internet

Someone on NetNewsWire’s Discourse site recently asked, “How to find motivation for reading feeds?” Below was my response.

As a longtime RSS addict, this question reads to me like “how can I start smoking cigarettes?”

I was nigh-endlessly scrolling newsfeeds before I was endlessly scrolling social media, so in some ways they’re the same to me. But what sucks me into social media more than my newsreader are the notifications. Notifications ends up making social media a destination about me as much or more than a place to stay up on news, friends and my interests. I really should turn more of them off. One of my worst app habits is to always agree to turn them on under the belief that I’ll turn them off if I dislike them (except I never do the second part).

I’ve been a fan of Hank Green, and his brother John, since their “Vlogbrothers” series in YouTube’s early days. As well-meaning and well-spoken nerds, they rapidly assembled a community of like-minded terminally online followers. One channel quickly turned into a network, laying the groundwork for educational franchises like SciShow and Crash Course. But with a big audience and community, they’ve also made good. In 2012, the brothers launched a foundation aligned with their goal to “decrease world suck”, and since then it has granted $17 million to more than 100 charities. Earlier this year, Complexly, the company the Green brothers started to produce educational content for their channels and partners like PBS, became a non-profit after both brothers donated their equity in the company.

Which is why the recent fallout over Hank admitting to using ChatGPT for research feels like such a seismic internet event. Hank Green isn’t a faceless media conglomerate chasing a payout, he’s a beloved creator at the center of the internet’s fiercest debate about automation, scale, and burnout. Hank first addressed the issues in a reply to a tweet, but the original tweet to which Hank replied to was deleted, and later posted a longer Reddit apology, admitting he had fallen into an unhealthy habit of relying heavily on generated notes to keep up with his brutal publishing schedule. He announced a pause on several of his personal projects, conceding that “the level of dopamine I’ve been getting from interacting with LLMs… is not healthy for me or good for the world.”

There’s been a lot of chatter lately about the future of the .io ccTLD. The top-level domain was originally created as a country code top-level domain for the “British Indian Ocean Territory”, but like history tells us, countries are not forever and that means ccTLDs aren’t either. Should a treaty by the UK government be passed, the islands would become part of Mauritius, ending the need for the .io domain.