a (not so) tiny rant on site usage
I like going into the Discover page of this site to find other blogs. Blogging is a little foreign to me in that I've never really built a habit of posting long-form thoughts online. But I’ve been enjoying reading blogs more lately than I have before, and find that it feeds the soul to read about someone’s day or their thoughts or whatever. Now that it’s become part of my regular reading diet, and especially now that I’m trying to get into the habit of writing a blog myself, those sorts of posts are what I want to find when I click on Discover.
So it's curious to me that I find a lot of posts used as... Carrd pages?
Like, I get it. I'm of the Twitter ilk. Having a little page that gives people information about you is both nice to have and fun to make. But it confounds me because… it's not the sort of thing you put on a blogging platform, is it? Sites like Carrd exist for a reason. (You can even use txt.ies if you like more of an HTML-looking page.)
I remember being 15 and wanting to do stuff that was Cool and New and Different from what I saw other people doing, even if it manifested as something as simple as using a different site for the same purpose, so part of me understands why this is the case, even though I’m not fond of it. Kids have also been doing the same on Neocities, which I read about in this post some time ago. It's a post that sums up a lot of my issues with this whole thing, but I'll just share some lines that stood out to me:
I'm tired of people coming to Neocities because fools on Twitter are tired of having their little Carrd bios locked behind a paywall. They come to Neocities because it's free, but aren't willing to put in the effort that actually goes into building and maintaining a website.
This is what Neocities stands for. Creativity, and freedom. This is not simply just a free website service. It is owned by a passionate man paying for the freedom for US out of his own pocket. If you don't support that, then you have no business using his service.
When you join the community with the "Neocities is a Carrd alternative" mindset, you've already fucked up.
Basically: It's disrespectful to the people using the site with the same values in mind – making space on the web, experimenting and being creative and being themselves, pushing the boundaries we've learned to work within when using other sites – when you diminish your site to a little internet business card that states your byfs and dnis that you could have done on a regular ass platform that cares very little about what you do as long as you keep their site Investable.
One could make a case that any use of a site is good use, and sites shouldn't try to police how people use their site. Sure, I can agree with that. But I'm not the site nor am I trying to police anything - I just find it annoying to not find blog posts on a site where I can find blog posts, or creative explorable websites on a site for creative explorable websites.
But this post isn't meant to be primarily hateful. A lot of my current passions stemmed from something simple and shallow that I just took a chance on exploring as a kid, and for all my annoyance with this Bear-as-substitute-Carrd phenomenon, I see how it can snowball into something worthwhile. Simply chasing off kids who don’t use things the way we want them to deprives them of not just the thing they wanted to do, but also the thing it could become.
So at the very least, I hope that whatever kid decides to use an alternative platform for their Carrd-esque idea in an attempt to be cool and different actually explores the site beyond what they intend to use it for.
For example: Bear's intuitive in its simplicity, but if you're looking to build a Carrd-type thing and your background is in extremely user-friendly sites like Carrd, you have to learn quite a bit to customize it the way you like - basic CSS, markdown, understanding text-heavy instruction.
And maybe learning that new thing is interesting enough for you to explore it further, and you pick up a new hobby or skill along the way that makes a big enough impact on your life that you forget it started with wanting to use something other than Carrd. Maybe going into the Discover page and reading people's blogs makes you feel connected to other people, or inspired by their authenticity, and motivates you to write your own blog and use the blogging site to... have a blog. Either way, a once-frivolous and hipstery decision has led you to something more valuable.
That's what I hope these Bear-as-Carrd users get out of it. I'm not here to tell them to stop but just - explore. Discover, even. (Ha.) Use that urge you have to be different, and let it push you into going beyond what you initially set out to do. You have no idea how far it can take you.
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Anyway this rant went longer than I wanted it to. I'll be normal again tomorrow.