“These days, however, we write increasing amounts of complicated, unsecure code to express less and less meaning, in order to infinitely generate shareholder value.”
That line signals a tribe: “infinitely generate shareholder value” is the ritual incantation that turns every topic into the same morality play, with the same stock villain. It’s the worldview of someone who wants to live in a small enchanted technical garden, treating the economic world as a gross external thing, that you can blame whenever you need a cause.
And “unsecure code” in that context is part of the aesthetic: modernity is decadent, business is corrupting, therefore the code is “unsecure” and “meaningless.”
The Brendan Eich stuff is the same genre: petty culture-war residue kept alive long after normal people moved on.
So yeah, the internet continues, and until such artistic types learn to tamp down their own biases and refrain from injecting those into every word they write, I will keep away from their walled gardens.
"Gender-based discrimination..."
"Fuck Brendan Eich [for opposing gay marriage at a time that Obama did as well]..."
"As ever, unionize, free Palestine, trans rights are human rights, fix your heart or die."
Ugh. What if you could possibly focus on technology instead of woke virtue-signaling (and threatening to kill those who disagree)?
Anyway, 'write ur website by hand' is absolute garbage advice, sorry. No, you are not going to effortlessly syndicate it elsewhere when you are manually updating your index.html to point to your latest hand-coded plain html file. Surely you won't even have a sitemap.xml. Will you write the sharing-friendly meta tags by hand every time too? No.
I agree with that goal, but then I might change the title. Maybe that's part of the problem - "website" sounds like something a big corporation makes.
I think there’s a way though.
Modern self-hosted open source is easy to run for semi-experts, so what if communities banded together to host stuff at the local library?
A bunch of enthusiastic teens could form a volunteer core that runs a bunch of services for their community and teaches anyone interested, giving kids a chance to learn how to host stuff online. There’d be high trust if it’s all locals providing services to locals. Host it on a cheap VPS so the library doesn’t even need infra; just a very small budget for the initiative.
It’d be super decentralized. And the teams running these services would provide high quality feedback to the developers on features & operating of their services.
Seems win-win.
So what stops me today? I don't have hosting.
Eventually livejournal, blogspot, etc. came around and provided a decent approximation of what people wanted to do, for free. Yes there might be a little ad on the side but it was basically 'okay'.
Eventually FB etc. came along and provided a decent approximation of a blog and allowed easy readership. Friendfeed got bought and soon enough everyone was in everyone's business.
The problem is facebook, linkedin etc. are too easy to propogate information. My ramblings shouldn't show up on everyone's feed. They should show up to people who inbound come want to actively seek them out; those are the people for whom they might be interesting. It's kind of like talking to your neighbor.
You find out what's going on in their life, but maybe you don't want everyone on the street to know, but you're fine if they happened to ask you about it. Chances are if someone is genuinely interested in you, they'd come to your website... but do you want your boss to come?
I don't know maybe the internet was a little safer when it was not anonymous, but at least somewhat selective as to who would access it.
It’s like suggesting that everyone become HAM radio operators or join Gemini (the protocol).
What the... How RSS which is an XML can predates internet and computers and even transistors?
as someone who grew up in a fairly insulated & isolated suburb, i think those types of experiences were really important in turning me from an unconfident, kinda angry kid into the aesthetically-engaged, witty, openly-gay man w/ a pretty big breadth of creative interests i ended up being. i'm truly not sure if i would've turned out this way if most of the internet remained as undiscoverable as it was ~20 years ago.
though i have more appreciation for the slow web nowadays, where my identity is a bit more solidified, i still feel a pretty strong pull towards "the platform", and my visions for a healthier internet include it. but, that's about as far as i've gotten.
This spends a lot of time on mood setting and analogy and doesn’t address: network effects, discovery economics, hosting and maintenance costs, security, spam and abuse mitigation, user incentives.
It’s aspirational rather than operational.
Personally, I believe it would be better if we had more technological self-direction and sovereignty, but this kind of essay, which downplays and denigrates the progress and value of our modern systems, is a perspective from which the insights necessary for such a transformation cannot possibly take root.
When asking such questions seriously, we must look at youtube, not twitter. Mountains of innovations in media publishing, delivery, curation, navigation, supplementation via auto-generated captions and dubbing, all accreted over 20 years, enabling a density and breadth of open-ended human communication that is to me truly staggering.
I'm not saying we should view centralized control over human comms infra as positive, or that we'll be "stuck" with it (I don't think we will be), just that we need to appreciate the nature and scale of the "internet" properly if we're to stand a chance of seeing some way through to a future of decentralized information technology
For however much I can respect individuals for showing their creativity, the novelty of it wears off. The majority of people in the Indie Web scene all blend together. The presentation might be different, but the essence is mostly the same. Not everyone needs to express themselves and voice their opinions. "Lurk five more years before posting" as people used to say.
The article is also laden with a certain kind of politics. You can infer the philosophical premises that led to some of these conclusions.
I have two blogs, one with a specific topic [1], another I created to share everything else that I feel like writing about [2]. Plus a personal "profile" page [3]. Both blogs only have one post, the first one perhaps a couple of drafts I never got around polishing to publish them. The personal page I still have to update after quitting a PhD months ago.
Why is this? Is it due to some lack of self discipline? Is it because, if I write why I quit a PhD, I would end up complaining about the current status of academia, and this could be at odds with my current employer's guidelines about posting on social media? Or is it because, if I stop and list all the things I have in the back of my mind that would require "just half an hour a day", I would end up filling a whole day? What are your thoughts on this?
[1] https://crypto.gtpware.eu/ [2] https://ramblings.gtpware.eu/ [3] https://gtpware.eu/
This ensures that the published materials have certain authenticity and inherent amount of quality. Publishing them "the indie way" functions as a kind of proof of work: not a guarantee of excellence, but evidence that something meaningful was at stake in producing and sharing it.
By contrast, the corporate web has driven the cost of publishing effectively to 0. This single fact opens the floodgates to noise, spam, and irrelevance at an unprecedented scale.
