curating obscure social medias

The people I find most interesting on social media are using it as a sort of diary/note to self, not broadcasting to an audience.

Hyping up your friends is actually a lot more fun than self-glorification. After a decade of Instagram, the whole “Look at this photo I took of what I’m doing” game is growing stale. In fact, it’s a bit asocial just lobbing your solo snapshots into the feed. A true social network doesn’t just make consumption social (Likes, comments, reshares), but... See more

Sharing the books you read with others can be an intimate invitation into your brain — what you are drawn to, what you think about, and the life experiences that shaped those interests and thoughts. Even a book chosen based solemnly on aesthetics or its cultural context is still a choice that says something about its owner, or at the very least,... See more

It seems that most people can remember only a few high-level details of a book weeks later—if that. A typical reader might spend hours finishing some serious non-fiction—then maybe it comes up at a dinner party, and they find you can remember like three sentences. Basically no detailed recall.

To be transformed by a book, readers must do more than absorb information: they must bathe in the book’s ideas, relate those ideas to experiences in their lives over weeks and months, try on the book’s mental models like a new hat. Unfortunately, readers must drive that process for themselves. Authors can’t easily guide this ongoing sense-making:... See more