I started programming because I wanted a web page for my band. These were the days of Geocities and Tripod and Angelfire. The internet was weird back then. The most common way to find out about things was through webrings. It was easy to get lost. You could start out on a web page about some local band and end up reading about some guy half a world away who specialized in restoring antique radios.

I'm old enough to remember when the Internet wasn't a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four.

— Tom Eastman (@tveastman) December 3, 2018

The enshittification of the internet is only going to accelerate as AI driven content farms become increasingly indistinguishable from the words and works of real live human beings. But Pandoras box has been opened, and no amount of hand wringing can change that.

So write your weird little blog. We need more content that’s just from ordinary people. Not being monetized or SEOed. Not playing to the algorithm.

Not a novel idea, and probably more eloquently put elsewhere. But I’m saying it here mostly just to embarrass myself into writing more.

AI looking header image generated by AI to the surprise of no one.