The core problem is that the average consumer cannot easily distinguish between these two fundamentally different universes. Loud, low-effort content often masquerades as significance, while quiet, honest, and carefully produced work is overlooked. As a result, authenticity is drowned out by volume, and signal is mistaken for noise.
To sum it up: this is not so much a problem of the internet as a lack of discernment among its users.
This is often smuggled in under the language of "network effects," as though the relationship were mutual. But "audience" is fundamentally one-directional. It turns participation into performance.
I think a lot of internet nostalgia is really grief for a time when you could participate without being on stage. Sure, you wanted lots of people to read your blog, but we did have an era when posting didn't implicitly ask: how big is your following, how well did this travel, did it work.
Today, the "successful" participants (the successful audience-builders) are called "creators", while everyone else (who is also creating, just without large-scale traction) is categorized as lesser or invisible. You can write a blog post, a tweet, a Reddit thread; you have undeniably created something. Yet without an audience, you haven't achieved the status that now defines digital legitimacy.
What I miss is a participation model that didn't say: audience or perish.
I do not for a second believe that the doom-scrolling brain-rot phase will not pass. It will pass like the many before it, the important question is what will replace it..
Effort should not be put into pulling us backwards as that's a fools errand. Instead it should be invested in asserting some control over current trajectories so we get something closer to what we like and further from what we hate during the next cycles.
As far as web is concerned, I would really like to see more decentralized services in every facet of our online usage. Mastodon to me is exactly what I wished things become.
Those who enjoy saying "I do not learn enough, I do not improve myself enough, I do not work hard enough" (but you say "the humanity" instead of "I"), that is just your own fault. Let people use the internet the way they want to use it.
- Run my own site (not much there yet)
- Use RSS Feeds instead of Reddit
- If a YouTube creator you like has a newsletter, SIGN UP!
- If a short form content creator makes long form content, watch that instead
- Post on forums, instead of their subreddit/Discord (lots of Linux distros have all three)
- Invest in my cozy web communities[1]
Speaking of the last one there, newsletters, RSS feeds and forums are the best way to be in control of the hose of content.
Will these ever be as “big” as the monolithic platforms? No. That’s okay.
That's all we need. Maybe throw in a few images:
Move on, and find the next thing before it hits mainstream.
Why does the internet function the way it does? It is really pretty simple. The internet is primarily characterized by very-high-volume-very-low-value transactions.
How much does it cost to send an email? When I send a real letter, I buy a stamp $0.78. So if I can send an email instead, it will save me a lot of money. You can try to calculate how many email transactions you can provide on one VPS costing $5.00 per month.
Here is a great business opportunity! You sell people email stamps at $0.01 per letter for 10k bytes. Cool. And 1,000,000 people each buy 10 stamps. Wow. That is a lot of money for your $5/month VPS, right?
But how do you get the money? You need to find a way for the one million people to each send you a dime. You cannot do it. If they put a dime in envelope and mail it to you, it will cost them $0.78. Etc.
So you have another idea. Why not let scammers include details of their scam in all emails send and they pay for the email. Oops, I should have used the term "advertisers". Now the people who email pay nothing and the scamm.... oops advertisers pay for the cost.
And you surprisingly find many, many people and corporations from all over the world are eager to exploit, oops target with advertising users. Especially if you can identify what kind of target they are.
A joy to read and loved the artwork on mobile.
1. Start small
2. Reduce friction to publishing
3. Don't worry about design
4. Use the IndieWeb
5. Join us in sharing what you've made
then it's an instant jump to "Let's write down what we want", which skips so many steps in between. why is the current internet bad, what are the reasons and causes that go along with it?
I'm saying this because, if I add these steps, I always conclude that it's just the past talking to me. The old internet also sucked, but for different reasons. You were yearning for things you take for granted now.
Not just no. Hell no. If it were a choice between whatever you claim to offer and an Internet that made me select from among curated sites as if they were cable channels, I'd take the latter. I thank my maker that such a choice remains hypothetical, and I feel no small amount of joy that you can't "fix" that.
I agree. I remember when you could read pages without requiring JavaScript enabled, and when enabled it was enabled it wouldn't cause things to constantly float about as you scroll.
One of the biggest reasons you'll never get the "old web" back, is because the culture of the "independent" world wide web morphed into something entirely different from what it was (or more aptly was outright replaced with general "weirdos" rather than model train hobbyists and the like[1]). Ironically all of the people complaining about "capitalism and corporations killing the internet" as they scroll their federated social media feeds and start their "indie" initiatives[2] don't realize that they are part of the problem.
So to fix the internet, you'd have to decouple the content from the toll to access it.
Webmentions do get you there - because it's a commenting system. But for finding the center of a community, it seems like you're still reliant on Bluesky or Mastodon or something. (Which doesn't "destroy all websites.") Love the sentiment ofc.
Okay, well have a nap and then fire ze missiles!
It is quite nice on iPhone, while I agree font is smaller in iPad for readability.
Although, they didn't block zooming/pinching (I hate when they do) therefore I was satisfied with the overall design.
I also found half-skimming it worked pretty well, using the images as markers to find what I really wanted.
Also it looks like it works pretty good on mobile, I thought it was small on my laptop too, but hey, thanks the heavens for built-in-browser zoom...
If YT shut down tomorrow morning, we’d see in a heartbeat why considering them a net benefit in their current form is folly. It is inherently transitory if one group controls it.
The OP article is correct about the problem, but is proposing throwing mugs of coffee on a forest fire.
I think bringing back websites like hawkee etc and providing an easy way to host is the right way forward, but it needs a catalyst (like most things) to become a trend.
I believe we can build something better. But I'm also now equally convinced that it's possible the next step isn't technological at all, but social. Regulation, breaking up the monopolies, whatever. We treat roads and all manner of other infrastructure as government provided; maybe a social platform is part of it. We always lean these thoughts dystopian, but also which of us technologically inclined readers and creators is spending as much time on policy documents, lobbying, etc, as we are schlepping code around hoping it will be a factor in this process. This is only a half thought but, at least these days I'm thinking more about not only is it time to build, but perhaps its time to be building non-code related things, to achieve what we previously thought were purely technological outcomes.
