the hobgoblin of little minds, take two

19 Dec, 2024

(rewriting/updating a post from the blog i briefly revived before discovering bear)

A few months ago I was thinking about social media again (as I do, too often) when I learned that cohost was shutting down at the end of the month. cohost was a social media site, possibly most easily compared to tumblr in terms of functionality and vibes, but most distinctly being against things like the commodification of content, the algorithmification of engagement, growth-at-all-costs strategies fueled by venture capital, all that jazz. (It also allowed an impressive amount of custom CSS, resulting in a lot of “css crimes” posts in the corner of cohost I saw, but I hesitate to overgeneralize the impact of that particular aspect.) I never really got into cohost and claim no expertise in how it went, so I will limit myself to shallow observations — many people described it as one of a kind and were incredibly sad to leave, reluctantly sharing links to their profiles on other sites, as one does. A few declared there was no other social media website they’d go to.

In particular, I saw arguments from two posters in very different places that public timelines and other discovery-oriented features, which were in most close alternatives but which cohost didn’t have, led to a lot more harassment by presenting things to strangers out of context for them to get mad at you. For better and for worse, posts on cohost were pretty low on discoverability: you’d see posts and shares from people you followed, and you could follow or browse tags to see posts where people explicitly opted in by tagging their post as such, and probably some stuff with mentions and other features I don’t know about, and that was it. Some users didn’t like this and adopted the ha-ha-only-serious tag “The Cohost Global Feed”, which kind of worked as intended for discoverability, but also caused some of the problems that you’d expect a global feed to cause. At least, that’s the vibe I got. This paragraph probably crosses the line of me talking about things I don’t know about, sorry.

One advantage of having a long-running blog is getting more-or-less authentic glimpses into the thoughts of myself from many years ago. One of the things I documented in, yup, 2009 (content warning: cringe 2009 blog post!), a glimpse I’ve come back to more than once, was my first encounter with the concept of “microblogging”.

Some things haven’t changed: I’m still a rambler, still not really into shortform content. I think it's a deep inclination — a few months back, I tried replying to a post on Bluesky¹, and an incredibly simple thought in my head became 350 characters when I typed it all out, so I had to go back and delete words and punctuation and whatever until I had exactly 300 characters that maybe got the point across but barely sounded like me. Ugh! And now additionally, I have a vague unease that the prevalence of one-line zingers with all the room for nuance and bridge-building squeezed out of them has contributed nontrivially to our current civilizational predicament of misinformation and polarization. So there's that.

Some things have changed, though: I don’t care so much about actively trying to reach people by posting any more. I’m still at least slightly proud of my post about that. (Also, I don’t weirdly condescend to my readers at random points, I hope.) In fact, low discoverability is kind of nice. I am lucky/privileged enough to not have personal experience with being harassed online; for me, I guess it’s just that thoughts about readers and exposure provided a slowly-but-steadily increasing source of pressure to meet my own standards, which led to slowly-but-steadily decreasing motivation to finish things.

Somewhere along the way while blogging, I picked up the assumption that the goal was to get your posts to reach as many people as possible, and ran with it without much thought. For a while, it might have been defensible as instrumental for a more pragmatic goal, albeit one that I probably gave way too much weight to, which was to get hired somewhere cool by impressing a recruiter or something. But that’s not really a concern for me these days.

A different anecdote springs to mind: I went to a chat/interview with Bo Burnham where some of the talk was bemoaning the always-on nature of being on the internet and social media nowadays (a theme very much in his work, in a typically self-aware fashion) and what it must be doing to people’s brains. Something I noted down for myself somewhere was that one of his ultimate goals was to “be comfortable with not being heard”. I still think about that.

I was reading a guide on how to use Twitter well — yes, I know, Twitter? in 2024? But I'm close to people who really seem to me to have figured out how to use it prosocially, and continue to this day, plus some things the guide covered definitely generalize to other platforms — and the guide included that goal of getting hired and several others on top as part of the pitch for why you should try, which I had read without really absorbing at first. And it was a pleasant enough guide, it wanted you to be constructive and kind, it taught you how to aggressively take control of the experience, it cautioned adequately against trying to become popular at all costs; what is there to object to? But when I reflected harder on the goals, and why I was reading the guide and considering this experiment at all, I realized I didn't really need any of the things it was selling right now. Some of them would be nice! It would be nice to make more friends and connections. But I have friends, thank goodness, and... the kind of new friend I think I want to make the most is exactly the kind that shares my preference for expressing themselves thousands of words at a time over pithy tweets.

