/reader

I spent the last 15 years of my life working on the web, coding all sorts of sites for all sorts of people. Part of me loves the web, while another part of me hates what the web is becoming. One thing I refuse to do, though, is give up on it. This idea I see floating around that the web is dead and we should just give up the whole project and start from scratch makes absolutely no sense to me.

Yes, a huge chunk of the web is unbearable to use at the moment. Yes, an enormous percentage of sites are impossible to navigate without ad blockers. And yes, AI is not making the situation any better and also yes, I am so goddamn tired of hearing AI talk nonstop everywhere all the time.

All that is absolutely true. But that’s not all the web there is out there. The web is vast. It’s probably impossible to say with certainty how big it really is, but the Internet Archive recently celebrated 1 trillion pages archived. Yes, that’s trillion with a T. You know how long it would take to count to a trillion if you could count one number every single second without ever stopping? 31000 years.

The fact that people keep browsing the same 3 sites, day after day, getting served content by algorithms controlled by 3 companies is such a shame. Because there is so much interesting content out there ready to be discovered. And discovering new content also means connecting with new people, getting exposed to new ideas, different cultures. That’s by far the best quality of the web if you ask me.

The problem many people are facing is how to find that content, how to escape the algorithmic bubble. I think the only answer to that is curation. The vast majority of people on the web are lurkers which means someone has to spend time herding content and collecting it somewhere for others to consume.

Over the years, I realised that it is probably the only reasonable contribution I can give to this cause. I’m already doing this with People and Blogs, slowly composing a list of people—and blogs—worth following and engaging with. And I’m also collecting content both on the blogroll and on the forest.

If I already have these, why start something new you might be wondering. There’s a reason for this. Two actually. The first reason is that I hate having spare time, apparently. And if I have to burn myself to the ground in front of a screen, I might as well do it while doing something fun and useful. The second—and more serious—reason is that all those projects have some limitations. P&B moves slowly. It’s a weekly series, which means you’re discovering at most 5 new blogs a month. Yes, there are links on those interviews, but still, this is a slow-moving project. The forest and the blogroll, on the other hand, require intention. Those are sites you need to visit in order to discover new content, and we all know it’s a lot more convenient when content comes to you, rather than the other way around. Which is why I decided to start another newsletter.

The goal with Dealgorithmed is to provide interesting content gathered from all around the web in a convenient package delivered in your inbox twice a month. Content that you can then use as a starting point for your own internet explorations. If all this sounds compelling to you, feel free to sign up. The first email should land in your inbox on January 1st.

Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

• This is a really good blog post, in response to a post I wrote here that said among other things that a WordPress instance is easier to set up on your own server than Mastodon. #
• At the start of the piece he said it was like comparing apples and oranges, but by the end, he was starting to see that they kind of do the same thing. I am prepared to explain that. #
• First what they have in common is that they deal with posts, and they have more or less the same features. Mastodon for historic reasons, places limits on posts. I'm sure they could relax those limits, so I don't see this as an important difference. #
• And then there's all the traffic that comes into a Mastodon instance that doesn't come into a WordPress instance, posts from people you follow, some in response to posts you made. But there is a feed reader built into WordPress. And WordPress supports a very nice API so if you want to build on a different kind of feed management system (as I do) -- no problem, as long as it works on the web, they can connect. Again if we build on the web there are kinds of possibilities that don't exist if you build a monolithic all-in-one system like Mastodon.#
• And then you might say that feed readers are slow because they poll, and people want to see messages instantly. And this is where I say there's a very well-debugged feature in WordPress that I helped them build in 2009 that make feed updates instantaneous. Yeah Google tried to FUD it, as they did so much fuckery with feeds, but it it didn't actually accomplish anything. rssCloud is there, and it works, and it's absolutely instantaneous. Every WordPress site supports it as does FeedLand.#
• So I figure if we connect the dots, just building on open stuff (ie the web), with WordPress and FeedLand, hooked up to each other, it would more or less do what Mastodon does. It might still be apples and oranges, but on the web, you probably can hook an apple up to an orange and it would probably work the first time. ;-)#
• Now there will be things one can do that the other can't, and it probably will go both ways, because this way of doing social networks works somewhat differently, but the cool thing is you can see ActivityPub starting to evolve toward RSS, so I think for the first time in a long time, a very long time, we will see some real motion in Social Media Land. There hasn't been any real competition in this space in a long time, and thus it has stagnated. But with a little competition, the minds should wake up and get to work meeting the challenge.#
• One of my mottos: "People don't listen to their friends, they listen to their competitors." It's still true today as it always has been. We are a species that is motivated to compete. It's deeply ingrained into who we are. #
• PS: I love posts that pick up from where I started and move the ball in an interesting direction. This was one of the best things about the blogosphere of the past. It's nice to see that tradition being revived. Thanks to Steven Rosenberg. :-)#
• PPS: Someone should edit the Wikipedia page about rssCloud. First they should format the name correctly. Second they say it was superceded by something the W3C did. I asked ChatGPT a straight question, did WebSub supercede rssCloud, and here's the answer. Unequivocally false. Not only that the two protocols are very fundamentally different. #
• PPPS: This is one of the reasons I say Wikipedia has a much bigger trust issue than ChatGPT. It frequently transmits fake news or hallucinations like this, due to how it's edited. I expect to see lies on a Wikipedia page, and despite what you read about AIs, they're in my experience much more reliable. It's easy for a Wikipedia page to be hijacked by interested parties, as it was, no doubt, this time. For some reason the AIs seem to factor out the noise, somehow. Or maybe it's just that people haven't figured out how to spam it yet. #

