Category: Internet

Chewing on a Proper “Self-Hosted” Web-Sphere: Very Early Thoughts

On 2026-04-07

It wasn’t technically Daniel Sell’s “How to Stop Jumping Ship” that made me start thinking about the topic of this post, but that is a linkable resource that has some of the information that has filtered into my brain space:

How To Stop Jumping Ship
08 Mar, 2026

Almost all of us have been on the internet long enough to have had one of our essential community hubs go flying off into oncoming traffic. MySpace, G+, Discord (world weary sigh)? Facebook and Shitter's decent into I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream? Dead and dying, the lot of them, and they take what little community they generated down with them every bloody time. I'm tired of wasting energy on rebuilding community ties over and over again, it's not an especially good use of our time and it means that those of us who are most comfortable with, or benefit the most from, a fractured, chaotic wider community benefit and rise to the top. Behold, the world.

Important bit from slightly below that:

So I propose…we just toss it all in the bin and go back to the beginning. Blogs, newsletters, IRC, mailing groups, and, sure why not, Usenet, go nuts…These things are time tested, functional even in the face of overwhelming lack of interest from the general internet, and are, most importantly, utterly unbreakable. A specific blog, irc etc etc might disappear, but that won’t take anything besides that one facet of a larger whole with it.

What actually started it was an email which was sent out to the Melsonia email list. Same sort of information, a bit more pithy:

Do You Have A Blog Yet?

'Cos you should. Social media is poisonous, drains all your finer impulses. Wastes energy you could spend being happy. So I made a webring and a blogroll to make me happy.

How To Be Happy Too
Go make a blog now. Even if all you do is post your campaign notes up on it, I wanna see it.
Join a webring. Yes, like in the 90s. People will find your blog and you don't have to do anything other than be you.
You can even add a blogroll to it, just like in the Google Plus times.
Post. Read. Post. Read. Delete social media. Post. Read.

Really, it's that easy. You don't need to be good or popular or cool. If anything, they're the worst people to have blogs. The uncooler the better, I say.

Pretty much everything in that image is in the above linked post, though one addition is very much in-line with the stuff I talk about here, which I’ll quote:

Social media is poisonous, drains all your finer impulses. Wastes energy you could spend being happy.

He includes a link to Bear Blog which I won’t include because I’m sure it is fine but this is not an endorsement of a particular product over the other and at a glance, the software seems to violate a couple of principles I’ll talk about in a minute.

If anything, this post is absolutely an anti-endorsement of anything that might be considered a product. Websites/Apps-as-products are killing us. Killing the earth. Killing creativity.

I Digress All Over The Algorithm

One caveat creeps up almost immediately: Sells and I are at least partially concerned about two different things. He seems to be largely talking about (a) moving towards a platform where ideas exist outside The Platform® and are not beholden to the constant drive towards enshittification and profits AND (b) coming up with something that trumps the Algorithm Class’s version of a good time. I like both of those things, both fit strongly in my Reclaim Ownership concept I have been discussing here or there on the blog, but I think for me there is something else brewing in my brain:

Stop treating the Algorithm Class like your friend: you are a commodity to them and the current internet is designed to take resources from you and feed your resources into their bank accounts [money they use to take more freedoms from you].

We are witnessing the death of ownership and are being manipulated into thinking we need them. In 2026, The Algorithm tells you you are bored, that you are unhappy, that you are worthless without The Algorithm, that your replacement worth is derived from the dopamine you get from participating in a rich-person’s profit margin. And we believe it…

Come and share! Like and subscribe! Upvote! Get your five-year streak!

We live in a world where we give third-party companies all the content that makes the platform worthwhile but then you give up increasing rights to your own creations as they rapidly change the rules. They don’t even ask nicely. They just have your college friends’ content being held hostage and you are lonely.

AI amoebae demanding access to our creations. Less control over what we can share versus keep. Free-fall user unfriendly design based around selling digital baubles. Digitally engineered loneliness and disease. All the other terrible aspects forced upon you while specialists in behavioral modeling outsource whitepapers to tell the owners of the servers how to maximize profits from your work.

