I find myself in a weird place with the internet. I used to love Twitter, getting my news from there and engaging with friends and some randos about various topics. I don’t want to get into the politics or history of it, but it’s pretty clear it’s way different now, users are fragmented, and the notion of the “creator economy” has taken over not only X but every other platform.

I have nothing against creators. I went to art school, I work in advertising producing creative content (well, now I consult but that’s for another day). Make your money, get your brand deals, be “creative”. I just don’t find the content enjoyable to consume, and the discovery and served-to-me aspect of it is equally annoying. And then there’s AI slop, content generated at scale designed to game algorithms rather than say anything, which has made the signal-to-noise ratio genuinely bad in a way that feels new.

Thinking about it, I never really liked watching videos online to begin with. Polished YouTube, TikTok, Reels, all of it. Watching requires either isolation or divided attention, and I don’t have much of either. I prefer to read. That’s probably why I liked Twitter in the first place: it was text, it was my own timeline of people I chose, not random things being served to me.

This has manifested in a return to RSS and reading blogs, along with podcasts. A curated experience that isn’t fed to me by an algorithm and keeps the copycat optimized content at arm’s length. What you lose is any social or community aspect, which I’m not necessarily craving but do find some value in. Nothing has really filled that gap cleanly.

The hosts on a few podcasts I listen to have talked about this and have gone back to or started blogs for what I think are similar reasons. It inspired me to do the same. Have a place that is mine, where I can explore thoughts about my interests and where I’m currently at, that I own and is free from the algorithmic content farms these platforms have become. And if that leads to some interaction with various communities, great. But that’s a bonus, not a feature.