A while back when I quit Amazon Prime (note to self - quit Amazon Prime again) I mentioned how the big problem with Prime was that it eliminated so much friction from the process of making a “buy” decision. Spending is one place where friction is good.

Do you know where else we need more friction? Human communication, particularly the online variety. The ease of clicking reply and saying something rude or stupid is going to cause a war soon, if it hasn’t already. My average Tweet only gets seen by about 100 people, but I’m much more likely to get a rude reply than I am here on my blog, which I think also gets about 100 readers to an average post. I took all analytics off the site a few years ago, so I’m not really sure, but that average held over most of the last decade, so no reason to think it’s changed dramatically. I never get rude emails about a blog post. (Note - not an invitation!). Clicking the email link at the bottom of the post really isn’t that much work, but nobody does it. But if I express the same thought on Twitter, I’m much more likely to get a rude reply from roughly the same number of viewers.

Interestingly, Twitter is experimenting with a feature that triggers a pop-up box suggesting your reply appears to be rude or angry, and gives you a chance to reconsider before posting. They report about 30% of people do edit or cancel the post. So apparently 30% of Twitter users are sheeple that can be led around by the company.

That was a joke.

I also noted in my previous blog post that a little friction in the music listening experience might make it better. If you pick an album versus letting an algorithm choose for you, the music is likely to be more meaningful and more memorable. If we accept that the above thesis is true, it presents a problem. The internet seems to exist to remove friction from every process it can touch, but if our happiness relative to those experiences suffers due to the lack of friction, we are literally making ourselves unhappier and unhappier the more time we spend online. Well, except for the time spent reading this blog.

I was an early adopter of the commercial Internet, and it’s paid my bills since 1996. But more and more I can’t shake the feeling that we’ve made a terrible mistake. Not the concept of the Internet, a worldwide platform anybody can publish to is a fine idea, but our implementation, particular the monetization of it, has ruined the ideals we all had when we were doing this stuff in 1996.

I don’t have any real solutions here, except maybe some of you should dust off your blogs and start posting regularly again.

Inspiration for this post

This post composed while listening to Natchez Trace and Restoration by Kevin Bowe & The Okemah Prophets, streaming straight from my SSD drive.

A while back when I quit Amazon Prime (note to self - quit Amazon Prime again) I mentioned how the big problem with Prime was that it eliminated so much friction from the process of making a “buy” decision. Spending is one place where friction is good.

Do you know where else we need more friction? Human communication, particularly the online variety. The ease of clicking reply and saying something rude or stupid is going to cause a war soon, if it hasn’t already. My average Tweet only gets seen by about 100 people, but I’m much more likely to get a rude reply than I am here on my blog, which I think also gets about 100 readers to an average post. I took all analytics off the site a few years ago, so I’m not really sure, but that average held over most of the last decade, so no reason to think it’s changed dramatically. I never get rude emails about a blog post. (Note - not an invitation!). Clicking the email link at the bottom of the post really isn’t that much work, but nobody does it. But if I express the same thought on Twitter, I’m much more likely to get a rude reply from roughly the same number of viewers.

Interestingly, Twitter is experimenting with a feature that triggers a pop-up box suggesting your reply appears to be rude or angry, and gives you a chance to reconsider before posting. They report about 30% of people do edit or cancel the post. So apparently 30% of Twitter users are sheeple that can be led around by the company.

That was a joke.

I also noted in my previous blog post that a little friction in the music listening experience might make it better. If you pick an album versus letting an algorithm choose for you, the music is likely to be more meaningful and more memorable. If we accept that the above thesis is true, it presents a problem. The internet seems to exist to remove friction from every process it can touch, but if our happiness relative to those experiences suffers due to the lack of friction, we are literally making ourselves unhappier and unhappier the more time we spend online. Well, except for the time spent reading this blog.