It’s Big Tobacco all over again. Paying experts to make things more addicting while telling us they are just giving us a product we really want and rumors of your own addiction are greatly exaggerated.

With the bonus that it’s not only our creations, but often the core of our friends and family groups being held for ransom. “Keep smoking and you can keep talking to your mom back home!”

THEN, they take extra data from you and sell it.

It’s like the worst possible version of the peer-review process. That process has volunteer writers being edited/scored by volunteer editors and volunteer peer-review committees. Then the output is given freely to scientific publishers who generate substantial profit off making it available. With the consequence of not publishing can include missing out on tenure and promotion.

Only instead of contributing to the ever-expanding world of valuable science, we are simply trapped in a loop where in leaving a billion-dollar money maker we have no control over ends up with being branded as anti-social and distant. No party invites without social media. Missing out on collector’s items by our favorite brands because people on X got first dibs. How in the hell do we know what Florida Man is doing this week unless we spend hours each week doomscrolling through made up posts about Florida Man?

“I can’t leave Instagram, what about all my friends!?,” we say over and over as our data is stolen and the money generated from it is spent to lobby for war crimes. Taking your joy of expression and turning into AI slop generated in data centers so environmentally unfriendly they are altering ecosystems while unwriting decades of copyright and intellectual property law.

Don’t say, “If you are not paying for it, you are not the customer.” That’s tired. Sad. Ignorant. You can pay for it all day long and to The Algorithm Class you are just money and never enough.

Besides, you are very much paying for it and its the most expensive purchase you have ever made.

Like cats, there is no free social media. We are collectively paying billions of dollars to avoid going to bed on time. Our tax money spent to subsidize The Algorithm Class. In return, The Algorithm Class buying out a large portion of our governments for their needs. Every lost ecosystem and plot of land to build data centers. We are spending generational wealth indirectly to look at ads on Facebook.

And the saddest thing is that for all this money, you and your creations are worthless to them individually. Sold for pennies. A penny today so they can buy congressfolk to not pass privacy laws and make a dollar tomorrow.

That’s the thanks you get. Being sold for $0.03 on loop with no protections just so hackers can get your national ID numbers and ruin your credit while the data hoarders say, “oops,” and face no consequences.

There is no ceiling that will stop folks from generating profit off of your hard work and there are very few protections to keep you from suffering the laziness of their vibe-coding neglect.

I DIGRESS.

An Early Thought Experiment Towards Doug’s Ideal Web-Sphere

The point is that reading Sells’ post made me think about how hard it would be for me to actually get any of my friends and family on board with creating a web-ring or similar. I could probably get two or three signed up but the siren call of the wide-open for-sale web would hang there. We are two decades into the social-media-and-search-engine revolution that has stripped us of a properly free internet.

This means this is all in the heady realms of though experiment, so taking that as an act of freedom rather than problem, I was thinking of things I would like to see if I could back and shove Myspace off a cliff.

An actual emphasis on creator ownership, not just virtue signaling. No caveats or catch-EULAs where you give up the rights.
An emphasis on self-hosting or hosting done by entities where you pay them real world money to host your data and in exchange they treat it as hands off for any other use unless they pay you to use your data.
Related to above, but you are free to take your data whenever and wherever you please. Zero retention in a third party and absolutely no “a third party sold your stuff to another third party that has no contract with you explicitly” unlike the current real world problem.
“Censorship” and moderation are generated at the hands of the end-user through tools easy to read and use.
No advertisements unless the content creator is getting paid a substantial portion of the fee [let’s say 80+%] and at their behest [yes, this means content creators will have to pay to post stuff].
Multiple media streams — text, microblogging, video, audio — can be handled by servers optimal to them, each chosen by the content creator.
No addiction-behavior models. Discovery layer predicated by the needs and desires of the end user rather by a creation of any sort of presumed force.
In fact, there would be optimally many many end-user tools that have their own approach to discovery and moderation.
Anonymity vs ID exposure decided by content creators.
Absolutely NO Upvotes and, perhaps most controversial, probably NO comments posted to your own data stream [they would be posted to the commenter’s data stream]. The idea is to break apart the Skinner Box variation of the internet [as described here or there by Cory Doctorow]. You will not get algorithmically friendly shiny cookies. You share data and information and art: others can read it and watch it and enjoy it. SEO is the mind killer. SEO will pass right through you. When SEO is gone, all that remains will be memes.

