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- title: "content and customisation & like and share buttons"
- published: 2019-06-12
- ---
-
- the point of my ever having a website (including this blog) and my
- writing a book or designing a game or programming something is, above
- all else, the *content* of whatever project it is. all too frequently
- for me, however, i get much too engrossed in the customising my
- product before it is even worthy of the title. instead of writing this
- blog post, i could be making my blog easier on the eyes, giving its
- colours better contrast, spending hours trying to create a favicon, or
- any number of things which i am sure to do in the future, but more
- than any of those things, my blog needs **content**. i do not feel bad
- about waiting until i at least had a mostly functioning blog to
- actually start writing seriously, because having an idea of the
- general layout and formatting tools available to me will no doubt have
- a significant influence in the style in which my posts are written.
-
- > so why doesn't *this* post make use of those so-called "formatting
- > tools", i hear no one ask so i will answer.
-
- simply put, because especially at this stage of my blog,
- <big><b>content</b></big> > **customisation**. not too mention a lot
- of what i'm doing is experimenting with what's available to me to use,
- how to use it, and what outcomes my choices will generate.
-
- ## before i bore you to death
-
- because i feel like there needs to be more to this post, and if i
- touch on more than one topic, i might actually end up interesting more
- of you than i thought plausible.
-
- ### the problem with preambles
-
- like the one i just wrote, is it can be pretty easy to forget either
- what you were planning on leading into or forgetting how you were
- going to say it. it's a funny little world that way, is it not?
-
- > *say something interesting or stfu, smeghead*
-
- you might be saying to yourself. but in the end they are **my**
- monologues, and if i was writing for sake of publicity and one of the
- main addictive aspects of social media, i would have `like` and
- `share` buttons for an array of platforms as well as a comments
- section. i have absolutely zero plans to at any time implement any of
- these things. i do plan on implementing an rss feed, though. and i
- honestly would like to hear if you liked my post, should you read it,
- but it's not why i'm writing it.
-
- ## the like button killed the weblogging star
-
- on any social media platform, really, be it proprietary shitsites(tm)
- like twitter, facebook, and whatever there is (tumblr? instagram? i
- have never had an account with either so i don't really know what
- they're for, but i have heard the phrase "follow on instagram" so it
- almost definitely qualifies) or decentralised, less-evil,
- freedom-enabling social media such as mastodon, pleroma, or misskey,
- what is more likely to get "up" votes or "likes" or "shares": an
- inspirational quote from someone a lot of people like attached to a
- cute or heartwarming image of anything, ~or~ a post that on its own
- isn't particularly noteworthy and just shares some thoughts about a
- niche interest? obviously the first one. but what if person one only
- ever posted short, snarky, silly, substance-less fluff while person
- two posts what they thought was an interesting take on an idea, or
- reviews of thought-provoking media, or small tutorials on how to
- accomplish something the way they did? person two sounds more
- interesting, but when you are judged on every small snippet of text
- and/or media, you'll be rewarded for posting things that trigger an
- immediate emotional response from the reader, and this has led to many
- things that used to be judged as a whole (the way podcasts usually
- still are and the way blogs and such used to be) instead being judged
- line for line.
-
- if you liken that to books, the ridiculousness of it
- becomes more self-evident still. you will seldom like every single
- part of a novel, if any. there will be sentences, word choices,
- scenes, or dialogue you wish would have been handled differently. but
- that is normal. and i have a strong belief that when you add the "vote and
- share" memetic norm and being funded through advertising together, the
- sum of the equation is what we know as this fake news epidemic. people
- erroneously expect the things posted by their friends whom they trust
- to have already been fact checked, and so continue spreading lies and
- "news" designed to incite irrational tribalism or raise ad revenue
- through clicks to *their* friends who
- continue this viral propagation of dangerous ideas and fake news, all
- of these people unwittingly becoming part of the problem.
-
- ===
- [unashamed of having an unrevised first draft published, because i
- don't want to have to bother with it. just consider posts like this as
- stream of thought blogging]
- ===
-
- nyaa~
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