While I agree with much of the article's thesis, it sadly appears to ignore the current impact of LLMs ...
> it’s never been easier to read new ideas, experiment with ideas, and build upon & grow those ideas with other strong thinkers on the web, owning that content all along.
But, "ownership" ? Today if you publish a blog, you don't really own the content at all. An LLM will come scrape the site and regenerate a copyright-free version to the majority of eyeballs who might otherwise land on your page. Without major changes to Fair Use, posting a blog is (now more than ever) a release of your rights to your content.
I believe a missing component here might be DRM for common bloggers. Most of the model of the "old" web envisions a system that is moving copies of content-- typically verbatim copies-- from machine to machine. But in the era of generative AI, there's the chance that the majority of content that reaches the reader is never a verbatim copy of the original.
Historical parallel: the advent of newspapers showed the same catastrophe.
I would assume they also try to derive associations to social media accounts via passport information if you don't provide any to them. So I think it's rather an additional bureaucratic step added on their side rather than a red flag.
Maybe publishing on HN should have a cost.
Not to say I agree with the reasoning, but it comes from a place of fear. The more fear, the more scrutiny. The criteria you need to show is based on what they fear.
Merely having a somewhat populated account on Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn passes the bar of being a "real person." You share a few regular everyday things, you get happy birthday posts, a handful of people usually like your posts, you get a green flag in almost every circumstance.
Not having a social media presence comes with this question that can make it the scary part: Is it because of disinterest, because you're not socially belonging, or because you got ran off the platforms? It's obvious to us that is is disinterest, but they no way of truly knowing. And based on what they fear it can scare them, that unknowing.
If you can convince the other person it truly it is simple disinterest, there is no problem. Unless they're really bent on seeing your everyday thoughts...
If you don't "integrate well," it scares some people. You're too different and they fear becoming the outcasted outgroup with your inclusion.
If you're banned, that's... not good :) Which is a terrible place to be for people who were unrightfully banned.
What they're really hoping to catch is the blatantly obvious people that are openly delusional or violent on social media. There is a non-trivial amount of people who do this. If you have a page like this, or worse if you don't disclose it, that is the huge red flag.
This is a social investigation we personally do with others at the inner relationship level, with people who are already in the US. Right or not, it's not surprising to me that this reputational criteria bubbled up to immigration.
I think people see the very western culture of haves and have nots where all that matters is big number dominating the digital landscape the way it does in the physical world. It is gross but not remotely new. You put the audience or perish pressure on yourself when you value big number go up opinions. Dont be friends with those opinions. They change nothing and have no real power if you dont depend on them for survival.
It's beautiful to be sure, I wanted to actually read what the author had to say, and stuff kept flying around my screen, so I did not get far.
Maybe if I printed it out...
Edit: Half joking with the printing (although I do find it much easier to read printed materials), but it definitely seems to me it that the author was trying to make a magazine and not a website. (A magazine where everything moves while you're trying to look at it!)
If you don't feel like keeping a server secure, there are free and easy hosting solutions (Cloudflare pages publishes at a press of a button, for example).
You’re also the one that is being a little nostalgic for the past. Even 15 years ago bots would immediately hit sites looking for vulnerabilities in things like phpmyadmin, Wordpress, etc
In the same way heroin proves itself more useful for everyone year after year.
I'm doing my part on the human curration side. My shameful plug: https://randomdailyurls.com
A human curated newsletter and site if you just prefer that. Lots of people use email --> RSS. I don't block it or stop it.
Also the collective capability of our IT is inhibited in some ways by the silo-ing of particular content and domain knowledge+tech, no question
This is very true. I've found that there's more good content than there ever was before, but that there's also much more bad content, too, so the good is harder to find.
RSS helps me, curated newsletters help me. What else helps build this discernment?
I recently did a deep dive of an (allegedly) human-curated selection of 40K blogs containing 600K posts. I got the list from Kagi’s Small Web Index [1]. I haven’t published anything about it yet, but the takeaway is that nostalgia for the IndieWeb is largely misplaced.
The overwhelming majority of was 2010s era “content marketing” SEO slop.
The next largest slice was esoteric nostalgia content. Like, “Look at these antique toys/books/movies/etc!”. You’d be shocked at the volume of this still being written by retirees on Blogger (no shade, it’s good to have a hobby, but goddamn there are a lot of you).
The slice of “things an average person might plausibly care to look at” was vanishingly small.
There are no spam filters, mods, or ways to report abuse when you run your content mill on your own domain.
Like you, I was somewhat surprised by this result. I have to assume this is little more than a marketing ploy by Kagi to turn content producers who want clicks into Kagi customers. That list is not suited for any other purpose I can discern.
To that end, I made a trivial Chrome extension and an equivalent CRUD backend that just helps me store lists of users I like and dislike. The former are highlighted, and the latter are simply removed from comments.
As an example, the user I'm responding to is someone whose comments I like so I have had them in my highlight list for two months now and not regretted it https://overmod.org/lists/view?pk=ELpqNsanTYP9_wZXNjdF-FcEOc...
My personal tool is particularly idiosyncratic but I think information sieving is particularly important these days, so I recommend everyone build something like this for themselves. One thing I've found it particularly helpful with is the usual outrage bait. But I also killfile users who I think particularly misunderstand the comments they respond to, and I also killfile users who express what I think are low-information views.
Imagine my surprise, when I opened the site and it looked and felt just like a museum or art exhibit. This was the literal feeling I had -- being at an art gallery, but online.
I guess, these comments tell more about the commenters, than TFA. We should remind ourselves to be more critical to the content we consume, regardless where it comes from.
And they are complaining precisely because it has pompous title. If it was "badly designed but personal website" there would be much less of that
I had fond memories of programming my CP/M machine back in the day, built a re-creation and was painfully aware of how limiting a 25 line by 80 character display could be. Nostalgia, remembering the good times, reality some things really sucked too.
