Over It

Someone asked if I was doing A Heart For Blogs again and I had to figure out why I wasn’t into it anymore. The original concept was fine—everyone nominate the blogs you actually read. No algorithm in between. A genuine recommendation network. That idea appealed to me when it first started.

But somewhere it stopped working. Every post about the campaign funnels traffic back to whoever’s running it. They’re in the middle of every recommendation. The organizer benefits most and everyone else kind of doesn’t. I don’t think it was started with bad intentions. But the structure is what it is.

What really gets me is that you don’t actually need any of this. You don’t need a designated day or a red heart logo or anyone’s permission to link to something you like. You can do that whenever. I do. The whole campaign only exists because people like being part of something collective, something with a shape. Which is fine. I just don’t want to be part of that particular thing.

I’d rather keep my recommendations untethered. Just whenever I find something worth talking about, I talk about it. That’s the whole thing—no campaign, no middleman, no permission.