You can’t stop the flow of time. But you can count the costs. And I think a lot of people, for reasons I can’t quite make out, are threatened by the idea of counting the costs when it comes to change. That’s what I’m asking you to do today: count the costs. Count the costs with me.
I can put my finger on two things that have meaningfully changed in the last 25 years: my age and the internet.
I was thirteen at the turn of the millennium. I came of age in the 90s, and I too have this romantic nostalgia for that time. Issues of Star Wars: Insider delivered to the mailbox, music on CDs from record stores, the nascent internet and action figures and trips to DQ and Memorial Day spent at the family cemetery. Things felt slower then, and they were. The speed at which things change, at which culture is grown and shaped and discoursed and discarded, at which information flows, was so much slower then.
Now things feel fraught. Now things feel fragile. Now things feel on edge and tense and anxious and uncertain. And maybe they aren't — maybe they just feel that way. But why would they feel that way? What's changed?
My age and the internet. The latter changed everything, and not for the better. Sure, things might seem better — things might objectively even be better. But things don't feel better.
There’s a lot of stuff in there about YouTube virality, starting with the Click Thru Rate (CTR) for the all-important video thumbnails:
This is what dictates what we do for videos. “I Spent 50 Hours In My Front Yard” is lame and you wouldn’t click it. But you would hypothetically click “I Spent 50 Hours In Ketchup”. Both are relatively similar in time/effort but the ketchup one is easily 100x more viral. An image of someone sitting in ketchup in a bathtub is exponentially more interesting than someone sitting in their front yard.
The creative process for every video they produce starts with the title and thumbnail. These set the expectations for the viewer, and everything that follows needs to be defined with those in mind. If a viewer feels their expectations are not being matched, they’ll click away - driving down the crucial Average View Duration that informs how much the video is promoted by YouTube’s all-important mystical algorithms.
MrBeast videos have a strictly defined formula, outlined in detail on pages 6–10.
The first minute captures the viewer’s attention and demonstrates that their expectations from the thumbnail will be met. Losing 21 million viewers in the first minute after 60 million initial clicks is considered a reasonably good result! Minutes 1–3, 3–6 and 6-end all have their own clearly defined responsibilities as well.
Ideally, a video will feature something they call the “wow factor”:
An example of the “wow factor” would be our 100 days in the circle video. We offered someone $500,000 if they could live in a circle in a field for 100 days (video) and instead of starting with his house in the circle that he would live in, we bring it in on a crane 30 seconds into the video. Why? Because who the fuck else on Youtube can do that lol.
Technology, double-edged sword, evil intentions etc. There’s an avalanche of manipulated bullshit coming from every direction, I’m afraid, the media is horribly guilty, on a zillion levels, of selling fantasy as fact - but I’m more concerned about people’s willingness to buy into whatever they’re fed, no matter how ridiculous, if it supports what they already believe. Even worse are people who get their information from social media, which is basically an ideological glory hole; you have no clue as to the origin of the information, you just dutifully put it in your mouth and then spread it like syphilis to all your friends. I don’t know if it’s a societal shift, or the failure of schools to inspire more kids to learn & understand, or the disappearance of books, but there’s this whole, weird thing out there where people read a snippet online and feel they’re experts on any subject, and will expound, or criticize, or speak in absolutes when in fact they’re laughably ignorant. The Internet has the power to legitimize the worst kinds of idiocy. If a guy is on a soapbox, screaming gibberish on the corner of Hollywood & Highland, people ignore him; give him a Twitter account and the Los Angeles Times will quote him and dub him a “pundit.” At some point the world has to realize that the Internet isn’t an accurate barometer of anything. Social media has become such a minefield of bullshit & scam artists that I’ve pretty much abandoned it. I’m disappointed in virtually everyone, everywhere.
…my dad passed away two weeks ago. His name was Mike Loftus and he was 65 years old, so if your dad’s older than that, it should’ve been him. Fuck your dad.
Has there ever been a better argument for the Internet? A total stranger sharing their grief with vulnerability and humor.
Yesterday TikTok presented me with what appeared to be a deepfake of Timothee Chalamet sitting in Leonardo Dicaprio’s lap and yes, I did immediately think “if this stupid video is that good imagine how bad the election misinformation will be.” OpenAI has, by necessity, been thinking about the same thing and today updated its policies to begin to address the issue.
