Reading Material

Most internet time is wasted, obviously. Every few months though you stumble on something someone actually thought about instead of just optimized for, and it reminds you why you still bother scrolling.

I came across this essay by Sara about keeping her blog amateur, refusing to turn it into a business. She said her updates are just for her own amusement, no higher purpose, and she was okay with that. Everyone tells you to build an audience and monetize it, but there’s something defiant about saying no. I get that.

Around the same time the RocketBeans guys did an interview about their internet TV station. They kept emphasizing that having a small fanbase that actually shows up matters way more than chasing millions of passive followers. That’s always made sense to me. Scale doesn’t equal anything real.

René from Nerdcore posted this exhausted rant before disappearing to America for a few months - basically about how the internet became a wasteland managed by mediocre business school graduates pumping out fake-click metrics. He wasn’t wrong. You can feel it when you scroll. Increasingly boring feeds, waiting for someone to do something interesting.

That week also had pieces about Nazis quietly taking over rural villages in eastern Germany, someone questioning why we got so paranoid about child nudity. All part of the same sense that we’re compressed into the same broken patterns, just faster now.

But yeah. People still write things worth reading. You just have to actually look.