In other words, something where people create content streams through many different self- or creator-focused-hosted methods and something — webrings, RSS/Atom feeds, metadata chunkers, your own eyes and fingers — will handle this and there will be no fake digital commons generating billions of dollars in revenue as long as you keep playing ball and getting your grandma to sign up for an account.

No lectures from AI-generated moderators about how you need to tweak your content to maximize conversions.

Hell, there would be no conversions. Death to the trust-economy. No product of The Algorithm Class has earned the right to addict us and constrain us to the information/data/consumption-complex they have chosen.

You decide what you want to read and no one knows what you do with it but you.

The Tower of Babbling Replies

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-04-01

In Internet, Rants

There are a few “Explain the Joke” subreddits on reddit and most, probably all, are trash-tier karma farming circle jerks. Just absolutely awful.

The same easy-as-shit jokes or rage-bait memes are posted over and over with people showing up in the thousands to comment. Sure, some of the replies are just bots joining in on the blatant karma manipulation. Which is fitting since it is likely mostly bots posting them. Bots and people trying to farm a few easy k karma to kickstart a reddit account so they can then sell it to bots.

In fact, you could probably automate a script to block every person who ever makes a post in one and trim a fair number of crap from your reddit experience.

Some of the replies are just going to be people who can’t help correcting others or sharing their thoughts, even when the same posts show up once a week or less. It’s weaponized tribalism versus default redditor behavior.

It is especially painful because posts from a couple/three of these subreddits frequently drift to the popular feed which dirty little no-accounts like me are forced to browse without extensive bookmarks: which might be the point. Let the shit float so people are forced to make an account just to have the tools to block them. Eh. Every day is a gift.

HOWEVER, you do occasionally get gold despite the massive attempt by gravity to pull sanity off a cliff. Like this one asking about the Tower of Babel made in [not-]LEGO [look at me violating my “never link to reddit or any social media” rule].

Pardon the proximity to a pun, but my brother in Christ, what could we possibly explain? I can get folks posting references to obscure-but-knowable things with a bit of a gate-keep to even knowing search terms. Sure.

Things like the Tower of Babel might not be universally known but when the immensely searchable words are right there….

At any rate, like all good circle jerking on reddit, the scant pretense of actual joy is people running with it and the replies are full of people posting answers [some on point] in various languages….and some people then trying to argue about the true meaning of Babel. Which is like the true meaning of Dollar Store kitten calendars. It’s aliens, my man. All aliens. All the way down.

Bonus, someone ended up inserting a Hail Mary joke which will make no sense until you’ve read maybe the first quarter of the book, but still.

I look forward to this above image becoming a post on this same subreddit in a couple of days.

And Thus…I Leave Feedly

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-03-13

In Internet, Rants, Technology

Sigh.

Just a few days ago I was going through a multi-hour process to disentangle from OneDrive and now, for reasons, I’m doing the same thing for Feedly. Some of it is similar. A recurring cost that offers little real value compared to what I can do myself. A company that considers its AI-arm to be its true innovation. Features and elements I like being de-prioritized over a different type of client than I am.

And while Feedly is different in several ways…

OneDrive is more integrated into the default Windows experience
Feedly genuinely is one of the best feed readers out there, while OneDrive is not necessarily one of the best cloud-based storage systems
Feedly is a lot more “optional” than proper file management, even if very helpful
I would say that Feedly is actually innovative in its interface, even if I don’t need most of it

…it still hit an irk in me this morning.

I went to search for something. The above picture shows me searching for “dice¹.” That’s not what I searched, initially, [it was “daylight savings time” which glitched it out] but it will do for a demo.