Then there is the paradox of freedom to deal with, specifically if everyone is free to change anything they like to be the way they like it, other people will hate it and the entire system will be "bad." But for everyone to use the same basic frame work, and the dislike for the lack of freedom will be a common cause that builds community.
Back in the early days of the web and SGML, the focus was reversed, which is to say "web" sites would just publish content and the "user" could apply what ever style they liked to get a presentation that worked for them. This infuriated web site authors who had their own idea about how their web site should look and act on your display. You were the consumer and they presented and if you didn't like it go somewhere else. You can still see vestiges of that with things like "use this font to show things" Etc.
So yeah, nostalgia is never a good motivation for a manifesto. :-)
How in the world does that sound like a reasonable conclusion?
I wouldn't mind getting back to reading more from RSS over aggregators, even though I often appreciate the comments on HN. Aside: it's a shame that so many sites removed comment sections, and any attempt to create a comment extension for any site turns into a cesspool.
A possible piece of the puzzle: I originally read the article on mobile, no issues. Then I opened it on my desktop, and found the design quite jarring. The margins are much too large for my taste, forcing the text into a single narrow column, and the header animations were distracting and disorienting (fortunately the page works perfectly with JavaScript disabled). Perhaps this triggered people?
It's by no means a perfect article, but the general message seems to be that we're not powerless to build the web we want, and you can host your own website, which is still true.
Social media bad, Javascript bad, cars bad, old internet good, RSS good, personal websites good, HTML good.
If you want to farm upvotes on Hacker News, write about these topics. This content is like crack to developers.
Even Valve of all people made a streaming apparatus that was more advanced than Twitch's which had then innovative features such letting you rewind with visible categories and automated replays of moments of heightened chat activity, and even synchronized metadata such as in-game stats - and they did it as a side thing for CSGO and Dota 2. That got reworked in the streaming framework Steam has now which is only really used by Remote play and annoying publisher streams above games, so basically nothing came of it.
That's how it always goes. Twitch lags and adds useless fake engagement fluff like bits and thrives, while competitors try their damnest and neither find any success nor do they have a positive impact anywhere. The one sitting at the throne gets to pick what tech stack improvements are done, and if they don't feel like it, well, though luck, rough love.
The same goes for website creation. You can post text, pictures and images on any social media site. The independent web is never going to be able to match that level of usability, and IMO it shouldn't try to. Part of the reason the indie web is interesting is because it's full of people who found their way towards wanting to build their own site.
Human curation is still where it’s at.
Jim: "Pam texted back saying we could give them all iPods".
Phyllis: Oh, if they don't have an iPod by now they really don't want one."
Website creation has reached its equilibrium rate of growth. Those who want a website will make one, and the rest won't. Personal websites are one of many media for public self-expression today; in 2004, the options were far more limited. Those who are on Neocities or mmmm.page or Bearblog etc., are the spiritual successors of that MySpace HTML template generation. They are a trickle relative to the number of people who'll start a Tiktok, Bluesky or Youtube account. It's not going to grow any faster than what it is, regardless of whichever points of friction in creating one can be eliminated.
How to win the war for the soul of the internet and build the Web We Want.

Captive Pegasus, Odilon Redon (1889)
~3100 words; about a 15 minute read
part one.
Well, the Internet mostly feels bad these days.
We were given this vast, holy realm of self-discovery and joy and philosophy and community; a thousand thousand acres of digital landscape, on which to grow our forests and grasslands of imagination, plant our gardens of learning, explore the caves of our making. We were given the chance to know anything about anything, to be our own Prometheus, to make wishes and to grant them.
But that’s not what we use the Internet for anymore. These days, instead of using it to make ourselves, most of us are using it to waste ourselves: we’re doom-scrolling brain-rot on the attention-farm, we’re getting slop from the feed.
Instead of turning freely in the HTTP meadows we grow for each other, we go to work: we break our backs at the foundry of algorithmic content as this earnest, naïve, human endeavoring to connect our lives with others is corrupted. Our powerful drive to learn about ourselves, each other, and our world, is broken into scant remnants — hollow, clutching phantasms of Content Creation, speed-cut vertical video, listicle thought-leadership, ragebait and the thread emoji.
It used to feel way better to Go Online, and some of us will remember.
We used to be able to learn about our hobbies and interests from hundreds of experts on a wealth of websites whose only shared motivation was their passion. Some of those venerable old educational blogs, forums, and wikis still stand, though most have been bulldozed.
Now, Learning On The Internet often means fighting ads and endless assaults on one’s attention — it means watching part-1-part-2-part-3 short-form video clips, taped together by action movie psychology hacks, narrated gracelessly by TTS AI voices. We’re down from a thousand and one websites to three, and each of those remaining monolith websites is just a soullessly-regurgitated, compression-down-scaled, AI-up-scaled version of the next.
¶
We used to make lasting friendships with folks all over the world on shared interest and good humor.
But now those social networks, once hand-built and hand-tended, vibrant and organic, are unceremoniously swallowed by social media networks, pens built for trapping us and our little piggy attentions, turning us all into clout-chasers & content-creators, and removing us from what meaningful intimacy & community felt like.
¶
Even coding for the web used to be different: One could Learn To Code™ to express oneself creatively, imbue one’s online presence with passion and meaning, and for some of us, build a real career.
These days, however, we write increasing amounts of complicated, unsecure code to express less and less meaning, in order to infinitely generate shareholder value. We don’t think about the art of our craft and the discipline of its application, we think about throughput and scale.
To be very clear: I’m not trying to Good Old Days the internet. None of this is meant to make you feel nostalgic — the Internet used to be slow and less populated and less diverse, and its access was limited to those of a certain class. The Web For All is a marked improvement, widespread global internet access is a marked improvement, and what I’m asking you to consider is what it used to feel like to use these tools, and what we’ve lost in the Big Tech, Web 2.0 and web3 devouring of the ’Net.
part two.
The onset of the automobile was a revelation for access and personal liberty. With the advent of cars, members of society could travel farther, get more done in their day, and bend their limited time more to their creative will!
But as time wore on and the industrialization & proliferation of the automobile progressed, its marginal utility diminished — the industry started to offer society fewer & fewer benefits, and take more & more in exchange1.