I was an early adopter of the commercial Internet, and it’s paid my bills since 1996. But more and more I can’t shake the feeling that we’ve made a terrible mistake. Not the concept of the Internet, a worldwide platform anybody can publish to is a fine idea, but our implementation, particular the monetization of it, has ruined the ideals we all had when we were doing this stuff in 1996.

I don’t have any real solutions here, except maybe some of you should dust off your blogs and start posting regularly again.

Inspiration for this post

This post composed while listening to Natchez Trace and Restoration by Kevin Bowe & The Okemah Prophets, streaming straight from my SSD drive.

Hang on a second, gotta cancel my Spotify account before continuing this post. .
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.
.
.

Huh. I don’t have a Spotify account. Not paid anyway. I never bothered to migrate away from Pandora. I do have a free account, so I can listen to the occasional song or playlist that somebody posts on Twitter or Facebook. For most of this century, I really didn’t use streaming music services. I’ve had a Pandora account since it was a start-up service in the early 2000s, but I mostly used it for occasional free listening at work. However, I've been WFH full-time since 2015. For about the last year, we have had a Pandora family account, which I use to mostly play music I already own. I need to stop doing that. Streaming services are useful for previewing new music before deciding to buy, and for sharing on social media, since sharing a song from my Dropbox would violate all kinds of rules and laws.

I have my MP3 directory on my computer. I don’t have time to enjoy the 500 odd albums I’ve chosen to buy over the years. Adding 70 million more choices on a streaming service doesn’t really help solve that problem.

Also, tech stocks have gotten hammered this entire month. Spotify, along with just about every other tech stock, has lost tens of billions combined market value. Neil Young did not blow up Spotify’s stock.

Here is the thing. You are never going to listen to even .01% of the music available on Spotify, or any of the other streaming services. Their value prop is portability and music discovery. Portability is not a big deal anymore. If you don’t want to install Plex, back up your MP3 directory to Dropbox. There are free apps that will let you stream straight from Dropbox. Again, not a user but from what I’ve read online this week music discovery on Spotify has been broken for years, as the algorithm recommends what gets Spotify paid the most, not what you might want to hear next.

I have a crazy idea, so hear me out. What if we all started talking about music again? What if we shared the cool stuff we are listening to on Twitter or Facebook or our blogs or wherever. Human curation > algorithms, every time and forever. Also, what if we bought the music we wanted to listen to? It’s better for the artists, and probably better for the environment too. Won’t you think of the songwriters, and the polar bears?

Also, support live music. Most indie bands are basically t-shirt sales operations anyway. Go to the show, buy the CD, buy a t-shirt. You’ll have more fun and the artist will make more money. It’s a win-win.

One more thing. Abundance causes us to under value anything. It's a simple economic principle. So having 70 million songs available at any time causes you to value any specific tune at roughly zero. Contrast that with a carefully curated record collection, even if it is all in MP3 form. Those albums have value. They have meaning, because they are yours. Also, you probably know the music better when you choose to play it, versus passively consuming whatever Spotify throws at you.

You don’t need Spotify for podcasts. In fact, Spotify locking up podcasts on their platform violates the spirit of openness that podcasts were created under. Podcasts use RSS (remember Google Reader?) It’s an open platform by design, an open platform usable by anybody with no fee or gatekeepers involved. So fuck Spotify just on principle, even if it is an asswaffle like Rogan they are locking up behind a proprietary platform.

Keep using Spotify or don’t, I really don’t care. I doubt it’s going to make any difference in the long run anyway. I’ll be here listening to my MP3s using an open source music player, like I have been for the last 20 years.

This post composed while listening to the album Perfectly Good Guitar by John Hiatt, using the open source Audacious music player to play locally hosted MP3 files.

Hang on a second, gotta cancel my Spotify account before continuing this post. .
.
.
.
.

