/note-taking/task management system would be done and done. If I would realize that I’m emotionally inclined to using an SSG for publishing, I could post everything here using Zola. Simple as can be.

Anyway, long story short, the key to simplicity isn’t finding the simplest possible thing. The trick is to stop looking.

But will I ever be able to stop looking?

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