I had to click several things to tell it “just my feeds, please” instead of “Feeds & All Web” and then to unclick the defaults of “Business & Strategy” and “Tech Blogs” as well.

After which, I got the worst search results since Bing was initially launched.

I could only see, nearly fully, the “top result” but not click on it. Every other result is faded out and hidden. In fact, they are not search results at all. They are dummy results slapped behind a “disabled-entries” flag.

I can’t even tell if this is just some sort of hiccup in the system or if they really expect me to upgrade to Pro+ just to be able to search by classifying “search” as “follow” which are two different sorts of tasks.

It for sure has encapsulated what should be a fairly simple task as a “Feedly AI” worthy one. If you go all the way back up to the top, you’ll see the “Feedly AI” tweaked my search options to generate more results…none of which were usable by me. Outside of that, if I search for something in my feeds and there are no results, I want there to be no results. I’m not just idly passing time. I’m trying to use information.

Keep in mind, there used to be a fairly user friendly, intuitive search feature just a little over a year ago. One I am pretty sure wasn’t locked behind the Pro/Pro+ features. I was Pro, then. In fact, I joined Feedly in August (?) 2016 and joined Pro around a month later. And kept it, at the actual ridiculous fee of around $7us/month for a decade.

I should have bolted when they started going more in on Enterprise level tasks rather than just serving a product that worked.

At any rate, spent around an hour researching private and self-hosted type feed readers and began migrating stuff over (including finding a fun glitch where CloudFlare keeps killing some OpenRSS feeds).

Will probably delete my entire Feedly account soon. They can have MBAs using AI models to track awful crypto blogs be their customer base if they want that crowd so badly.

Going Back to Check…it is designed worse than I thought

So I went back before clicking post because I wanted to make sure I wasn’t missing some obvious checkmark. I might still be missing some check mark, but, I am pretty confident that I am not missing an obvious one.

Some things I learned.

Feedly still brands its search as “Across Your Favorite Sources” on the home screen…

heh, “easily.” “Just fifteen clicks to not get any results! easy!”

…then changes up the language once you get to the search page.

Note that most of those are AI searches rather than just a simple search across data.

Technically you can see THREE of your results, you just have to check them all and save them to a board

Note, you have to believe that the checkbox exist and just mouse over it. The fun thing about “3 articles selected” (and with some testing, it seems to always be three articles returned for a search) is that it means there is always a completely hidden-in-fog article down below for absolutely NO reason since it’s just white, no-display space. They are literally wasting server and browser processing time to show you something that isn’t there. It’s probably something to do with needing extra space to get the proper fade on the gradient. Or just plain madness.

“Yesterday on the stairs, I met a Feedly search result that wasn’t there…”

That’s…just awful. That’s some serious tomfoolery.

Yeah, deleting that account very shortly.

NOTE: I have not tested the app and right now don’t care to test the app. I’d rather just delete than waste any more time on this. Maybe it works as expected, there, but none of these things suggest good things about the future of this product.

I don’t know which is worse, the fact that it assumed I was searching for “DICE” the company and tagged it as a company search OR the fact that it absolutely did not matter since it just did a keyword search anyhow across my feeds. Terrible. ↩︎

The [Super] Universe is Healing…

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-02-24

In Internet, Movies & TV, Tokusatsu

In the sheer inanity of modern existence, where every day is a slam between the mental load of simply considering an international conspiracy of terrible people on one side and the wryly chuckling at “boop-gate” on the other…

It is sometimes nice to see the same fights show up about fansubs as always.

Ah, that takes me back. Logging into IRC channels and getting reamed because you make a joke or ask about the process. I one time asked about the process of fansubbing a series that was on a kind of on semi-pause¹ and the ensuing argument out of nowhere ended up with an announcement that “despite rumors, we have not dropped this series.” No shit. I was just curious.

Ah, 2003-2004 era TV-Nihon, I kind of miss that level of jack-assed-ness. Seriously TVN folks, thank you for the memories.

