Realigning my Phone

When Meta decided they were going to remove fact checking, and move moderation to Texas, and demand everyone do 20 push-ups before starting their work day, I decided to take Instagram and Facebook off my phone. Is it as good as deleting the apps? No, but I’m not there yet. The utility is still there for me. However, at this point I decided it wasn’t worth having installed on my phone anymore.

A couple of weeks prior, I took Reddit off my phone. I have a bit of a love hate relationship with Reddit. On one hand, it’s definitely a great aggregator of information. I get most of my college football articles from r/cfb. On the other hand, I hate what it’s done to forums overall. The up/down vote system along with unpaid moderators just allows discussion to get out of hand or disappear all together. Reddit isn’t a forum replacement in my opinion. However I took it off because I just feel like we are in permanent summer Reddit territory and it’s becoming a very frustrating experience.

This has led my phone to a place where it hasn’t been in some time. There are zero* algorithmically fed apps on my phone. What’s on there? BlueSky, Mastodon, Gibson Guitar, stuff like that. It’s back in a state as the iPhone was introduced. It’s an iPod, a phone, and an internet device.

Something I consider a lot is what do we give up, in the name of innovation. Are those trade offs we want to make? It’s easy to think about this if you’ve built a website any time in the past 15 years. Frameworks like React have allowed us to do far more with the browser (although native features are rapidly catching up), but we end up in Node module Hell and we are tied to a framework. Sure we can write native HTML/CSS/JavaScript** but that might be slower, perhaps less fun to write.

The innovation of algorithmic feeds are a trade off. In theory, you can watch relevant content forever. However you lose time, the ability to discover on your own, depending on which person is President, the ability to see an app at all. These are trade offs I am no longer willing to make and I hope others consider this as well. It’s not Abe Simpson yelling at a cloud by any means. I think apps are great. Not everything needs to be browser based, but I think leaving our internet usage and discovery to some black box is not a healthy way to approach the web.

*Apple Music has an algorithm. I’m not saying it’s all bad. It’s how it’s used.
**This continues to be my favorite way to make things but it’s not always the best way.