In American cities, for example: though at first the automobile enabled humans to travel further distances, it now demanded that humans travel those distances, and demanded infrastructure be created & maintained to enable it.2 Many now must use an automobile to get everything done in their town in a day, and must pay & take time for that automobile’s fueling & maintenance.3
Further than that, the automobile asks all of us to chip in tax revenue to protect its infrastructure, but only certain classes can afford an automobile with which to use that infrastructure, and those classes who can’t afford to do so are relegated to underfunded public transit systems.4
No longer a tool to serve our societies, our societies now serve the automobile.
part three.
In his book Tools For Conviviality, technology philosopher and social critic Ivan Illich identifies these two critical moments, the optimistic arrival & the deadening industrialization, as watersheds of technological advent. Tools are first created to enhance our capacities to spend our energy more freely and in turn spend our days more freely, but as their industrialization increases, their manipulation & usurpation of society increases in tow5.
Illich also describes the concept of radical monopoly, which is that point where a technological tool is so dominant that people are excluded from society unless they become its users. We saw this with the automobile, we saw it with the internet, and we even see it with social media.
No longer a tool to serve our societies, our societies now serve the automobile. Instead of designing and using tools to build a society, our society changes to adapt to the demands of our tools.
¶
Illich’s thesis allows us to reframe our adoption and use of the technologies in our life. We can map fairly directly most technological developments in the last 100 (or even 200) years to this framework: a net lift, followed by a push to extract value and subsequent insistence upon the technology’s ubiquity:
The preferred imagery used to mythologize the Industrial Revolution is the woodetchings of textile manufacturers, transformed in the early 19th century by the arrival of automated fabric machinery. Its proponents laud the shift of an agricultural society to a technological one, creating new sectors for labor, and raising up the middle class (we will say nothing of this period’s new punishing conditions for labor in this essay6). But the ultimate ecological and human costs engendered by the increasing availability of cheap fabric production are well-documented: In 2022, the fashion and textile industries employed around 60 million factory workers worldwide7, and less than 2% of those workers earn a living wage. Those workers also endure the full suite of labor exploitation practices, including gender-based harassment, wage theft, and unsafe conditions. On the material side, the induced consumption resulting from ever-cheaper products means the world consumed 400% more textile products globally as 20 years ago8, and bins most of it (the average American generates 82 pounds of textile waste each year).
The arrival of antibiotics in 19289 allowed for revolutionary leaps in fighting bacterial infections like strep throat, pneumonia, and meningitis, but an over-dependence and over-prescription of penicillin and its siblings through the 1950s-70s resulted in the proliferation of antibiotic resistance, which subsequently led to longer hospital stays, higher medical costs, and increased mortality.10
Since the beginning of the space exploration era in the late 1950s, humanity has made leaps and bounds in learning about our own world and its physical systems, telecommunications, imaging, etc. The increasing frequency of commercialization missions in space for satellite systems (and lately tourism) has resulted in immense amounts of space debris being generated — both from active satellites and from jettisoned/destroyed components of previous missions, the debris threatens future missions and has even been destructive to the field of astronomy, making it impossible to use earth-based sensors and photography devices to learn about space.11 So desperate to extract Shareholder Value from the starry sky, we’re blinding our own ability to look at it.
The web is no exception to this pattern. A vision of interoperability, accessibility, and usability, the World Wide Web was first conceived in 1989 as a way to universally link documents and other media content in a flexibly-organized system that could make information easily accessed at CERN, and be easily shared with collaborators beyond.12 But the proliferation of access and ultimate social requirement of access has spawned countless troubles for human society, including cyberstalking and bullying, the instantaneous circulation of CSAM, violent images, and misinformation, identity theft, addiction, etcetera.
The rampant industrialization and commercialization of the Web predictably develops flashy, insidious patterns of extracting capital from its users: new surfaces for information means new surfaces for advertisement, and new formats of media beget new mechanisms for divorcing you from their ownership.
Illich poses convivial tools as directly opposed to this industrialized, radically-monopolized set of social systems. Similar to E.F. Schumacher’s concept of “intermediate technology” introduced in his 1973 book Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered, convivial tools are sustainable, energy-efficient (though often labor intensive), local-first, and designed primarily to enhance the autonomy and creativity of their users.13 Illich cites specifically hand tools, bicycles, and telephones as examples, but with its enormous capacity for interoperability and extensibility, the Internet is the perfect workshed in which to design our own Tools For Conviviality.
part four.

The Plains of Heaven, John Martin (1851-3)
let’s reconsider
the markers of a decaying 'Net I mentioned before, with convivial tooling in mind:
Monolithic platforms like YouTube, TikTok, Medium, and Substack draw a ton of creators and educators because of the promise of monetization and large audiences, but they’ve shown time and time again how the lack of ownership creates a problem. When those platforms fail, when they change their rules, when they demand creators move or create a particular way to maintain their access to those audiences, they pit creators or their audiences against the loss of the other. Without adhering to the algorithm’s requirements, writers may not write an impactful document, and without bypassing a paywall, readers can’t read it.
¶
When those promises of exorbitant wealth and a life of decadence through per-click monetization ultimately dry up (or come with a steep moral or creative cost), creators and learners must look for new solutions for how educational content is shared on the Internet. The most self-evident, convivial answer is an old one: blogs. HTML is free to access by default, RSS has worked for about 130 years[citation needed], and combined with webmentions, it’s never been easier to read new ideas, experiment with ideas, and build upon & grow those ideas with other strong thinkers on the web, owning that content all along.14
Social media apps have imprisoned us all in this weird content prison — in order to connect with friends we’re sort of forced to create or be vanished by capricious black box algorithms, and all that we do create is, as we’ve already alluded to, subsequently owned by whatever platform we’ve created it on. If Instagram goes away overnight, or decides to pivot catastrophically, your stories and your network of friends goes with it.