超 100% means “super” in this context, as backed up by all of the hype [heh, pun], press, and most likely some official release somewhere down the road that I’m ready and willing to slap down pre-order button upon when I get the chance. As in a reference to the Super Sentai series that Gavan is “replacing.” As in the kanji used in numerous Super Sentai productions which calls-back to that meta-series name. It’s an homage. I thought it was a nice touch.

A loving handshake to a venerable series that has lasted for multiple generations of childhoods.

Still, fansubbers and fansub-fans arguing about such things is like… it’s the universe healing, you know? Something lost from my youth and taken up by a whole new generation.

Actually, I think it was more like the series was still be subbed, but they were sharing the files via a different method? I don’t know, that was 20 damned years ago. Specifics escape me. ↩︎

The Blogger Canonical (?m=1) Issue Revisited

By Doug Bolden

On 2025-11-19

In Blog Stuff, Dougiverse, Internet, The Algorithm

If you want to just see an explanation of the issue, you can skip to THE TECHNICAL ISSUE, below. First, I get to rant a bit and give some context.

When I first returned to blogging after eight years, it was not with a traditional blog: it was with The Doug Alone PROLOGUE. It was a place for me to post notes and recaps about the solo rpg stuff I was doing.¹ Only there was a problem. I actually mentioned it on my final post on that blog. Google more or less refused to index it.

It looks like it did at least briefly index a single page and then wiped it later.

Even though the blog was primarily meant as a play journal, there were elements that I wanted people to find. Only there was a primary error that kept showing up by way of explanation:

I had a vague notion of what that meant but the more I looked into it, the more I found posts by people insisting it was not an error. It was intended. It’s not up to Google to SEO for you. Maybe your blog isn’t worthy. Here’s a reddit thread with most of those things said from just a few months ago.

However, after Noism Games posted a post noting their Blogger/Blogspot traffic had just plummeted, I felt curious and looked again.

Doug Is Right: The Blogger Canonical Edition

Here’s the tl;dr: I am right. The SEO experts are wrong on this one. Neener neener.

I knew I was roughly correct. I’ve worked with a lot of different web platforms over the years and am well aware that Google is a fickle beast when it comes to promoting something (say, a one-off post about carpet beetles) over things that are more core to your blog identity (such as old posts about a variety of horror movies). However, months of Google flat out ignoring a blog with unique content was not consistent. At least a few pages would have passed The Algorithm.

Those more in the know of the technical issues probably know, and I had an idea but just not why Blogger/Blogspot was being hit by it. Had I cared more, I would probably have put it together earlier. Would I have still moved blogs? Oh yes. I like having my own space to play.

The Technical Issue

What’s the issue?

Webpages can have canonical tags. It’s not required. It just helps Google (and other search engine type things) to say that the page with the listing is the page you want to index. If you are on a platform where your content might bounce from page to page, you can use it to say that this is the correct page.

EXAMPLE: You have a cooking blog. You have a set of pages with different recipes and other pages that include snippets of those recipes and you don’t want Google to send folks to the pages with only the snippets (such as a category page or a front page that shows the most recent). You prefer your recipes to be front and center. You put the canonical tag on those pages.

In the specific case of Blogger/Blogspot, there’s a bit of code that basically tells each new page to have a tag on the post itself:

<b:include data='blog' name='all-head-content'/>

One aspect of this is to drop a simple line that gives the URL and says “this one, Google” in the <HEAD>:

<link href='https://dougalone.blogspot.com/2025/09/beginning-to-migrate-some-content-to.html' rel='canonical'/>

And that should be well in good except for a technical glitch on Google’s side. It does not scan the blog like a person on a home computer will. It scans largely as a mobile device. And Blogger/Blogspot, a GOOGLE PRODUCT, tries to be helpful by serving up a ?m=1 version of the page. Old themes did not have a native mobile version. Newer ones do, but the artifact from Ye Olde Times is still there.