Bear is a blogging platform, not a social network. You can't directly follow or repost things inside it. You interact with each Bear blog as an individual entity, just about the same way you would with any other blog anywhere else on the internet. Except, Bear does have a global feed, and it's not so large that the feed is overwhelming. And, it has some bold design choices, bits of the ethos that seem familiar from cohost; and so, it seems, it draws a specific kind of user. I wouldn't call it a community, exactly, as that suggests more interactions between its members than there naturally are, but maybe this kind of self-propagating effect, where the existing set of writers influences the next kind of user who joins, is enough. It sure feels like one, and it's a group I'm proud to be influenced by.

Sometimes I still visit the Art of Problem Solving blogroll. Very, very briefly: AoPS is a website that offers online math classes, the kind adjacent to middle and high school math competitions; it also happens to have an attached forum and user blogs. I never took any AoPS classes, but the forum was a huge part of my childhood and I met a lot of friends there. I don't know what the demographics of AoPS bloggers are, but vibes match my naive guess of mostly middle and high school students who participate in math competitions.

I'm long past that phase of my life now, but occasionally I'll still scroll the blogroll to absorb the vibes, the uncontainable youthful exuberance of the most scribacious cross-section of academic overachievers. It's people saying things: life events, things they like and don't like, "haha I'm so random" observations. It's people polling the audience for takes and opinions, as if anybody cared enough to respond; and then, incredibly, it's people caring enough to respond, or else, just as incredibly, it's people continuing to post as if they still believe anybody cares enough to respond.

I'll scroll, and wish I could still enjoy the internet that way.

AoPS blogs also support custom CSS, and one time while I was scrolling I noticed somebody had a few other users on their contributor list in some crazy styles, so I checked the CSS and saw something like:

a[href="/community/user/123456"]::before {
	font-size: 15px !important;
	font-weight: bold;
	content: "[redacted]";
	font-family: "[redacted]";
	animation: redacted 5s linear infinite !important;
}

I was stunned. Compared to CSS crimes on cohost, obviously this pales in terms of technical prowess, but CSS crimes in the cohost ecosystem feel quite normalized, and this... who on earth would appreciate it on this random person's blog, who could it be for? But I had a guess: it was for themselves.

I abandoned my WordPress blog seven years ago to take control of my Online Identity™ and markup and to leave a lot of my old cringe blog posts behind, switching to a more professional and technical blog, backed by the classic combo of a static site generator on GitHub Pages. I don't post a lot or really advertise my posts, but last week one of my coworkers offhandedly mentioned he had read my most recent one, and there was that one time I made the front page of Hacker News and the comments weren't even that bad, so... I guess it's going pretty well, actually. Plenty well enough for my tastes.

Why do I need another blog? Why not?

In the first version of this post, I wrote that I found a different reason to blog, for a different audience: people who want to know more about me. The urge to tack on a self-deprecating “for some reason” to that sentence is strong, and maybe it’s weird how I can square that with the previous section, but I want to be calmly, totally indifferent to the size of that set, treat it as a de dicto specifier. There is a lot of anodyne stuff I can write about. It won’t be innovative, it won’t be original; the prose won't be polished to a fault, there won't be a tight thesis statement holding everything together. And that’s fine.

The rationale in my head was something like: sometimes I go down rabbit holes learning about some other person, and all the thoughts that might seem anodyne to them, everyday details about their lives, actually fascinate me; so, what if I played the other side to that? There's this one chapter from Sideways Stories from Wayside School with a metaphor that I definitely did not absorb when first reading it, but for whatever reason, stuck with me. Maurecia is a student from the story who loves ice cream. One day, the teacher brings the entire class Maurecia-flavored ice cream, which tastes like what Maurecia tastes when she's not eating. Maurecia doesn't enjoy it because it tastes like nothing at all to her, but the rest of the class all love the taste. Later, when Maurecia gets to try some other students' flavors, she enjoys them.

Do you enjoy my flavor of ice cream, internet stranger?

Well, I don't think that's a terrible reason. But with a few more months I realized that's not exactly what I want either. I had distilled my reasoning into a directive to myself that I should reveal something about myself with each post, just to rule out completely impersonal jokes and quips about things I didn't really care about.

But, reflecting on all this yet again, I realized I probably value forming one two-way connection more than giving a thousand people a briefly entertaining glimpse of my inner workings. There are a lot of things about myself that I could imagine to be interesting but that might not be important to me, might not be something I'd think would justify connecting with somebody else over. Can I make the posts that, if I saw somebody other than myself post, would make me instantly want to become friends with them? Even if only 1%, or 0.1%, or less, of people would react in the same way?

That's a question I hope to answer. It generalizes to all the shortform platforms, but I really want to try to answer it here. Thanks for reading.