lucasdidthis

Artisanal software

In a speech delivered years ago, Ev Williams used agriculture as a metaphor to understand what’s possible on the Internet.

Agriculture was a tremendous invention – it got people fed and freed them to do many things. But agriculture – taken to the extreme in the pursuit of profit leads to a sick and obese population and industrial... See more

• The future of internet media is less, but better.  Time and attention are precious, finite resources. How we spend them determines the quality of our lives. We believe media practitioners have a responsibility to treat time and attention as sacred, refusing to churn out commoditized filler content or algorithmic bait, and instead only ask for

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For the best part of a decade, people have been making content for an algorithm, not the audience. Worse, they haven’t been creating things for themselves. So if the feeds can no longer be relied upon to put content in front of new eyeballs then people are free to make the things that they want to make. Rather than making things that float well at ... See more

There is currently a quite monocultural digital life, especially compared to the digital world that we came up with in the late nineties and early two-thousands, when individuals created the web. We had our websites and our hodgepodge content management systems, which we’d built for ourselves. Because of that, the web felt more like a city with dif... See more

Search engines — the window into the web for many people — top their results with pages containing thousands of words of auto-generated nothingness, perfectly optimized for search engine prominence and to pull in money via ads and affiliate links while simultaneously devoid of any useful information.

Social networks have become “the web” for many pe... See more