I’m moving the breaking smart list to substack this week. There will be broken links galore, which I may or may not ever get around to fixing. Main immediate reason: substack is free while mailchimp is now costing me $90/mo.
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There is also future optionality for a thread of paid content. Like maybe a podcast or more researchy posts. But in general I decided to take the leap because it feels like content infrastructure is poised for a paradigm shift.
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Substack, static sites, paid content, encrypted messaging, slack are on the right side. Mailchimp, wordpress, ad-supported or affiliate-links supported content, public media, are on the wrong side. Lot of affection for stuff in the second bucket, but not a lot of hope.
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Going a level deeper, headless CMSes, AWS lambda, nex-gen pubsub mechanisms (descended from RSS) are on the right side of history. Basic search (ie Google), heavy private backends, anonymous discovery, are on the wrong side. The web is going underground.
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One sign I take seriously: surface web tech is increasingly getting anti-text. It is getting *heavily* optimized for images. Aka packaging. The wordpresss ecosystem should be called imagepress now. Text must now flow in subterranean rivers.
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When I started in 2007, most Wordpress themes were text oriented and it was a Wild West. Now a couple of big theme frameworks dominate. Genesis, the top one, features many excellent image-first themes. The theme I use, appropriately called “Prose”, isn’t supported anymore.
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Ironic huh? “Word”press no longer supports “prose”. The drift towards packaging I think reflects the rise of Instagram in particular. Presaged by Pinterest winning out over bookmarking sites. You’re either pretty in public, or prosey in pipes.
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Venkatesh Rao Retweeted Venkatesh Rao
It’s not just ribbonfarm (as a prose-heavy blog in both content and presentation) that’s become a compile target. Textual language itself is now a compile target past strings of ~280 characters.https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1129047877135691776?s=20 …
Venkatesh Rao added,
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Venkatesh Rao Retweeted
I’ve seen the twitter-REPL analogy made several times now, including by me. Remember the original line by Om Malik that it is the messaging bus of the internet? Wrong end of the stack. https://twitter.com/Aelkus/status/1129050965557092352?s=20 …
Venkatesh Rao added,
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Venkatesh Rao Retweeted Star Simpson
This is a subtly different way of putting it. It isn’t just the REPL or deeper/longer/more persistent text layers. It’s the REPL of society. Search “twitter REPL” for more flavors.https://twitter.com/starsandrobots/status/930861196923748352?s=20 …
Venkatesh Rao added,
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The ultimate compile target is the collective unconscious, with code that persists across generations of course
Instagram, Wordpress frontend, static sites
Twitter
Mailing lists
Headless CMSes
AWS lambda
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Collective unconscious
Cthulhu
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Replying to @vgr
"When I set out to lead humankind along my Golden Path. I promised them a lesson their bones would remember." - God Emperor of Dune https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Path_(Dune)#cite_note-5 …
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Replying to @vgr
I think there are some interesting options being built out in this space right now. I would enjoy spending a few hours with you and some good wine, brainstorming post-hypertext models of textual information systems.
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