Gilmore Girls looms large in the world of innkeeper-fluencing. “Have you wondered what Lorelai Gilmore actually does for a living?” says Caroline Cardamone, a 20-something innkeeper at a bed-and-breakfast in Wisconsin, in one of the dozens of TikToks she’s posted about picking up breakfast burritos for guests, dusting a lot of doily-adorned wood, and doing laundry. John Lavin, who bought a century-old bed-and-breakfast in Blue Ridge, Georgia, in early COVID and soon started posting about it on TikTok, has been described by followers as “Luke Danes and Lorelai Gilmore rolled into one person.” Lavin says he’s never watched the show, but understands what they’re getting at: “People project this kind of fairy-tale life.”
What concerns me about the audience for this shit is their shared point-of-reference. When our only touchstones are characters from a terrifically uninspiring television show from twenty years ago? When you can make a Gilmore Girls reference and that somehow conveys meaning?
Are we not through the looking glass when media becomes more real than reality?
I have the privilege of knowing how to troubleshoot this stuff on my own largely due to my profession as a tech journalist. To others, this stuff is a foreign language. Knowing how to set up a home internet system is not a skill everyone has, and the complicated steps required to do it properly make moving to a new place more stressful, especially if you work remotely and need the internet to earn a paycheck.
I was tempted to use the cliché “AI is an incredible tool,” but then I remembered that while yes, perhaps in its current iteration AI is a tool, it’s also something else.
Intelligence is such a nebulous thing — I rarely hear it called a “tool.” Aspects of intelligence, like critical thinking? Sure, that can be a tool. A piece of the puzzle. A component of the whole.
But AI, or perhaps AGI (artificial general intelligence, loosely defined as when machines are able to think on their own without human intervention), is meant to be a component and a whole. A tool we use…but also a tool that will one day think critically for itself. Without humans.
Remember, while the AI of today is easily explainable with metaphor, the AI of tomorrow is not.
…it’s a profoundly weird (if surprisingly common) rhetorical move to say “I support you for your independence, but you wrote something I disagree with, so I’m not supporting you anymore.” It should go without saying - saying stuff that you don’t agree with is an expression of my independence, and it’s strange to endorse independence in the commission of telling me that you expected me to adhere to your own views. Subscribe or cancel as you will. But are you really out to support independence of thought if you don’t support it when that independence results in an opinion you don’t like?
Since Hamas attacked thousands of its citizens last week, the Israeli government has started a sweeping social media campaign in key Western countries to drum up support for its military response against the group. Part of its strategy: pushing dozens of ads containing brutal and emotional imagery of the deadly militant violence in Israel across platforms such as X and YouTube…
The mature and responsible thing to do would have been to add a content security policy to the page. I am not mature so instead what I decided to do was render the early 2000s internet shock image Goatse with a nice message superimposed over it in place of the app if Sqword detects that it is in an iFrame.
It has been one of my greatest achievements as a dev: to live-deploy a massive goatse image to at least 8 domains that aren’t mine.
Many of us at Tablet believed strongly, and still believe, in the possibility of creating a better world. But something bothered us from the very beginning about these ideas, and the people pushing them. Every time we pressed on one of the newly mass-embraced policy proposals or narratives—intersectionality, decolonization studies, the Iran nuclear deal, Russiagate, Black Lives Matter, the Women’s March, critical race theory, COVID lockdowns—a weird thing would happen: The idea itself fell apart at the seams within seconds of contact with reality, and yet its defenders got more sure of themselves, more performatively boastful, more passionate and gleeful about smearing anyone who dared to question them.
The more we listened to freshly minted universal experts, the more we were struck by the increasing lunacy of their pronouncements on every topic under the sun, always backed by “studies” and “science”—where COVID–19 came from, how many genders there are, which skin tones and personal experiences qualify a person for protection status and which do not, whether it was OK for a Syrian dictator to bomb and gas 500,000 of his people, whether the U.S. should ally itself with a Holocaust-denying medieval theocracy, whether the president of the United States was secretly a Russian agent, whether large American cities should let drug addicts and violent schizophrenics get high on the streets and steal stuff—and more. Indeed, over time, we were struck by how little the ideas themselves seemed to matter; what so many people seemed most attached to was power.