¶
The advent and development of tools & methodologies like POSSE (Publish On your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere), ActivityPub, microformats, and ATProto, it’s becoming quite achievable to generate your own social network, interoperable with other networks like Bluesky or Mastodon. That network, designed for ownership and decentralization, is durable, designed around storytelling instead of engagement, and free of the whims of weird tech billionaires.
With some basic HTML knowledge and getting-stuff-online knowledge, a handful of scrappy protocols, and a free afternoon or two, one can build their own home to post bangers for the tight homies, make friends, and snipe those new friends with those hits of dopamine they so fiendishly rely on.
Lastly, consider the discipline of web engineering:
We have been asked to build the same B2B SaaS website with the same featureset n^∞ times, and our answers for the optimal way to do that are increasingly limited. We’ve penned all of our markup into JavaScript templates just in case a product manager needs the wrapper component to post JSON somewhere down the line, and we’ve whittled away at style code until it’s just a mechanism for deploying one of two border-radius-drop-shadow combos to divs. It’s an industrial, production-minded way of approaching a discipline that has all the hallmarks of being a great craft, and that’s understandably uninspiring to many of us.
¶
Yet our young React shepherds have no need to fear: there are countless more colors than blurple out there, and countless more fonts than Inter. HTML and CSS are better and more generative technologies than they’ve ever been: Thanks to the tireless work of the CSS working groups and browser implementers, etc, there is an unbelievable amount of creative expression possible with basic web tools in a text editor. Even JavaScript is more progressively-enhanceable than ever, and enables interfacing with a rapidly-growing number of exciting browser APIs (still fuck Brendan Eich though). ${new Date.getCurrentYear()} is a veritable renaissance of web code, and it asks of authors only curiosity and a drive to experiment.
Illich’s thesis is that technology and its derived tools should serve people in a way that enhances their freedom, creativity, independence, and will.
The distillation of those principles on the web through manual code, hand-built social networks, and blogs, points luminously to one answer to the question of how the Internet can best serve humans:
Hand-coded, syndicated, and above all personal websites are exemplary: They let users of the internet to be autonomous, experiment, have ownership, learn, share, find god, find love, find purpose. Bespoke, endlessly tweaked, eternally redesigned, built-in-public, surprising UI and delightful UX. The personal website is a staunch undying answer to everything the corporate and industrial web has taken from us.
And how might one claim this ultimate toolchain of conviviality, and build a place on the web that enhances their autonomy and creativity?
How might one build a personal website?
Let yourself start small, have fun trying shit that doesn’t work, document your growth, publish failed ideas & successful ones. Some of the best websites in the world are just HTML, and they belong to their authors. Make friends, let yourself be inspired by others, send friendly emails asking to learn new things, and do not demand of yourself masterpieces.
Get the resistance to ship out of your way. Don’t get caught up in tooling and frameworks, just write HTML and get something online. If you’re an engineer, delight that you’re not beholden to the same standards of quality and rigorous testing that you are at work — draft some ideas, hit the h1 to p tag combo, and publish. Update and update again; let your ideas grow like gardens, the way they do in your mind. The mutability of the web, often its great weakness, is also one of its great strengths.
Don’t worry about design unless that’s the part that brings you joy. Make friends with designers and trade your work for theirs, or trade tips, trade advice. Get comfortable with being joyfully bad at something — from that soil of humility grows a million questions for those who have learned and are excited to share. Iterate until you’ve something you’re proud of, or iterate so much you’ve ruined it and have to go back to bald.
Leverage the IndieWeb and its wonderfully thought-out protocols, tools like brid.gy to syndicate your ideas out to the wider web, and then use Webmentions to bring the ensuing conversations back where the content is. That way, you can publish work where you prefer to, folks on Bluesky can enjoy and discuss it, in the same stroke as folks on Mastodon may, or folks directly on the canonical URL.
I encourage you to join us in our auspicious website adventure, and if you do, I hope you’ll further join us on personalsit.es, our happy little home for everyone building something humble or thrilling or joyful or deeply accursed, but personal.
part six.

Sunrise on the Matterhorn, Albert Bierstadt (after 1875)
You’re not crazy. The internet does feel genuinely so awful right now, and for about a thousand and one reasons. But the path back to feeling like you have some control is to un-spin yourself from the Five Apps of the Apocalypse and reclaim the Internet as a set of tools you use to build something you can own & be proud of — or in most of our cases, be deeply ashamed of. Godspeed and good luck.
❦
That’s all for me. If you find any issues with this post, please reach out to me by email. Thanks eternally for your time and patience, and thanks for reading. Find me here online at one of my personal websites like henry.codes or strange.website or stillness.digital or strangersbyspring.com, or sometimes on Bluesky and Mastodon.
As ever, unionize, free Palestine, trans rights are human rights, fix your heart or die.
fin.
As Terry Pratchett observed in a 1995 interview with Bill Gates: “There’s a kind of parity of esteem of information on the net”.
Equal internet votes means any propagandist with a human or machine bot army can bias whatever they want. Now we have people with unimaginably large propaganda machines drowning out those who act with integrity, intellectual nuance and selflessness.
I definitely want an "overlay network" for those sites that have hijacked the term "social network". Also I'd like one for movie reviews too please.
But damn, it is absolutely beautiful. The fonts and paintings, wow.
Not designed to fool anyone into some random extremist view.
It may be that people who don't pick up on subtext humor, post more than average.
The singular destroys the monolithic many.
Like of course you had your CP/M machine and it had its restrictions but you are seeing them now with the added information of the current stage
There were also things that you liked too and still like and they may be better than somethings in current time
So you can then take things that you like and add it to modern or remove previous restrictions by taking access to modern upgrades.
> So yeah, nostalgia is never a good motivation for a manifesto. :-)
I think the problem's more so spiritual. The social contract is sort of falling off in most countries. So there is a nostalgia for the previous social contracts and the things which were with them like the old internet because to be honest the current monopolistic internet does influence with things like lobbying and chrony capitalism to actively break that social contract via corrupt schemes.
