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I started using Substack back in 2020 and for the next several years I was a diehard evangelist to anyone in my life who would listen. But now, once it is everywhere and everyone is there, I kinda can't stand it.
Also I don't really like what this says about me. Ugh.
(But realistically part of the reason that I'm no longer a superfan is the Notes feed, the live and streaming video, meme-y photos, the social media style posts, the posturing, and self-importance, the casual impressiveness. Ick.)
Apr 21, 2025
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on a slightly related note substack is very confusing to me now, i thought it was for posting pieces and now i find a twitter adjacent portion and videos on it?
Apr 21, 2025
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in early 2022, i had somewhat of a menty b and abandoned my tumblr, which i used for like 12 years. watching tumblr go from toxic to wholesome and self-aware** and then back to toxic over the years made my eye twitch. "not this shit again." so i stopped doomscrolling and i stopped posting on social media, save for a few very rare and random occasions. my instagram became an instrument solely for the purpose of sending my partner memes and saving craft project ideas.
2022, 2023, and now 2024 have passed. my life did not get easier, especially this past year when i lost a friend to cancer, had my job nuked by my state government, and everything else that made 2024 in america particularly trash. i also exist in a marginalized body so there's no real way of escaping constant news of doom. my aversion to living any aspect of my life with an online audience of strangers only grew. seeing people i once knew become addicted to shame because the internet rewards it was particularly disheartening. watching those people become indoctrinated in real time made me feel really hopeless.
so as much as i hate the idea of self-surveilling, i had to admit to myself that i have a lot to give, a lot to share. from all the reading i've done on the human condition in the past 3 years, it seems the only way to combat hopelessness is to share meaning with others. i'm still mostly going to do that offline, but i was happy to find that a platform such as pi.fyi exists because i hate algorithms and people sharing what they like with others is so human.
my corn mittens post getting so much love (tysm btw) made me feel very human, but also kind of sick from all the dopamine hitting my underprepared brain. overall, a great experience posting anything for the first time in years.
**in terms of tumblr, i mean. i realize this is not everyone's experience.
Dec 19, 2024
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I made a Goodreads account recently and it asked me to rate some popular books I’d read before. Little did I know, every time I ranked a book, it would give me 5 more similar to that one, and then 5 more from that, and on and on until a neverending phylogenetic tree of books emerged on my screen.
I was on FaceTime with my friend as I did this, and we compared which books we’d both read, ones we loved, ones we got forced to read in school, ones we read as preteens, etc. But half an hour in and no end to the Goodreads algorithm, but stuck in The Very Hungry Caterpillar-y children’s book branch of the algorithm tree that I couldn’t escape, I started to get mad. So I command-Q’d chrome and called it a day.
This week I went back to organise my To Read list and to purge all the loose one-book memos on my notes app. My professor recently gave me her recommendations on queer literature and I wanted to properly organise them. On my profile it said I’d already read some 100+ books and I’d given them all 5 star ratings. Ok well now that’s pissing me off. Why is there digital clutter on my brand new account, and why did I give all that information to them anyways.? I love to categorise, but did I really need to log my readership of the individual 39 Clues books?
I feel similarly about when I first downloaded letterboxd and it made me go down a similar never ending algorithm of potential movies I’d watched before. I did spend an unreasonable amount of time swiping through those movies trying to remember if I really did watch Horton Hears a Who in 2008(?) or not.
Why do I feel the need to share this with the algorithm? genuinely what purpose does this serve me? Why am I volunteering memories from my 7 year old self when I learnt English by reading Geronimo Stilton books for the first time?
Anyways, I deleted all the past data from my Goodreads account. There’s only logs from my current reads, and the list of books I want to read next. There’s comfort in organising and seeing your life laid out in list/grid categories, like unlocking achievements on video games - oh did you know I read so and so and yeah I was a pretentious little bitch in high school and every YA book I read in 2013 has gotta be logged and
But there’s another type of comfort in keeping that information away from the internet where they’ll find a way to use that data against you. I can‘t think of a single occasion I’d need personalised ads for the chick-lit books I read in primary school but I know the algorithm is going to eventually find a way to sell my nostalgia back to me somehow… I‘m going to open any of my little apps and see hyper specific #ad on my screen.
I know I’ve given so much of me away online already - and look what I’m doing right now(!) , sharing my interests and recommendations to strangers online hah .. I won’t lie about the fact that it brings me joy to live online - it’s been my playground for so much of my life - Like sorry I am literally the internet explorer -But there was a time before I lived on the internet. I don’t think they need to know everything about Then.
I recommend not giving up everything about yourself to the machine
Mar 8, 2024
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used to be very into reddit in my edgelord high schooler years. at some point it dawned on me that the general vibe there is pretty negative, at least on the main feed there’s prolly some lovely little subreddit communities out there. I started to realize that I didn’t enjoy the experience of being on the site, the memes felt very self-referential (making memes about memes for the sake of making more memes, it didn’t make for very stimulating content), and the interest based communities felt more argumentative than friendly discussion. it felt like I spent hours scrolling to find something that would hold my interest beyond the malaise of r/me_irl type posts and the same repeat r/askreddit threads.
eventually i figured out that i could find what i liked about reddit elsewhere (got really into youtube video essays) and that I felt better using my time differently. had a similar thought process with twitter a few years ago too. i still have a reddit account for the few times it pays to find niche info on specific subreddits, but I haven’t browsed regularly in probably 8 years.
May 17, 2024
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this is worthy of celebration: the lack of video—autoplay video, noisy inane video, panicky video, algorithmic, dumb video, rabbit hole video, any video—on pi.fyi is a good thing
Oct 5, 2024
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this is going to hurt — A LOT — but it's getting to the point where there's no other option
Mar 11, 2025