This linkdump is algorithm-free, hand-rolled and made with love. And yes, you might discover some sort of theme in this collection…

A large book titled The Internet Yellow Pages Third Edition features various icons like a globe a newspaper a baseball a computer and a paint palette against a red background

@Westenberg | The creator economy trap: why building on someone else’s platform is a dead end

When you build on someone else’s platform, you are ultimately limited by the tools, features, and monetization options that the platform provides.

Building your own platform is not a guarantee of success. It demands hard work, creativity, and a deep understanding of your audience and your niche, perhaps moreso than the creator economy.

The Memex Method. When your commonplace book is a public… | by Cory Doctorow | Medium

There’s another way that blogging makes my writing better: writing every day makes it easier to write every day.

A final word on blogs before we return to our regularly scheduled programming

I also don’t want to — and don’t think we can — resurrect the corpse of “how blogging used to be”, it needs to be, as Paul said, “something new”.

Browse the old Web: A system that connects emulated web browsers to web archives, allowing users to browse the old web, today, as it was!

AI isn’t useless. But is it worth it?

You can also spot LLMs in all sorts of places on the internet, where they’re being used to try to boost websites’ search engine rankings. That weird, bubbly GPT voice is well suited to marketing copy and social media posts, too. Any place on the web that incentivizes high-volume, low effort text is being inundated by generated text,

The Tech Baron Seeking to Purge San Francisco of “Blues” | The New Republic

Balaji then revealed his shocking ideas for a tech-governed city where citizens loyal to tech companies would form a new political tribe clad in gray t-shirts. “And if you see another Gray on the street … you do the nod,” he said, during a four-hour talk on the Moment of Zen podcast. “You’re a fellow Gray.”

Sunsetting Section 230 Will Hurt Internet Users, Not Big Tech  | Electronic Frontier Foundation

As Congress appears ready to gut one of the internet’s most important laws for protecting free speech, they are ignoring how that law protects and benefits millions of Americans’ ability to speak online every day.

Are We Watching The Internet Die?

We’re watching the joint hyper-scaling and hyper-normalization of the internet, where all popular content begins to look the same to appeal to algorithms run by companies obsessed with growth.

Heat Death of the Internet - takahē

You buy a microwave and receive ads for microwaves. You buy a mattress and receive ads for mattresses.

The web is not dying – Manu

it’s a lot harder to reach a million people if you have to start from your own little corner of the web. But you know what? Tough shit.

A Time We Never Knew

There is a beautiful and melancholic word I like called anemoia. It means nostalgia for a time or a place one has never known.

How 2014 Changed the Internet Forever - The Ringer

Ten years ago, developments in commerce, activism, and influencer culture coalesced, and our contemporary concept of “being online” was born

If We Hung Out…

…listen to your favorite rant… and encourage you to write a blog post about it.

We Don’t Love RSS Enough

Believe it or not, you don’t have to be a content creator yourself to make a useful RSS feed. Instead of maintaining a large multimedia project, you could simply run a simple feed that includes some of the most important or insightful news and media.

We Are the Curators of the Web

We are the human beings that are meant to curate the web. We should continue to spread the word about how we use the web, which is very personal and as active participants.

Beware the cloud of hype - The History of the Web

There’s no knowing exactly what will happen with AI technologies, but it wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect something far more boring and centralized than what’s being promised.

Tech has graduated from the Star Trek era to the Douglas Adams age (Interconnected)

It is absurdly improbable that you can hoover up the internet, shred it, then talk to the mulch pile and it talks back.

What Emacs got right, or how I wish modern apps were more like a 50 year old text editor

When you do anything in Emacs - including hitting a hotkey or clicking - you’re actually just executing a command. And this turns out to be an exceptionally useful architecture for several reasons