Huh. I don’t have a Spotify account. Not paid anyway. I never bothered to migrate away from Pandora. I do have a free account, so I can listen to the occasional song or playlist that somebody posts on Twitter or Facebook. For most of this century, I really didn’t use streaming music services. I’ve had a Pandora account since it was a start-up service in the early 2000s, but I mostly used it for occasional free listening at work. However, I've been WFH full-time since 2015. For about the last year, we have had a Pandora family account, which I use to mostly play music I already own. I need to stop doing that. Streaming services are useful for previewing new music before deciding to buy, and for sharing on social media, since sharing a song from my Dropbox would violate all kinds of rules and laws.

I have my MP3 directory on my computer. I don’t have time to enjoy the 500 odd albums I’ve chosen to buy over the years. Adding 70 million more choices on a streaming service doesn’t really help solve that problem.

Also, tech stocks have gotten hammered this entire month. Spotify, along with just about every other tech stock, has lost tens of billions combined market value. Neil Young did not blow up Spotify’s stock.

Here is the thing. You are never going to listen to even .01% of the music available on Spotify, or any of the other streaming services. Their value prop is portability and music discovery. Portability is not a big deal anymore. If you don’t want to install Plex, back up your MP3 directory to Dropbox. There are free apps that will let you stream straight from Dropbox. Again, not a user but from what I’ve read online this week music discovery on Spotify has been broken for years, as the algorithm recommends what gets Spotify paid the most, not what you might want to hear next.

I have a crazy idea, so hear me out. What if we all started talking about music again? What if we shared the cool stuff we are listening to on Twitter or Facebook or our blogs or wherever. Human curation > algorithms, every time and forever. Also, what if we bought the music we wanted to listen to? It’s better for the artists, and probably better for the environment too. Won’t you think of the songwriters, and the polar bears?

Also, support live music. Most indie bands are basically t-shirt sales operations anyway. Go to the show, buy the CD, buy a t-shirt. You’ll have more fun and the artist will make more money. It’s a win-win.

One more thing. Abundance causes us to under value anything. It's a simple economic principle. So having 70 million songs available at any time causes you to value any specific tune at roughly zero. Contrast that with a carefully curated record collection, even if it is all in MP3 form. Those albums have value. They have meaning, because they are yours. Also, you probably know the music better when you choose to play it, versus passively consuming whatever Spotify throws at you.

You don’t need Spotify for podcasts. In fact, Spotify locking up podcasts on their platform violates the spirit of openness that podcasts were created under. Podcasts use RSS (remember Google Reader?) It’s an open platform by design, an open platform usable by anybody with no fee or gatekeepers involved. So fuck Spotify just on principle, even if it is an asswaffle like Rogan they are locking up behind a proprietary platform.

Keep using Spotify or don’t, I really don’t care. I doubt it’s going to make any difference in the long run anyway. I’ll be here listening to my MP3s using an open source music player, like I have been for the last 20 years.

This post composed while listening to the album Perfectly Good Guitar by John Hiatt, using the open source Audacious music player to play locally hosted MP3 files.

From early May last year through the end of the year, I don’t think we were ever home 3 weekends in a row. There was a period in the fall that between a work trip to Denver, camping, a road trip to Roanoke, and a visit with Michelle’s dad in Florida, I went 6 straight weekends not being home. I pretty much haven’t left the house since Christmas, except for necessary errands like grocery shopping and weekend walks in the park, and I’m very much feeling the walls close in on me. Michelle says I’m pacing in the house like a caged animal. Breck and I have tickets tomorrow for Bruce Dickinson’s Spoken Word show in Raleigh. However, they aren’t checking vaccine status for that show, and the Venn diagram for metal heads and anti-vaxxers has way too much overlap for me to feel comfortable spending an evening with a couple of thousand Iron Maiden fans. So I’m writing those tickets off and staying home.

All of which is to say I’m feeling the wanderlust hard right now. I very much want to be anywhere but home. But winter travel in Virginia is kind of the worst of all worlds. It’s too cold most days for any extended outdoors activities, and there is no snow pack to power traditional wintertime activities that might be fun. Mostly it’s just cold and dry or cold and muddy.

