Do something nice and don’t get caught

The Verge wrote a great piece on consent and filming strangers for social media views. It reminded me of how uncomfortable “hidden camera acts of kindness” content always made me.

Hasan Minhaj discusses this on Dax Sheppard’s podcast:

“[My wife Beena says] I love how you only care about these issues when there’s a camera on you.”

The conversation on the topic of truth, generosity, spreading awareness, and ego get’s really interesting. It’s worth a listen. (Discussion on kindness and clout starts around 1:02:00)

On daily blogging

E.B. White’s amazing writing nook

I left Twitter after Elon Musk's takeover, which was a total shitshow. 

It was the cringey Dad-joke moment Musk where I felt it all jumped the shark.

The truth is, I've been reevaluating my relationship with social media long before Musk bought Twitter.

I’ve been nostalgic for the early days of blogging. When we didn't know what SEO was or what we should do for the algorithm.

The first website I built was an Austin Powers fansite / personal blog when I was 14. I created animated gifs of Austin Powers for some reason, and made almost daily journal entries. This was before there dedicated blogging platforms, so I did this all by hand via HTML.

Later, I moved on to Xanga, then Livejournal, then Tumblr, before settling on Wordpress and Squarespace. 

Ahhh, the good old days

It was so pure and fun back then.

I decided to take a few pages from Austin Kleon and do a 30-day challenge to blog daily. (For my reward I’ll get myself a nice long massage.)

It's funny how I used to look forward to getting home so I could fire up Livejournal and just write. I wrote about anything and everything. While I got a nice shot of endorphins when a someone would comment, that was never the goal. I seemed to write and put things out into the ether just to put it out there.

To leave a trace of me in the universe.

I want more of that.

Shaped by the algorithm

I started using Feeder.co to read blogs, and it’s giving me so many great memories of late web 1.0/early web 2.0.

Right now I’m mostly reading personal blogs, like those by Austin Kleon and Derek Sivers. Both have very early web 2.0 vibes to them — personal, covering a wide range of topics, without any regard to SEO.

“Shaped by the algorithm” is a term used to describe the sameness we see with a lot of content on the web and social media these days.

A type of content gets a lot of views, likes, and clicks.

Algorithms recognize this and promote it.

More people see it and decide to create similar content because it gets more views, likes, and clicks. (This concept is also why Marvel movies all look and feel the same.)

This sucks for creativity and discovery.

For creators, I think it’s a good time to start thinking/living/creating outside of algorithms.