Which means that Google gets a link like this for the page linked above:

https://dougalone.blogspot.com/2025/09/beginning-to-migrate-some-content-to.html?m=1

You can likely see where this is going. If you click on it, it is identical to the previous page, except the rel='canonical' is not pointing to that link, it is posted to the .html, not the .html?m=1 version.

This means for every Blogger/Blogspot page scanned, Google sees a page constantly serving up alternate pages and because the ?m=1 keeps persisting, it constantly fails to find the canonical pages.

What’s the Fix?

Unfortunately, the two primary fixes are both on Google engineers and since this has been brewing for a few years, I have no idea if they will fix it. Hopefully so, because Blogger/Blogspot is a nice all-in-one blog for people who don’t want to fiddle too hard and just want to get their content out there.

FIX #1 would be for Google to not treat ?x=y as wholly different pages at least in the case of mobile pages where the canonical link has identical content. I appreciate there are lots of cases where it is different content, but there should be a way to prevent that.

FIX #2 would be for Blogger/Blogspot to stop appending the ?m=1 to mobile pages. There are better ways to handle that. That feels like an artifact from 2010 era internet. Back when you had completely separate mobile sites. Ah, I remember those days unfondly.

What can we do as users of the product? I’m not sure. If you look, there are suggestions for Javascript workarounds. I am attempting to use the script at this page. Go gently into that night and double check before you use it, yourself.

I also did try updating my robots.txt file to tell Google to ignore ?m=1 pages. Will it work? I don’t know. I’m not precisely holding my breath. If I remember to check in a couple of months and it has worked, I’ll let you know.

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Disallow:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /search
Disallow: /share-widget
Disallow: /*?m=1
Allow: /
Sitemap: https://dougalone.blogspot.com/sitemap.xml

Obviously, if you want to use that you want to change the final line to be whatever your blog’s address is. I’ve seen variations of that across multiple posts so I don’t know where it originated. Apparently older Blogger blogs had a baked in robots.txt but mine didn’t. I had to add it whole cloth.

Let’s see what the outcome of this double approach might be.

NOTE: It is possible that Google will eventually scan it via a non-mobile-first scanner and make all this a non-issue. Just 16-months seems like a fair time to run a test.

There is a paradox of solo play where a lot of folks, myself included, have a strong urge to share it with someone. The initial idea was not a blog. I thought about streaming some stuff on Youtube. Since I ended up figuring out a lot of mistakes, tweaking a lot of notions, and so forth: I am glad I went for a format that did not involve me just sitting there confused and sweaty on camera. ↩︎

Just deleted most of my Patreon follows, including the free ones

By Doug Bolden

On 2025-10-22

In Internet, Rants, Technology, The Algorithm

This morning I got a message from a Patreon Creator that was a simple “Hey” but based on previous interactions, I know any response to it would result in this person asking for more money. Let’s call them Person K.

I one time, now years ago, actually did send them some money outside of Patreon. I eventually said I wasn’t going to send them any more and after a few exchanges stop replying. Over the next few years, they sent me a lot:

I obfuscated it because I’m not interested in real naming-and-shaming but that should give you an idea. Each of those blue-boxes is a message, more or less. Most are friendly. Some are a bit insistent. All are basically asking for money. I skipped a few because I think I had enough to establish the point.

Not a single Doug-reply is in there. I left their Patreon a bit back, including the “free tier” [they sent me a “bye Doug :'(” response]. Then they kept messaging me. Not so frequent that I cared all that much.

Today was just a different sort of day, though. The kind of day where I was ready to delete most of the flack off my digital landscape.

I figured out how to block Person K — which gave me a message that Patreon had removed me from their page, so I guess somehow I was a zombie there — and gave a pretty big think about how I wanted to use & engage with Patreon if I kept using it. The final answer, after around thirty total seconds: not much. Very nearly none.

My problems with…well, sort of with Patreon but buckle up because Doug’s about to go off

I have always been a moderate- to lower-tier user, even at peak. There are lots of reasons why I have never gotten deeper into it. Let’s come up with something like a starter three really quick (# given is roughly the order I’d put the problem):

(5) The interface is fairly poor for a website that is one of the major backbones of the indie creator scene.