On moving fast and breaking things:

breaking stuff and moving on quickly leaves us surrounded by carnage.

There’s an intriguing part in the interview where Ive reflects on how he obsessed over a particular detail about a cable’s packaging. He laughs at the story, almost seemingly embarrassed, because it seems so trivial to care about such a detail when he says it out loud.

But Collison pushes him on it, saying there’s probably a utilitarian argument about how if you spend more time making the packaging right, some people mights save seconds of time and when you multiply that across millions of people, that's a lot of savings. But Collison presumes Ive isn’t interested in that argument — the numbers, the calculation, etc. — so there must be something almost spiritual about investing in something so trivial. Ive’s response:

I believe that when somebody unwrapped that box and took out that cable, they thought “Somebody gave a shit about me.”

I think that’s a nice sentiment. I do.

But I also think there’s a counter argument here of: “They cared when they didn’t have to, but they were getting paid to spend their time that way. And now those who can pay for the result of that time spent get to have the feeling of being cared for.”

Maybe that’s too cynical. Maybe what I’m getting at is: if you want to experience something beautiful, spend time giving a shit about people when you don’t stand to profit from it.

To be fair, I think Ive hints at this with his use of “privilege” here:

I think it’s a privilege if we get to practice and express our concern and care for one another [by making things for one another at work]

People say products are a reflection of an organization’s communication structure.

Ive argues that products are a function of the interpersonal relationships of those who make them:

To be joyful and optimistic and hopeful in our practice, and to be that way in how we relate to each other and our colleagues, [is] how the products will end up.

Ive talking about how his team practiced taking their design studio to someone’s house and doing their work there for a day:

[Who] would actually want to spend time in a conference room? I can’t think of a more soulless and depressing place…if you’re designing for people and you’re in someone’s living room, sitting on their sofa or floor and your sketchbook is on their coffee table, of course you think differently. Of course your preoccupation, where your mind wanders, is so different than if you’re sitting in a typical corporate conference room.

Everybody return to the office!

Ive conveying an idea he holds that he can’t back up:

I do believe, and I wish that I had empirical evidence

What is the place for belief in making software?

Ive speaks about how cabinet makers who care will finish the inside parts of the cabinet even if nobody sees them:

A mark of how evolved we are as people is what we do when no one sees. It’s a powerful marker of who we truly are.

If you only care about what's on the surface, then you are, by definition, superficial.

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“I hear you still haven’t fixed the phone thing.”

Sometimes it’s not the issue itself that people get stuck on. They actually enjoy it. They’d never admit it, of course, and they may not even realize it themselves.

But it’s true. They get a little rush from “being right”. They love pointing fingers, or preferably the whole hand, and saying:

“I am right. You are wrong.”

I’ve fixed the phone now. Not because it was a problem or because I’d heard enough about it. I did it to take away his unhealthy way of feeling good.

He hasn’t called since.

I feel like polyamory, open relationships, relationship anarchy and other forms of non-monogamy are now sufficiently accessible to popular culture that we can drop the word “ethical” and still be understood. (Ideally we do so before it starts to look like virtue-labelling.)

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