It looks like Omicron peaked here last week, as the curves on the CDC graphs all have a steep negative slope over the last few days. Hopefully that continues right back to a community spread percentage well below 10%, so we can start to feel safe about concerts and other large gatherings again.

The cutback in social media is going well. I’ve already noticed my ability to concentrate for 5 minutes to read longer form articles has improved. What I did with Facebook is I created a couple of custom friends lists and using a FireFox plug-in I can open the profile page of everybody in the list with one click. So once a week I open a bunch of tabs with your profile pages and I can quickly catch up in less than 30 minutes. Doing it this way has made it obvious that most of you are basically not using Facebook. Or, put another way, my Facebook feed was being dominated by just a handful of you folks! Anyway, Facebook use is down to 30 minutes a week.

In other news, I got a very late arriving Christmas gift in the mail yesterday.

And finally, on my 30-minute tour of Facebook yesterday, I stumbled into the YT video below. I know I’m an old and thus don’t have my finger on the pulse of popular music, if I ever did, given my normal tastes. However, these kids are amazing. They sound like a mix of the Jackson 5, some Stevie Wonder, and other early 70s funk/soul influences with a layer of modern pop sensibilities. I’ve had their 3 albums on constantly since yesterday afternoon.

From early May last year through the end of the year, I don’t think we were ever home 3 weekends in a row. There was a period in the fall that between a work trip to Denver, camping, a road trip to Roanoke, and a visit with Michelle’s dad in Florida, I went 6 straight weekends not being home. I pretty much haven’t left the house since Christmas, except for necessary errands like grocery shopping and weekend walks in the park, and I’m very much feeling the walls close in on me. Michelle says I’m pacing in the house like a caged animal. Breck and I have tickets tomorrow for Bruce Dickinson’s Spoken Word show in Raleigh. However, they aren’t checking vaccine status for that show, and the Venn diagram for metal heads and anti-vaxxers has way too much overlap for me to feel comfortable spending an evening with a couple of thousand Iron Maiden fans. So I’m writing those tickets off and staying home.

All of which is to say I’m feeling the wanderlust hard right now. I very much want to be anywhere but home. But winter travel in Virginia is kind of the worst of all worlds. It’s too cold most days for any extended outdoors activities, and there is no snow pack to power traditional wintertime activities that might be fun. Mostly it’s just cold and dry or cold and muddy.

It looks like Omicron peaked here last week, as the curves on the CDC graphs all have a steep negative slope over the last few days. Hopefully that continues right back to a community spread percentage well below 10%, so we can start to feel safe about concerts and other large gatherings again.

The cutback in social media is going well. I’ve already noticed my ability to concentrate for 5 minutes to read longer form articles has improved. What I did with Facebook is I created a couple of custom friends lists and using a FireFox plug-in I can open the profile page of everybody in the list with one click. So once a week I open a bunch of tabs with your profile pages and I can quickly catch up in less than 30 minutes. Doing it this way has made it obvious that most of you are basically not using Facebook. Or, put another way, my Facebook feed was being dominated by just a handful of you folks! Anyway, Facebook use is down to 30 minutes a week.

In other news, I got a very late arriving Christmas gift in the mail yesterday.

And finally, on my 30-minute tour of Facebook yesterday, I stumbled into the YT video below. I know I’m an old and thus don’t have my finger on the pulse of popular music, if I ever did, given my normal tastes. However, these kids are amazing. They sound like a mix of the Jackson 5, some Stevie Wonder, and other early 70s funk/soul influences with a layer of modern pop sensibilities. I’ve had their 3 albums on constantly since yesterday afternoon.

A few years ago, I unfollowed everybody on Facebook, and it turned out to be a fabulous decision. Our connections run by algorithms on social media are so damn shallow that eliminating the newsfeed made zero difference in how connected I felt with far-flung friends and family. I could still pop into your profiles and see what people were up to whenever I wanted. It turns out seeing your vacation photos a week after the vacation and not in real time while you are on vacation doesn’t ruin anything.