(3) It quickly gets costly. While backing a couple of Creators is not a whole lot of cash, it is easy to end up backing 10+ and seeing a monthly bill rivaling old school cable bills. Especially with how many Patreons have that stupid “$20+ a month to get your name at the end of my videos” thing.

“I’d like to thank DickMaster2000, the Might Gooble, Tom the Tominator…”

I personally don’t tend to engage with content on a subscription basis, ever. (4) I do things in little bursts.

This means I would back a podcast, listen to some of their backlog, wait a few months (paying the whole time to not use them), and then do another backlog. At this point I might leave or I might wait another few months to pick up another backlog.

If I ever left, if I ever downgraded, I might be losing out in months of content that I could access as long as I kept paying.

Which brings me to a fourth reason which is #2 in the final list, though this is less Patreon-specific and more the whole damned thing that is happening right now:

(2) Business models that promote FOMO [fear-of-missing-out] are inherently problematic: freemium memberships, gachas, crowdfunding with backer-exclusives. Even when they enable some creators to make special content for their best supporters, there are very few safeguards for the backer-side and drive creators to work around this “value added” model.

FOMO is a billion-dollar industry driver across its many facets and a major slice of a lot of the modern hobby landscape. Apps that allow extra features, sites with minor upgrades, games with a few bonus aesthetics, gacha pulls, overspending on crowd-sourcing for extra features, member videos, etc.

I am not necessarily blaming all content-creators. Some do try to take care of their content-consumers. Some are in a place where this is the best way for them to publish their content. Some work very, very hard to make it worthwhile.

And, to clarify: exclusive content is not necessarily evil, no more than having a unique painting for sale at an art festival is evil, but when combined with the structure of the modern content marketplace, it has to be careful.

These massive third parties that run the websites and portals make it a constant focus for content-creators [from big media empires to smaller creators] to drive content-consumers to enter into a buy-in relationship. Break the old game with new characters. Make your character look more unique. Get a campaign exclusive t-shirt that you might never wear. A bonus chapter for your favorite book series. An exclusive series of videos shot in the director’s bedroom!

Come inside, friends, here is exclusive!

Which is where we get to #1 in the ever growing list:

(1) Business models that thrive on parasocial relationships, pseudo-communities, and consumer addiction are inherently evil.

In many cases, they force consumers to spend a lot of time and effort to keep engaging with these communities and hobbies. Not just with the central creators but also the other members of the community, including trophies for heavy interaction and fake incentives to share memberships and similar addiction-driving behaviors.

We all lose (maybe not the platform owners)

These last two feed on each other. Creators are driven into increasingly less-profitable time-sinks to push a business model that has the real capability of driving consumers into feeling actively responsible for the well-being of their favorite creators.

That latter point cannot be stated loud enough. Whether it is time [like, comment, subscribe, share] or actual money and effort, our relationship to content creators is in a terribly strange place now. With many smaller creators having no other real options but to encourage the same predatory behavior that enables other entities [larger content creators and platforms] to also feed upon those same consumers.

Platforms like Youtube and Twitch have created a new type of rock star for us all to want to be. One with the doors kicked wide open. Only, the rules keep changing. The revenue keeps dropping. The user experience gets worse. Creators start tacking on Patreons, memberships, donation drives, subscription drives, an all sorts of behaviors that take away from the core experience that justifies the content creator even being on the damned platform to begin with.

Too often, your success is not about whether you are good or talented or just in it for fun and having a good time. Over and over the message is driven home: success is doing exactly the sort of thing that increases profits for the platform owners, the revenue handlers, and all the people who use them for advertisement. Keep your fans engaging so their data can be more widely shared with entities that are barely required to even admit they in the food chain. .

At best, it is a terrible stop-gap for a broken creator-consumer relationship where a few entities own so much of what we can consume while more indie folk are constantly trying to stay afloat [and here comes GenAI to tighten the screws further while eating the indie creations to learn how to emulate them].

