Let’s take back the Web!
date
Aug 25, 2023
type
Post
year
slug
take-back-the-web
status
Published
tags
Rant
summary
What have we done?! We’ve signed up to all the convenient services. Now our lives are full of shitty ads and we’re being tracked wherever we go.
What have we done?! We’ve signed up to Facebook, the site formerly known as Twitter, GMail, Medium and all the other convenient services. Now our lives are full of shitty ads, we’re being tracked wherever we go and someone else is controlling the content we see, all the while profiting from whatever content we create.
Screw this! Let’s take back the web! 💪
Let’s start our own blogs again, on our own domains. (It’s easier than ever!) Let’s collect RSS feeds from people with actually interesting things to say and read those instead of the ad-laden, potentially AI-generated nonsense we get fed by the algorithms behind Google News, Facebook et al. All they want to do is keep us scrolling so they can make ever more money by showing us ever more of their crappy ads. All the while controlling what content we get to see and what we don’t get to see. What an outrageous act of paternalism! What a waste of our valuable time.
I can’t even tell you how sick I am of wanna-be influencers telling me to “please like and subscribe” on YouTube. Well, not nearly as sick as I am of jokers on TikTok fake-pranking people, but still… How are we, as a society, ever going to dig us back out of that filthy filthy hole?
Well, you know what? The good news is that we don’t have to do any of that stuff. We can simply turn it off. We can ❌ delete the apps, or - for a start - remove them from our home screens. We don’t have to keep scrolling forever. We don’t need to use apps that are engineered to get us addicted and encourage eternal doom-scrolling. Let’s read our RSS feeds instead, and when we’re done reading the latest posts, then let’s just go and do something else - let’s be creative, let’s be social, let’s do something meaningful that actually makes us happy. Write a story, draw a picture, hug a tree.
Let’s take back the web and let’s take back our lives!