Breathing New Life into Instapaper

At the start of this year, I put my Instapaper use into overdrive. Instapaper has always been one of my favorite apps, and consistently one of my most used. Even so, I didn’t have much of a system for using it and it was taking the form of a teenager’s unkept bedroom. It needed some tidying up and a new plan for keeping it tidy. I found what works for me.

The first step was to go through the whole mess and archive/delete anything I wasn’t really going to read. There were a bunch of articles from years back I clearly was never going to read, and so I unceremoniously wiped them out. Next, I set up daily To Do reminders to read one article a day, any article at all. But on Saturdays, I read the longest article I had saved. On Mondays and Thursdays, I would read the oldest. Instapaper makes this easy with their convenient Sort feature on iOS.

My account currently has about 70 unread articles in it, and for some reason it seems to permanently hover around that number. Even though I’m constantly adding articles and the oldest article is only from a few months ago.

Lately, my focus on the internet has shifted. The social web 2.0 stuff has taken a back seat to plain old reading. I took a break from Instagram, Twitter, etc. and leaned hard into my RSS reader. I’ve been thinking more about the web as a publishing platform than a messaging forum. It seems like while most people are pushing for more and more micro-conversations, we’ve lost sight of a healthier, meatier web. A web of good reading and writing. By placing greater attention on instapaper and longer-form reading, the internet became a more nutritious place. Less snark and more information.

The next move for me is to find a way to write and publish more myself.

After Twitter

The more I think about it, the more ready I become for the end of Twitter. If it went away, I, personally, would not be so terribly inconvenienced. I would lose a few things, but I’d gain others, too. I’d gain back time. I would put greater emphasis on articles and books in my life. I might even write more. There are conceivable benefits of a world without Twitter.

But what about what we lose. We lose a very important online town square. We lose a chunk of free political discourse. We lose trustworthy, second-by-second real-time breaking news. We lose diversity in voices.

Can these lost things be found again in blogs? Are there other platforms for less privileged voices to ring out? I suspect the answer will be “no” on both accounts for a long while.

What I want to build is something which exists in that world between RSS readers, personal blogs, and Twitter.

End of Twitter, Feb 2016 Edition

News is breaking that Twitter is rolling out an algorithmically sorted timeline. An algorithmic Twitter is an I’ll-check-it-once-a-week-for 5-minutes Twitter. I wonder if it would even feel trustworthy in the case of a tragic disaster, the kind that seems to happen a few times a year. If I feel like Twitter is trying to show me relevant content instead of simply allowing the news to flow, I don’t think I would rely on it for info. But where else would I go? What are we supposed to do? Just let it go, I guess. Back to 2006.

Tweetbot has been a refuge. In fact, if it weren’t for Tweetbot, I likely would have stopped reading Twitter altogether. The official app is a mess, already out of order and impossible to grok. It feels uncomfortable, like socks which won’t stay up, or a too-small-sweater.

I’ve been preparing myself for the end for a long time. It seems obvious third party apps won’t be around for ever. Eventually we’d all have to use the official app. I check it occasionally, but it’s a horrible experience, and I always feel less anxious after closing it. If I had to use their app, I would just not bother.

I’m not really a social person. Not really an over-sharer. Twitter and Instagram made it easy for me for awhile, but something has changed. I feel less comfortable with social networks in general. Personal, private blogging feels much more my style.

Feels like Twitter is almost over. It really does this time.

Mind of Winter

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

— Wallace Stevens

RSS by Time of Day

I use Feedly for my RSS reading and I believe I’ve found my favorite way to sort through the news. Last fall, I arranged my feeds into time of day: Morning, Afternoon, Evening, Night, Weekend, and Work Reading. Most feeds are in multiple folders, and few are in less than two. It’s a very easy way to run through what’s happening out there in the world. At particular times during the day, I’m more interested in certain kinds of news. In the morning, I want to read national news and the personal blog posts from friends and colleagues. In the afternoon, I like all forms of news, including entertainment and trivial stuff. In the evening, the longer form articles are more interesting. At night and in the weekends, I’d rather read lifestyle stuff and to give myself a break from the think pieces and awful politics. At work, I just want to read stuff that pertains to my career, so that stuff is quarantined to office hours.

All in all, it really works. I get through my feeds quickly but without rushing. I know if I leave 50 posts in the morning list, the timely stuff I’ll likely get to later in the day. And when I want to take a real break from RSS, I check only my Vacation folder: about 20 feeds which entertain me more than inform me; a breezy list.

There is a lot of work to do in making RSS products into the forms they deserve to be. At least now I feel I’ve cracked a personal code.

Raising Boys and Girls

From an article in the Atlantic by Debbie Chachra:

“A quote often attributed to Gloria Steinem says: “We’ve begun to raise daughters more like sons . . . but few have the courage to raise our sons more like our daughters.” Maker culture, with its goal to get everyone access to the traditionally male domain of making, has focused on the first. But its success means that it further devalues the traditionally female domain of caregiving, by continuing to enforce the idea that only making things is valuable. Rather, I want to see us recognize the work of the educators, those that analyze and characterize and critique, everyone who fixes things, all the other people who do valuable work with and for others — above all, the caregivers whose work isn’t about something you can put in a box and sell.

Percents and Percents

I’m really tired of reading articles with paragraphs full of sentences like, “[This Percent] of [this demographic] believes this while [This Percent] of [this demographic] believes that.” Am I reading more press release type articles now, or is this a lame, lazy trend that’s growing?

Bowie's Reading List

David Bowie’s reading list, from Brain Pickings. A lot of good stuff here, only a few of which I’ve read.

Sunset of Social Media?

I’ve stopped visiting Pinterest. It’s been weeks or months since I’ve been in the habit of looking through the site. At least six months since I tried keeping up to date with my stream. I’ve reached a saturation point with visual inspiration. I’m on the other end of the pendulum swing: I need to be making things.

I’ve also rarely kept up with Twitter, and mostly that’s just my short list of people I most care about. Instagram has lost its grip on me. Facebook I stopped reading well over a year or go, or two.

It’s the end of social networks for me. I’m over them. The other things which really matter to me anymore are blogs and long-reads. It’s why I’m so obsessed with building an RSS reader. It’s another world out there outside the walled garden of social apps. It’s a bigger world, and far more interesting.

Bowie on the Internet 1999

This interview with David Bowie from 1999, in which he talks about the future of the internet, is reminding me that I haven’t tackled thoughts like that in a long time. I only read think pieces on the Internet now. I’d love to read more about art vs. the Internet vs. culture … I miss my brain being tickled in that way. I’ve got to get back to reading those books which really challenged me. Got to find them first.