At worst, this is an active abuse of psychological principles that have plagued humanity all the way back to our hunter-gatherer tribal roots. The need for community. The need for recognition. The need to provide. The fear of scarcity.

[Recap] The list in order of importance and slightly expanded

Business models that thrive on parasocial relationships, pseudo-communities, and consumer addiction are inherently evil.
Business models that promote FOMO [fear-of-missing-out] are inherently problematic.
Patreon quickly gets costly if you support more than a small number of Creators or feel the need [see #1 and #2] to engage at a higher tier.
I do things in little bursts, which systems like Patreon take advantage: you either engage constantly or you generate a backlog where you keep paying to avoid missing the content you already “own.”
The interface is fairly poor for a website all about connecting Creators to their consumers, which again means you have to engage frequently or spend time navigating past other temptations.

Um…Doug? We were talking about Patreon…

Right. RIGHT. Sorry, I get a bit ranty when I have a headache.

Also, like…when I don’t have a headache. Just, you know, in general.

The above thoughts had been on my mind for a while. The three “about Patreon” parts (#3, #4, and #5) are really why I just never could enjoy Patreon, personally: the UI, the cost, and the way I actually like enjoying the things I enjoy.

I didn’t like going to the website very much. I refused to get the app. I would get notifications and sometimes actually follow the link to get whatever file or post it was about. I would sometimes skip a month or two and just miss stuff. Every time I had a backlog I would just get frustrated trying to figure out what stuff for which I had “paid” was actually available [note: about that paying for…it’s complicated for such a model].

I still kept it up for a small handful of creators, some just a month or two, because I liked to support them. What’s that, did I feel responsible for them? Yeah, kind of. That is part of the problem, see? You start to feel like you, the viewer, are somehow beholden to pre-pay for content you may or may not enjoy because a lot of those content-creators are nice people with a dream.

However, when Person K from the first section of this post contacted me, it was a breaking point.

I went through a list.

Every Patreon I followed, paid or not, that I primarily enjoyed off-Patreon, I instantly unfollowed.

If I like their content on Patreon but was only there for short glimpses into the background “behind the scenes” type commentary [i.e., one that played, inadvertently or not against my sense of FOMO], I unfollowed.

If I was just there to support them for a bit and had already accomplished that, I unfollowed.

If I was only keeping one around to eventually get around to getting the content to which I had already subscribed but hadn’t actually consumed, I unfollowed. Yes, I lost all that content.

And on a personally selfish level: was I getting my money and time back or more? If not, I unfollowed.

Finally, was it sparking the hell out of some joy..

…if not? Yep.

There were times these points clashed. There were some that actually sparked joy but had exclusive tiers I didn’t want to bother with. Some were worth it but I would rather engage with them elsewhere.

Absolutely none of the people I unfollowed today were honestly bad actors (Person K is the closest to an exception but I can understand wanting money). They were all lovely creators. Just Patreon and all those points above showed up on a day when I headache.

The two which remain + some bonus shout outs

To end this on a kind of positive note, here are the two that survived all the cuts:

Witch House Media: I have been following them since their HPPodcraft days and they put out regular, good content about a niche genre that I adore.
Tana Pigeon | Mythic: I use Mythic a lot and I love reading the magazine. While I do get to take part in some polls and such and ask questions and whatnot, the Patreon is well worth the fee since I would have spent that money on the books and zines anyhow. It also lets me get some news about something that is a major hobby of mine. Excellently run.

Two that I did not keep for various reasons but did deeply appreciate are Dean Spencer Art and Brandon Scott. Dean Spencer puts out some of the best stock art for content creators and has regular posts and engagement. I just would rather go back to buying the pieces I will use, when I use them. Brandon Scott makes wonderfully creative stuff. He is the most likely candidate for someone I will go back and refollow once my headache clears.

Bonus shout out: Cracking the Cryptic. Lots of interactions, lots of content. I just reached a point I’d rather watch them on Youtube and buy their games/books.

Credits

The “Empty Tunnel”: Photo from from Getty Images via Unsplash+ License.