I’ve decided to follow through with my conviction expressed here and in other places, “to interact mostly with material and sources we have a direct relationship to”. So I vibecoded my own blog here, and am back to good old fashioned Atom feeds. Ah, the youth. You just don’t see it when you are younger and just use whatever is shiny and fancy (which was: Substack at a particular time), without thinking about long term implications.

There are well known problems with platforms, but what is my personal pet peeve are these recommender systems which I find absolutely vile. Somehow this thought occured to me is that this is maybe because whereas your brain tries its best to predict its environment (or form it according to what you want to see), these things try to predict you. Which makes you a kind of prey, isn’t it?

On that note, I’ve gone over to build my own curated feed into my personal issue tracker and cancel some subscriptions. My inbox now receives feeds from other blogs, YouTube videos from channels I’m interested in, email and so forth. And I can tune in or down whatever I need to see more or less of. All in one place, satisfying men’s hunger for news, but avoiding one’s attention system to get hijacked. Let’s see how this goes 💪.