"why would you use that site? don't you know it's financed by someone evil?" yeah well i made my own websites and you all stopped going to websites so i have to use the evil ones you like instead of my own.
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I remember finding your website when I was still a teenager and you already had a huge backlog and I spent ages going through all the pictures. It was a great time.
Used to go through a list of bookmarks daily, now I hope evil sites shows me the people I follow in my feeds. But I just added links to TFD and MTTS on my home screen so I can remember to check it more often!
My friend introduced me to your stuff in 2005 and both read it daily. We still call each other “harp baby” years later because this was the most hilarious thing we’d ever seen, we spent weeks telling each other to have some dignity after it was posted. https://marriedtothesea.com/index.php?search=Baby+orchestra
marriedtothesea, toothpaste for dinner...these used to be my home pages when I opened my browser before the bus came in like, high school 😂 I still really long for these days. Still maintain my own site in the spirit of it all.
i remember when my dad and my uncle would watch your vids that had charles in them all the time and would show em to me as a kid. god i miss that era of the internet.
Even with Substack, unless you were already a prominent figure you still have to promote it, and there’s no place left to promote anything other than social media. And Substack has its own problems.
It's not all users' fault. Twitter became "microblogging", with people posting quips and linking to blogs, articles, etc. Then their algorithms started punishing people that linked to outside content. That's how threaded posts became popular, as people didn't want to post to outside content.
This in turn trained people into laziness. I keep seeing people requesting embeddable videos on blue sky. Like... Nooooo. Click the MFing link and go watch it, yeeesh
I think automatic link card for YouTube links are fine without embedding, but I think it should default to ADDING the link card and if you don’t want it you can opt out
Everyone took the path of absolute least resistance and only consumed content in the absolute laziest way possible, but I also kinda don’t blame them for it because—at least in the U.S.—the working class has had leisure time systematically stripped from it for decades.
No ethical consumption under capitalism and all that... The best we can do is try and fuck corporations over while we use their services (e.g. adblock, pirating, exploiting whichever vulnerabilities we can find etc.)
Google killing Google Reader was a far bigger deal than anyone realized. 😞
Obv RSS still exists but ending Google Reader meant RSS went from an essential feature of a website to something niche for weirdos. The beginning of the end of the computer showing things in the order they happened. 😮💨
I used NewsBlur which has many (not all!) of the feature of Google Reader, but what it doesn't have is the most important thing: a community of people commenting and sharing feed items. It's very very lonely compared to Reader.
Came to the comments to see if anyone pointed this out. People didn't really move to competitors, we just jumped ship to Twitter to get our article links :(
yeah its called stop using twitter/facebook/bluesky/whatever and set up a blog literally the same exact way you did it back in 1999 the only different now is the software is even better
I’ve made a point several times now on Twitter (pre-Elon) and mastodon about the internet never feeling smaller than it does now with the concentration of information. It sucks tbh. My website stopped working years ago and it took 2 years for anyone to notice
This perfectly illustrates the need for open protocols connecting people across social media. You can host your own website and data and freely post with and follow people who choose to use evil websites. This is why the stuff the Bluesky devs are building matters.
My website only exists because I work on Substack which you're not allowed to promote on Twitter. I'd like to get off Mr Bones Wild Websites/No Websites Ride
I miss having my own site. I'd have a list of bookmarked sites I'd check out every day, and I used rss feeds to see who updated their blog... times were better then
I used to have yours and Natalie’s sites saved in my browser bookmarks back in the late 2000s/early 2010s. Made sure to check them everyday! (Been following you since “Charles Has a Licking Problem”.)
Comments
Thank you for your service
Shoulda never left the spirit of the BBS
like jesus christ it’s a monopoly, chad, what do you want us to do?
i don’t see anyone canceling their internet or phone service even tho those companies do really shitty things
Obv RSS still exists but ending Google Reader meant RSS went from an essential feature of a website to something niche for weirdos. The beginning of the end of the computer showing things in the order they happened. 😮💨
But I'm not a former user of Google Reader, and cannot compare 😊
RSS for everything!