Who is peeking over your shoulder while you work, watch videos, learn, explore, and shop on the internet? Enter the address of any website, and Blacklight will scan it and reveal the specific user-tracking technologies on the site—and who’s getting your data. You may be surprised at what you learn.
In my opinion, the strongest reason for any random person to start a blog is that you will have more awesome friendships—both in the sense that you will meet new awesome people as a result of your blog, but also in the sense that writing will cause you to have more interesting ideas, which will make your existing friendships more awesome because you’ll have better stuff to talk about.
Most other important things in life, like job opportunities and romantic relationships, are downstream of the quality of your friends, so this is pretty great.
I couldn’t agree more. I’ve been writing on the internet for much of my adult life, here and there, anonymously and, at least recently, not. The power of the internet is in finding connection, and I’ve made friends or acquaintances via my online presence that make my life far more rewarding. In “real life,” I know at most one person that’s interested in iOS app development, another one person that might appreciate (yet doesn’t love) Star Wars action figures, and maybe two or three that are interested in technology in general. “Real life” is bounded far more by geography and circumstance, but online, people with similar interests flock to each other like moths to a flame.
Thing is, none of this has happened on social media. Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok… These companies that tout their “we’re all about connecting people” bonafides are advertising companies and nothing more. Don’t be fooled. The only site that has a semblance of camaraderie (in my experience) is Reddit, and even that has started to undergo some unpleasant changes.
The real fun lies in the small web. What started back on uJournal and LiveJournal back in the late 90s and early 2000s led me here to Micro.Blog twenty years later. It’s the joy of hunting for great writing, for righteous opinions, for scathing dissents, for unique voices, all unfiltered by the cruft of advertising. It’s the human internet.
I am, as ever, torn. I both love my corner of the internet and hate The Internet. But I have to remember: I’m an anomaly. I pay for my search engine so I’m able to tweak my personal search algorithm. How many people do you know pay for a search engine? How many people spend a good deal each year on bespoke software for their iPhones and Macs so that they might use them to their fullest potential? My internet is not most people’s internet, and that’s easy to forget.
But I am, at heart, in love with my internet. I am so immeasurably grateful for the opportunity to have connected with so many people over the years. After all, what else is there?
A disclaimer: I have had substantially more at-bats with debt collectors than most people, as a result of an old hobby of writing letters on behalf of debtors to their lenders and non-affiliated debt collectors. I did this over the Internet, on my own volition, because it seemed pro-social and I was extremely underused by my actual job at the time. This experience leaves me with strong opinions on the debt collection industry; a frequent archetypical person in need of a letter was a Kansan grandmother in diminished financial circumstances who had been harassed for months. I’m going to try to keep these views to a dull roar here, in the spirit of spending more mental energy on discussing why the system presents as so broken.
People with a passion are not to be underestimated.
Summary: I believe that small websites are compelling aesthetically, but are also important to help us resist selling our souls to large tech companies. In this essay I present a vision for the “small web” as well as the small software and architectures that power it. Also, a bonus rant about microservices.
“We do not share SAT scores or GPAs with Facebook or TikTok, and any other third parties using pixel or cookies,” said a College Board spokesperson. “In fact, we do not send any personally identifiable information (PII) through our pixels on the site. In addition, we do not use SAT scores or GPAs for any targeting.”
After receiving this comment, Gizmodo shared a screenshot of the College Board sending GPAs and SAT scores to TikTok using a pixel. The spokesperson then acknowledged that the College Board’s website actually does share this data.
According to tax forms, 14 of the College Board’s 17 executives made more than $300,000 in 2021. Together, CEO David Coleman and President Jeremy Singer made $1,782,254.
A bit of good ol’ gumshoe reporting by Gizmodo, proving there’s something left inside the husks of Gawker Media.
What bullshit on the part of the College Board. Disgusting.
Remember: online, everything you do is tracked.
Everything.
If you aren’t paying for an online service, you are the product being sold.
(TikTok is ByteDance, a Chinese company that reports directly to the Chinese Communist Party. We’re selling out our own children…for what? So the execs of the College Board can have a new vacation home?)
In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.