Observations about life on the web: the good, the weird, and the em dashes.
Please don’t make the em dash—the long hyphen I’m using here—an indicator of AI-written text. I recently saw a post on LinkedIn (it pains me to admit it) where someone wrote a script to hide all comments containing an em dash because they’re highly likely to be AI-generated. I think there’s truth to it. But I also hate the fact that I think there’s truth to it.
Read moreI stopped scrolling through Bluesky for a month, and I really enjoyed that month.
Even though Bluesky and Mastodon are much nicer places than Twitter, I realized that I don’t enjoy the experience of scrolling through short message social media. There are a few posts here and there that are nice or funny or interesting, but if there’s just a one post that I don’t want to read or think about, the whole experience is ruined for me.
It’s not about keeping your feed clean of extremism and other bullshit. It was easy to keep my feeds clean on Bluesky and Mastodon. But people think and post about a lot of different things, and I’m just not interested in all of them, nor do I want to spend any amount of mental capacity thinking about them. Scrolling past them is difficult. I have to force myself not to read something I’m not interested in. And that just makes it not a great experience.
I subscribe to a YouTube channel because I’m interested in the kind of content they make, and I assume that future content will be similar. And I follow people on Instagram because I like the pictures they post. But short message services just give me too much variety in what to expect.
So, I will continue what I did for a month. I deleted the Bluesky app from my phone and removed it from my browser bookmarks. I’ll still cross-post my posts there, because of course I want to reach an audience. And maybe I’ll post the occasional meme there. (Why not post them here?) But for now, I don’t want to consume text feeds.
Last week, I tinkered with developing a Shopify App. Shopify’s developer guides are… eh – a mixed bag. What I wanted to do just wouldn’t work. So, when I can’t find an answer in their guides and it’s also not easily googled, I turn to ChatGPT. I don’t often use ChatGPT for this kind of stuff – I still mostly use Google because it’s faster – but I’ve found that searching for Shopify’s subscription guides often leads to forum posts with no clear answers.
The issue with ChatGPT is that it can be so annoying. It’s like talking to that one coworker who never responds directly to your questions, trying to hide that they secretly have no idea what they’re doing. Just give me an answer, Chatty!
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