Backseat Software – Mike Swanson’s Blog
People use “enshittification” to describe platform decay. What I’m describing here is one of the mechanisms that makes that decay feel personal. It’s the constant conversion of your attention into a KPI.
Link tags: tti
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39C3 - Persist, resist, stitch - YouTube
A fascinating talk looking at the history of the intersection of knitting and stitching with wartime cryptography and resistance.
A Website To End All Websites | Henry From Online
Hand-coded, syndicated, and above all personal websites are exemplary: They let users of the internet to be autonomous, experiment, have ownership, learn, share, find god, find love, find purpose. Bespoke, endlessly tweaked, eternally redesigned, built-in-public, surprising UI and delightful UX. The personal website is a staunch undying answer to everything the corporate and industrial web has taken from us.
So Many Websites
But perhaps the death of search is good for the future of the web. Perhaps websites can be free of dumb rankings and junky ads that are designed to make fractions of a penny at a time. Perhaps the web needs to be released from the burden of this business model. Perhaps mass readership isn’t possible for the vast majority of websites and was never really sustainable in the first place.
Why doesn’t anything work anymore? | Jason Rodriguez
I’ve worked in the tech industry for close to two decades at this point. I’ve seen how difficult it is to build quality products, but I’ve also seen that it can be done. It just feels like no one gives a shit anymore, beyond a handful of independent devs and small shops. It’s wild.
Curate your own newspaper with RSS
I’m almost certainly preaching to the choir here because I bet you’re reading these very words in a feed reader, but what Molly White has written here is too good not to share:
RSS offers readers and writers a path away from unreliable, manipulative, and hostile platforms and intermediaries. In a media landscape dominated by algorithmic feeds that aim to manipulate and extract, sometimes the most radical thing you can do is choose to read what you want, when you want, without anyone watching over your shoulder.
Frame of preference – Aresluna
Marcin has outdone himself this time. Not only has he created an exhaustive history of the settings controls in Apple interfaces, he’s gone and made them all interactive!
While it’s easy to be blown away by the detail of the interactive elements here, it’s also worth taking a moment to appreciate just how good the writing is too.
Bravo!
Pluralistic: The enshittification of tech jobs (27 Apr 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
The point of AI isn’t to make workers more productive, it’s to make them weaker when they bargain with their bosses.
But what if I really want a faster horse? | exotext
Overall, consistency, user control, and actual UX innovation are in decline. Everything is converging on TikTok—which is basically TV with infinite channels. You don’t control anything except the channel switch. It’s like Carcinisation, a form of convergent evolution where unrelated crustaceans all evolve into something vaguely crab-shaped.
Pluralistic: With Great Power Came No Responsibility (26 Feb 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
The web is open, apps are closed. The majority of web users have installed an ad blocker (which is also a privacy blocker). But no one installs an ad blocker for an app, because it’s a felony to distribute that tool, because you have to reverse-engineer the app to make it. An app is just a website wrapped in enough IP so that the company that made it can send you to prison if you dare to modify it so that it serves your interests rather than theirs.
To remember, or to forget?
What are your own scribbles, your own ordinary plenty, not worth much to you now but that someone in the future may treasure?
First Impressions of the Pixel 9 Pro | Whatever
At this point, it really does seem like “AI” is “bullshit you don’t need or is done better in other ways, but we’ve just spent literally billions on this so we really need you to use it, even though it’s nowhere as good as what we were already doing,” and everything else is just unsexy functionality that makes what you do marginally easier or better. I’m sorry we live in a world where enshittification is being marketed as The Hot And Sexy Thing, but just because we’re in that world, doesn’t mean you have to accept it.
Google Now Defaults to Not Indexing Your Content - Vincent Schmalbach
Google search is no friend to the indie web:
Well-known brands often see most of their content indexed, while small or unknown bloggers face much stricter selectivity.
There was life before Google search. There will be life after Google search.
Information that you might search for may never appear in Google’s results. Not because it doesn’t exist, but because Google has chosen not to include it.
Should I remove this blog from Google Search?・The Jolly Teapot
There was life before Google search. There will be life after Google search.
Google is not a huge source of traffic and visibility. I get most of my visits from RSS readers, other people’s links including fellow bloggers, or websites like Hacker News. It’s hard to tell at this point since I don’t track anything, but that’s an educated guess.
Removing my website from Google would have very little impact, so I was wondering if I should just do it.
My own little patch
Co-signed!
If the web is now a metaphorical barren wasteland, pillaged by commercial interests and growth-at-all-costs management consultants, then I’m all the more motivated to keep my little patch of land lush, and green, and filled with rainbow flowers.
So, feel free to stop by any time and stay as long as you like. I won’t track you, make you look at ads, ask you to download my app, harass you with popups, suggest you sign up for my newsletter or push you through a sales funnel. Enjoy the garden, and the peace 💐.
How to Turn Off AI Overview in Google and Set “Web” as Default
I don’t use Google Search myself—I use Duck Duck Go—but if you do, here’s how to avoid the slop.
Deplatforming Myself: A Tech Manifesto – Haste Makes Waste
The modern web is constantly, endlessly hoovering up massive amounts of data about you, only some of which is correct, and then feeding you its best guess of what will glue your eyeballs to the screen just a little bit longer, no matter what that is, whether it’s actually good for you or not.
Pluralistic: Tech workers and gig workers need each other (13 Jan 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Ever wondered why you’re always being encouraged to download the app?
But zero percent of app users have installed an ad-blocker, because they don’t exist, because you’d go to prison if you made one. An app is just a web-page wrapped in enough IP to make it a felony to add an ad-blocker to it.