Social Media Escape Club

Discoverability of smart web content relies on word of mouth and human curation.

While the dumb web screams, the smart web whispers.

I didn’t mind social media when it was just one aspect of the internet, and it was largely just for that first word, “social.” But it slowly became the everything place, and now it’s bite-sized versions of news, art, ads, politics, obituaries, health advice, crimes against humanity, kittens, low-rent humor, messages from friends, soft-core porn, go... See more

I often think of the Noah Smith quote: “Fifteen years ago, the internet was an escape from the real world. Now, the real world is an escape from the internet.”

Since 2015, I’ve felt like social media was an addictive high-speed treadmill, designed to keep us running to exhaustion, getting increasingly worse with each year.

You don’t need to be showing up everywhere. Nor do you need to be showing up all the time.

The internet of today is a battleground. The idealism of the ’90s web is gone. The web 2.0 utopia — where we all lived in rounded filter bubbles of happiness — ended with the 2016 Presidential election when we learned that the tools we thought were only life-giving could be weaponized too. The public and semi-public spaces we created to develop our... See more