Activity tagged "better web"

To begin with these platforms forced us all into their stylised boxes and now, as you can see up top, they’ve made all the boxes look and feel the same. So if web aesthetic = the messy, expressive look of the open internet, and platform aesthetic = the polished, standardised design of closed ecosystems, both aesthetics say a lot about power, creativity, and who controls the experience. That’s probably uncontroversial. What I want to think about now, though, is what the new web aesthetic is.

Twitter and its imitators have adopted a structural design that is fundamentally bad for people. This isn't just a matter of who's in charge; it's a problem with the thing itself. Forcing users to adhere to a tight character limit, discouraging link culture, preventing people from editing their own posts, steering people into sharing things they hate, incentivizing rage bait with trending feeds, subjecting people to decontextualized encounters, encouraging conflict by discouraging tags, and leaving users powerless to clean up the resulting mess—all of this is bad shape.

Yet my — and I'd imagine your — frustration isn't borne of a hatred of technology, or a dislike of the internet, or a lack of appreciation of what it can do, but the sense that all of this was once better, and that these companies have turned impeding our use of the computer into an incredibly profitable business.

Some weeks ago, I quietly shipped a new content type on A Working Library, such that I am now writing short, social-shaped posts on my site and then sending them off to the various platforms. This is not a novel mode of publishing, but rather one borrowed and adapted from the POSSE model (“publish on your site, syndicate elsewhere”) developed by the IndieWeb community. While one of the reasons oft declared for using POSSE is the ability to own your content, I’m less interested in ownership than I am in context. Writing on my own site has very different affordances: I’m not typing into a little box, but writing in a text file. I’m not surrounded by other people’s thinking, but located within my own body of work. As I played with setting this up, I could immediately feel how that would change the kinds of things I would say, and it felt good. Really good. Like putting on a favorite t-shirt, or coming home to my solid, quiet house after a long time away.