People want to do something about it, but speaking as a young guy, we didn't witness the old era so we ourselves are frustrated too but most don't create manifesto's due to it and try to find hobbies or similar things as we try to find the meaning of our life and role in the world
But for the people who have witnessed the old internet, they have that nostalgia to end up to and that's partially why they end up creating a manifesto of sorts themselves.
The reality of the situation to me feels like things are slipping up in multiple areas and others.
Do you really feel that the govt. has best interests for you, the average citizen?
Chances are no, So this is probably why liberterian philosophy is really spreading and the idea of freedom itself.
Heck I joined linux and the journey behind it all because I played a game and it had root level kernel access and I realized that there really was no way to effectively prove that it wasn't gone (it was chinese company [riot] so I wasn't sure if I wanted it)
I ended up looking at linux and then just watched enough videos until I convinced myself to use it one day and just switched. But Most people are really land-locked into the Microsoft ecosystem, even tiny nuances can be enough for some.
using Linux was the reason why I switched from trying to go from finance to computer science. I already knew CS but I loved finance too but In the end I ended up picking CS because I felt like there were chances of making real impact myself which were more unique to me than say chartered accountant.
So my point is, I am not sure if I would even be here if I had even the slightest of nuances. Heck, I am not even much of a gamer but my first distro was nobara linux which focused on gaming because I was worried about gaming or worried about wine or smth. So I had switched to nobara.
Looking now, I say to others oh just use this or that and other things and see it as the most obvious decisions sometimes but by writing this comment, I just wanted to say that change can be scary sometimes.
> Then there is the paradox of freedom to deal with, specifically if everyone is free to change anything they like to be the way they like it, other people will hate it and the entire system will be "bad." But for everyone to use the same basic frame work, and the dislike for the lack of freedom will be a common cause that builds community.
I would say let the man have his freedom. I would consider having more choices to be less of a burden than few choices in most occasions. Of course one's mind feels that there is a sweet spot but in longevity I feel like its the evolution of ideas and more ideas means more the competition and we will see more innovation as such.
One of my biggest issues was that on some occasions, Youtube algorithm would give me home run so I would still frequent Youtube algorithm
Another issue was that smh, youtube's rss feeds couldn't really find the difference between shorts and normal videos.
So if you have a channel which makes lots of short form content, you would see that so much more often.
Like I remember taking a few hours out of my life to fix it but ended up giving up.
Although now thinking about it, I feel like what can be done is seeing all the youtube videos and seeing all the shorts videos from an api or similar I guess and then seeing the difference and having it for an rss or such to pass another rss.
But one can see the pain in the ass for that and I am not sure how that would even work.
I must comment, Hackernews has been the perfect spot between algorithmically generated and completely self feed as it gives me new things.
is there anything like Hackernews but for youtube/video content?
* As a sidenote, people who just say "This." and "Cool." irk me, and I don't want to elicit the same annoyed reaction in others.
That's just one complaint, but it's not me, it's the site.
Manually writing html is more of a barrier than this. Back then there was a multitude of wysiwyg html editors like FrontPage, or Composer which was bundled with Netscape Navigator.
That's not necessarily a value judgement on the discussion though. From me, at any rate, it's more often a personal perspective: sometimes I'm just more interested in or charmed by the thing, and in digesting and coming to my own conclusions about it, than I am in reading other peoples' thoughts and perspectives on the thing.
But, yeah, to me it felt almost like an old magazine: the typography, the layout, the way images are used. A lot of the discussion about web design in the 90s came about as a result of people coming from a traditional publishing background and really struggling to do what they wanted with the web medium, so to me it sort of hearks back to that a bit, does a good job of embracing some parts of that older aesthetic, but works well with modern web capabilities. Mind, I'm looking at it on a desktop browser, and maybe the experience on mobile is less good (I can't say), but overall I like it. It has some personality to it.
Having said all of that, I certainly don't think it's bad, nor is it a commentary on the arguments being made. It's just not my cup of tea.
Amateur radio is a remarkably niche hobby so that kind of attention is rare, but it took ragebait to do it. A title like “The Next Generation of Ham Radio” would have flopped. I know this because that’s what I titled it first, and after 40 views in 2 months I slightly rewrote it and reposted it under the new title and within a day it appeared on just about every ham radio forum, facebook group, numerous email reflectors, and so on.
Now, someone's going to come out of the woodwork to remind me, "Well, ackshually, research suggests that it's easier to read text that's constrained by blah blah blah blah" I don't care. It sucks. It's always sucked. It will forever suck. I have a nice 27" monitor, and I want to use the whole thing. I don't want to have to hit ctrl-] ten times just to have text that is readable and spans my monitor.
Like to me especially signing up to each and every forum and then waiting to be accepted by a person feels good but has tons of friction and has some stress attached because you never know how strict the community is as well, it might take a day or two, perhaps this is the reason why we got the dumpster fire of mega internet forums called reddit or twitter of sorts
To me, federation feels better in this context since I can still have a single identity of sorts across multiple forums and you got better idea / ways to filter as well if need be
Another thing I feel about private forums where users have to wait for permission signing up is that I feel like something even as simple as having a cute cat or cute apple LOL or anything relaxing could make it less stressful for people to join. I assume its impact would be few but it would leave a deeper impact on those who do want to join.
I guess fetishising books and personal blogs has a limit.
I black-hole plenty of sites via pihole above and beyond the typical adblock lists. On a very few rare occasions I have turned off the pihole to unblock a site because I was curious after following a link that was blocked by said pihole. Every single time I quickly learned why that site was blocked, and visiting that site gained me nothing.
Thank you for sharing what works for you. I think it's great other people have been doing this style of read-side filtering. It's a pity that there's no way to inject code into mobile apps safely (i.e. this is an easy path to app-store rejection). Perhaps there's no option there but to push `shouldFilter` out to a server where you can run the logic. My use of my phone is the weakest link in my filtering strategy.
People talk about social media is if it were passive, when its deep intel, deep analysis, manipulation. Where everything we do, is not just used to manipulate us, but in aggregate, improves manipulation overall.
It is amazing what toxins people will accept, if the toxins become baseline familiar.