When we were all locked down last year in the initial COVID panic, I loosened up that policy quite a bit, as I didn’t really have anything else to do but scroll through my Facebook feed. Over the last couple of months, I’ve been thinking it was time to do a mass unfollow again. I did it yesterday. I unfollowed everybody on Facebook and LinkedIn. I do a lot of work related networking on Twitter, so I’m probably leaving it alone, although I have been aggressively unfollowing people that retweet crap into my Twitter feed. And Instagram is just looking at pictures of friends out doing fun things, often with their pets, which is sort of what I tried to use FB for, so it’s safe for now too.

I don’t think our brains are really wired to keep up with the torrent of who had what for lunch, who had a positive COVID test this week, and all of that. The day-to-day minutia of life is not something we need to broadly share, and trying to consume all that data is bad for our brains. I’m convinced that social media is ruining our attention spans, and maybe our democracy too. Facebook can’t make money if you spend 25 minutes reading an in-depth article on something. They need you clicking 12 times and refreshing the page 5 times in that 25 minutes. However, reading an in-depth article is unquestionably better for your brain health.

The FB algorithm will probably ensure most of you never see this post, and nobody will notice the change anyway. It’s not like I posted to FB 10X a day and your newsfeed will suddenly feel empty without me. And I’ll still be on FB. The one thing I may share every few days is not the problem. The newsfeed is the issue. The algorithm deciding what I should see next is the concern. The constant context shifting from a friend with a positive COVID test to a concert review from another friend to a climate change article for a third person is the problem. My brain, and really I think all brains, isn’t built to function like that. Multitasking is a lie.

So I guess what I’m saying is that if you expect me to see something you post to Facebook, make sure you tag me in the post.

A few years ago, I unfollowed everybody on Facebook, and it turned out to be a fabulous decision. Our connections run by algorithms on social media are so damn shallow that eliminating the newsfeed made zero difference in how connected I felt with far-flung friends and family. I could still pop into your profiles and see what people were up to whenever I wanted. It turns out seeing your vacation photos a week after the vacation and not in real time while you are on vacation doesn’t ruin anything.

When we were all locked down last year in the initial COVID panic, I loosened up that policy quite a bit, as I didn’t really have anything else to do but scroll through my Facebook feed. Over the last couple of months, I’ve been thinking it was time to do a mass unfollow again. I did it yesterday. I unfollowed everybody on Facebook and LinkedIn. I do a lot of work related networking on Twitter, so I’m probably leaving it alone, although I have been aggressively unfollowing people that retweet crap into my Twitter feed. And Instagram is just looking at pictures of friends out doing fun things, often with their pets, which is sort of what I tried to use FB for, so it’s safe for now too.

I don’t think our brains are really wired to keep up with the torrent of who had what for lunch, who had a positive COVID test this week, and all of that. The day-to-day minutia of life is not something we need to broadly share, and trying to consume all that data is bad for our brains. I’m convinced that social media is ruining our attention spans, and maybe our democracy too. Facebook can’t make money if you spend 25 minutes reading an in-depth article on something. They need you clicking 12 times and refreshing the page 5 times in that 25 minutes. However, reading an in-depth article is unquestionably better for your brain health.

The FB algorithm will probably ensure most of you never see this post, and nobody will notice the change anyway. It’s not like I posted to FB 10X a day and your newsfeed will suddenly feel empty without me. And I’ll still be on FB. The one thing I may share every few days is not the problem. The newsfeed is the issue. The algorithm deciding what I should see next is the concern. The constant context shifting from a friend with a positive COVID test to a concert review from another friend to a climate change article for a third person is the problem. My brain, and really I think all brains, isn’t built to function like that. Multitasking is a lie.

So I guess what I’m saying is that if you expect me to see something you post to Facebook, make sure you tag me in the post.