Remember Bookmarks?
It's hard to go on the internet these days, and not read about why the internet is bad. Of course, we're not talking about the entire internet. Just the handful of websites that everyone uses every single day to, effectively, browse the internet. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google. You know what I mean.
Just within the past month: 50 million Facebook users had their personal information stolen, Instagram is more than happy to prioritize growth over the mental health of their users, Facebook faked video view metrics by up to 900% which defrauded advertisers and ushered in waves of layoffs in the media industry and the New York Times Editorial Board recently scolded Facebook and Twitter for relying on the media industry to moderate their platforms for them.
The sum total of this is, in the estimation of writer Adam Sternbergh who literally took a course on how to be happy, is that today's internet is designed to make us upset. "If science sought to create a Sadness Generator, it couldn't do better than Facebook/Instagram," tweeted Sternbergh.
I believe him. We can't leave our consumption habits up to algorithms developed by profit-seeking companies that claim to know us better than we know ourselves. The feeds are destroying us. But buried within your web browser lies a solution. That solution is the bookmark.
Feeds were not always the dominant form of consumption. Before, the internet was like a large book you could flip through. You could pick it up, put it down — log on and log off — and everything would still more or less be there. It was a slightly smaller, sure, thus making it easier to feel like the assortment of websites you frequented was all the internet you needed. Back then, "browsing the web" was an intentional activity, facilitated by the laborious process of connecting to the internet and just how slow everything loaded. It was, thanks to the limits of internet speeds at the time, not a cascade of posts fed directly into your eyeballs that you can hardly look away from.
The people who developed the feed, the people who have invested in the feeds and the people who now rely on the feeds all want to convince you that the feeds are the best. That it surfaces things you wouldn't otherwise see. That it empowers you, the user, to make your own decisions about what you want to read and what you don't, what you believe and what you don't and so on.
There is some truth to that. The advent of sharing has made it possible for something to pop into your feed that you otherwise haven't explicitly said you want put there. And the feed has effectively destroyed the traditional forms of gatekeeping that plagued the old web. That you can now become wildly famous on Twitter for a good tweet, and then use that brief moment of fame to plug something — a Soundcloud, a Kickstarter, a Patreon, a GoFundMe and so on — would be next to impossible in the old days of the internet. But is that what we're really on this thing for?
The feeds have done everything but empower you, the user.
Instead of visiting various websites and having a nice time seeing what they have on offer and moving onto the next website, the feed has brought everyone — websites, people, brands, politicians and so on — into a single place. And they all want your attention.
They all want your attention because you're stuck here in the feeds and if you're going to look at something you might as well look at their something over the something of everyone else in the feed. This, of course, has created a race to the bottom for your attention. Everyone is trying to get you to pay attention to everything all the time. Not because anything of it is interesting or worth your actual attention, but because your attention is worth something to them. And because of the economics that drive display advertising on the internet, the only thing worth pursuing is more and more eyeballs. Not people, or interests, but just eyeballs. The CPM does not really care who you are, it only cares about how many.
Does this make you, the user, feel empowered? It bears repeating that it wasn't always like this. There was a time when things had a beginning and an end.
We can't leave our consumption habits up to algorithms developed by profit-seeking companies that claim to know us better than we know ourselves.
There is a lot wrong with the magazine industry. The unrealistic standards of body image it propagates. The towel-snapping Ivy League dickweeds who still sit at the helms of the biggest publications and only hire those in their own image. But what I always loved and found valuable in magazines is that you can finish reading them. You get a magazine once a quarter, once a month or even once a week and — if edited competently — will have stories that cover the sum total of knowledge you need in that given time period. Sometimes, I think folks forget that newspapers used to be printed multiple times per day.
Obviously, things having a beginning and an end is not compatible with, like, demands from investors that things must grow tenfold. And so we have the feeds. Because the feeds never end. And if something never ends then it can never stop growing.
But you know what does have a beginning and an end? A list of bookmarks. You know what websites you like and which ones you don't. You don't need Facebook and Twitter to see what they have to offer. You can just go to them. You can type them into the URL bar of your browser and just go to them. Better yet, you can bookmark them. A handy list of all your favorite places online that you can thumb through at your leisure. You can add websites you like and remove ones that you don't and you'll never be forced to look at them again. Doesn't that sound nice? Don't you feel empowered now?
I wish the internet was sincere. Almost everything online these days is insincere, an attempt to trick you into giving up your attention. Sometimes it is insincere people doing this, but more often than not it is sincere people forced into doing insincere things in order to pay rent, feed themselves and enjoy what little time they can manage away from the internet.
Stop following. Start bookmarking.
There is a sincereness in originality. And the internet — for all the "weirdness" that happens on it — is all the same. YouTubers pretend to be your friend to grow their audience. Brands pretend to be people because the advertising industry has run out of ideas. The art of writing a good headline has been rounded-off into delivering the maximum amount of clicks.
A bookmark is sincere. Typing out the URL of a specific website you know and enjoy is sincere. And I think media companies are starting to realize this. Years and years of trying to publish things that do well on the feeds — because "no one goes to your homepage anymore" — have left their homepages a scatterbrained mess that likely doesn't appeal to anyone in particular. Earlier this month, New York Magazine's Intelligencer relaunched their homepage with the goal of making it a place you want to go to directly. They're not trying to be the only website you need, but rather, the best way to actually read what Intelligencer has to offer.
It's something that we try to do every single day here on Digg dot com. On our website's homepage are 49 slots. Almost every single minute of every single day we are trying to fill those 49 slots with the best approximation of what is worth your time here on the internet. That's what we have to offer. It has a beginning and an end. This is a feature, not a bug. We want you to come to our website, but we also want you to go to other websites. Because who can say they honestly love the internet and also believe that their website is the only website people need.
And I think, you, the user, realize this too. When Facebook went down for the better part of an hour in August, people started going back to the homepages of news websites. You're smart. You know where to go to find things to read or things to watch on the internet. You don't need the feeds.
Stop following. Start bookmarking. At first, it will seem difficult. Just letting the feeds ooze content into your eyeballs the moment you have a single idle second will seem like the easier option. Do not give up. Use this moment to assess what you actually want to spend your time on the internet consuming. Identify the places that offer that. Bookmark them. It's that simple.
