Niche Internet

Niche Internet

The Web Is Evolving and Worsening – Pixel Envy
The Web Is Evolving and Worsening – Pixel Envy
Alex Pareene, Defector: We are living through the end of the useful internet. The future is informed discussion behind locked doors, in Discords and private fora, with the public-facing web increasingly filled with detritus generated by LLMs, bearing only a stylistic resemblance to useful information. Finding unbiased and independent product reviews, expert tech support, and […]
The way I often must to search the web today for useful, factual information is already similar to — as Pareene writes — “searches for illegal sports streams”. My queries contain so many Boolean operators that DuckDuckGo gets confused, and Google requires me to confirm I am not a robot.
·pxlnv.com·
The Web Is Evolving and Worsening – Pixel Envy
Productive Procrastination
Productive Procrastination
Writing about the big beautiful mess that is making things for the world wide web.
I do a pretty good job of channeling my procrastination into adjacent creative tasks which, in the end, influence, shape, and improve the chunks of work I do complete. And that looks like productivity from the outside. But trust me, from the inside, it usually just feels like avoidance and procrastination. But I’ve learned to accept that’s the cost of doing the kind of work I feel good at, so I let it be what it is.
The particularly nice thing about coding is that it offers many little “wins”: I get a function working, I figure out a piece of design
“Can’t face work? Then cultivate some side projects — and channel your work-avoidance into fun opportunities to learn” and once you’re done, you’ll 1) have something productive to show for it, and 2) be much more fit, rested, and ready to tackle that project at work. In other words: rather than fight your penchant for procrastination, work with it. It’s a judo move: don’t fight your enemy, use its momentum against it for your benefit.
·blog.jim-nielsen.com·
Productive Procrastination
Exapt existing infrastructure
Exapt existing infrastructure
The internet is one of the greatest open-ended technologies our species has created, up there with language, writing, money, math, markets. How do you design something like an internet? How does it get bootstrapped? How does it grow, scale, and evolve into the kind of ecosystem we have today? How did this internet succeed, when
Here are the adoption curves for a handful of major technologies in the United States. There are big differences in the speeds at which these technologies were absorbed. Landline telephones took about 86 years to hit 80% adoption.Flush toilets took 96 years to hit 80% adoption.Refrigerators took about 25 years.Microwaves took 17 years.Smartphones took just 12 years.Why these wide differences in adoption speed? Conformability with existing infrastructure. Flush toilets required the build-out of water and sewage utility systems. They also meant adding a new room to the house—the bathroom—and running new water and sewage lines underneath and throughout the house. That’s a lot of systems to line up. By contrast, refrigerators replaced iceboxes, and could fit into existing kitchens without much work. Microwaves could sit on a countertop. Smartphones could slip into your pocket.
·subconscious.substack.com·
Exapt existing infrastructure
The Ultimate Guide to Writing Online - David Perell
The Ultimate Guide to Writing Online - David Perell
Think better. Grow your audience. Accelerate your career.
I started writing because I was jobless and needed to turn my life around. I was an over-saturated news consumer with nothing to show for it.
Desperate for a solution, I started writing online. At the time, I was nameless and stuck on the sidelines because I didn’t have the gumption to share my ideas. I experienced a cocktail of searing emotions — envy, inspiration, fear, curiosity, rage, hope, hopelessness, excitement, and self-loathing. But with each article, things got a little better. For the first time in my life, I made use of the information I consumed. The friends I made shared my obsession with ideas. As I published, I realized that everything I wrote was a magnet to attract opportunities that felt like magic in the moment, such as a $20,000 grant from Tyler Cowen’s Emergent Ventures program and a podcast interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson, arguably the world’s most famous scientist.
becoming an online writer has shown me that I can succeed by bringing out more of myself
·perell.com·
The Ultimate Guide to Writing Online - David Perell
How to Put Out Democracy’s Dumpster Fire
How to Put Out Democracy’s Dumpster Fire
Our democratic habits have been killed off by an internet kleptocracy that profits from disinformation, polarization, and rage. Here’s how to fix that.
Tocqueville reckoned that the true success of democracy in America rested not on the grand ideals expressed on public monuments or even in the language of the Constitution, but in these habits and practices.
·theatlantic.com·
How to Put Out Democracy’s Dumpster Fire
Rewilding your attention
Rewilding your attention
To find truly interesting ideas, step away from the algorithmic feeds of Big Tech.
our truly quirky dimensions are never really grasped by these recommendation algorithms. They have all the dullness of a Demographics 101 curriculum; they sketch our personalities with the crudity of crime-scene chalk-outlines. They’re not wrong about us; but they’re woefully incomplete.
The metaphor suggests precisely what to do: If you want to have wilder, curiouser thoughts, you have to avoid the industrial monocropping of big-tech feeds. You want an intellectual forest, overgrown with mushrooms and towering weeds and a massive dead log where a family of raccoons has taken up residence.
For me, it’s meant slowly — over the last few years — building up a big, rangy collection of RSS feeds, that let me check up on hundreds of electic blogs and publications and people. (I use Feedly.) I’ve also started using Fraidycat, a niftily quixotic feed-reader that lets you sort sources into buckets by “how often should I check this source”, which is a cool heuristic; some people/sites you want to check every day, and others, twice a year.
Other times I spend an hour or two simply prospecting — I pick a subject almost at random, then check to see if there’s a hobbyist or interest-group discussion-board devoted to it. (There usually is, running on free warez like phpBB). Then I’ll just trawl through the forum, to find out what does this community care about?
·uxdesign.cc·
Rewilding your attention
Making the internet your own
Making the internet your own
I have used just about every productivity tool that exists. And in trying to figure out why none of them ever felt quite right to me, I’ve talked to countless experts about productivity, all of whom told me roughly the same thing: that the problem with productivity tools is that they tell you how to...
·protocol.com·
Making the internet your own