Yes, because even if you do, they will find other ways to exclude you. Their stated goal is to exclude as many non-Americans from the USA as possible, regardless of whether they consider you "innocent" or not.
But the images are a part of the work, not separate from it, no?[0]
You might have a preference against that, which is absolutely fine, but I think you're making an artificial distinction.
[0] There's obviously a separate conversation to be had about how much that part contributes or detracts with any such work, but the point stands that I tend to view such works as all of a piece including all constituent parts.
TFA works with iOS reader mode, which is all that matters to me. I use it instinctively as it makes style more or less uniform and lets me focus on the content of the article.
Now I'm in my 40s, oh wow. Small, illegible, font is everywhere. Instructions on food is especially bad for this. At least on the computer you can usually force 125% font rendering.
Point being, the site is probably quite legible to people in their 20s.
Your logic seems to be wanting.
I choose to spend more time at work than on vacation. Do you think I like it better, or can you imagine one reason explaining why I work?
Most people will readily admit to this, especially when it comes to the internet, and it’s well documented that many people are not happy with how much time they spend on the internet or how it impacts their lives.
Without the retatrutide dose I'm on I frequently consume large amounts of food. I love apples, and blueberries, and chicken and rice. I can easily eat an entire Costco bag of Envy Apples at a stretch. Inevitably, I regret this once I have exited my fugue state of food consumption. So why do I do it? My behaviour on retatrutide is far superior at getting me both total content and joy (in the sense of area-under-the-curve rather than point-in-time).
This concept has been explored for a long time[0]. The earliest documented I know of is the concept of Akrasia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akrasia from the Greek philosophers. But I think any notion of utility must build in the notion of regret and perhaps the bicameral mind and perhaps also the notion of non-rationality. My utility functions for the things I do are not time-translation invariant, therefore I think any model that optimizes for greater content and greater joy must necessarily involve temporally non-local terms. I don't yet have a strong model of this.
But we know this is common to many mental disorders. Part of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is an interruption of some mental pattern. My wife and I have a game we find amusing to play when we want to overrule the other's temporally local preferences: we challenge the other to a game of rock-paper-scissors to see whether the countermanding applies. When she exercises it, I frequently find that even if I win the momentary desire has passed.
tl;dr: Utility functions have different values depending on the temporal stride they take
0: Recently, Elon Musk claimed that the aim for Twitter should be "unregretted user minutes". Sadly, despite this stated aim, I found that his changes decreased these and increased regret so I had to stop using his platform. I agree with the notion of maximizing (value - regret) expressed in some abstract form, however.
The challenge when tackling difficult problems is to bring in solutions to those problems.
Subway offered an alternative to junk food. By offering custom flavors of choice, giving consumers more control over what they eat. I don't see any fresh food at subway. Does it mean what they did is futile? No. Can't we point out this is another type of junk ? We better do.
The site is wonderful when rendered with JavaScript. A web to aspire to is one where the system font is set by default, at least could be chosen.
All valid concerns looking at an endeavor discussing a better web. The author may even take note and iterate, there was no claim it was definitive work.
If your goal is to suffer as much as possible, it does not matter. You are still making choices that lead you to your goal as fast as possible.
I'm talking about (per the article) whether self-exclusion from social media will soon become a worldwide red flag for travel.
Design and content are inseparable. When design reinforces the point of the content, that is good design, even if it's ugly, even if it's not aesthetically pleasing to you, even if it's not how you'd do it.
But I'd argue that questing for neutrality is worse than taking a stance, even the wrong stance. Besides which, what one now considers "neutral" is also a giant set of design decisions - just ones made by committees and large corporations, so the blame for its drawbacks can be passed off, and there's plausible deniability for the designer.
Someone takes risks and makes something creative they consider artistic. You're reducing their choices to a question of whether they intended to be popular or to court criticism, flattening the conversation into one about social media credit, and completely discrediting the idea that they had true intent beyond likes and points. That response itself betrays something slightly cowardly about the ethos of neutrality you're proposing.
Reels is able to keep me engaged because it is able to surface similar content I would like but from different users. And they have such a breadth of producers these days.
The X home feed algo is not so good apart from it being text only, even for infotainment content. YT shorts also does not work as good as the Insta algo
Maybe this is just a disagreement of what it means for something to "become more useful"? As an example, If I need a bank account and every bank goes online only and shutters their physical locations, that is not online banking becoming more useful to me. I was perfectly happy going to the physical location, but i am now spending more time doing banking on the internet.
“I personally could not view this page [because I turned off JS], therefore I will dismiss it out of hand as it didn’t cater to my needs.” A choice made by the consumer somehow makes the author accountable for it.
Or more succinctly, “but what about me [or people I’ve anointed myself as spokesperson for]?”spoken by someone not the intended audience for the piece, trying to make the author responsible for their need.
The answer to which, I think, is either, “it’s not for you then so move on,” or perhaps even “misery is optional, just enable JS ffs.”
The idea that the creator of a work must bend to the will of those that consume it seems to be highly prevalent, and is pretty much at odds with creativity itself.
A lot of these arguments are really arguments about an unstated "baseline" that we feel we deserve.
Seriously, haven't we been working tirelessly to expand the circle of access? Nostalgia reflects when the circle was smaller, and we felt that we knew everyone in it.
People have a tendency to push blame to external forces rather than take responsibility for their own actions. But personal responsibility cannot be the full story, because (almost) everyone acknowledges that drug addiction is something over which people have starkly reduced control.
So the question remains: What about other things "in the middle" like social media or porn "addiction"? Is it the fault of the person, the external force (which you must admit is consciously organised with the goal in mind of promoting the addictive behaviour, since their bottom line depends on it), or some mixture?
Regarding your argument of “better” you seem to be arguing by definition.
Edit: I now realize you are the original poster who said “more useful”, so why did you change it?
If you write things for your own website you would make more of an effort and it would ideally find an audience that enjoys your world view or insights into your topics.
It would be great to lure you into that experience. HN is a terrible dating agency. Gathering down votes here is the opposite of making friends. It is however great for discovering authors like Henry.
He could have spend his time complaining on x how bad it is.