Let's not make this complicated

The web is far too complicated, in my opinion.

There's just too much junk, for lack of a better term. And it just keeps getting junkier. We're a few decades removed from the start of the Internet, and we've built something beautiful, with a wide world of possibilities that seems to truly be open to anyone.

And that's awesome.

What's less awesome is that it's become harder and harder for small, independent voices to carve out their tiny little plots of digital land to create, write, and explore ideas the way they'd like.

We're bombarded with ads, our data is exploited for targeted consumerism, and we're never really given a chance to get a spot and make it our own.

So that's what I'm doing here. The first post I wrote here was over on Something old, something new, and was mostly focused on why I decided to do a complete overhaul of my site.

One of the reasons I hadn't mentioned in that post was that I wanted to do a reworked version of my blog, something that's considerably different from the way I've done things in the past. More exploratory, less business-y. More fun, less stuffy.

You get the idea.

My design ideas were sparked by a whole host of different people, all of whom are way smarter than I am and have far better ideas about how we should use the powers of the web to actually improve the world around us, like Maggie Appleton, the folks at Semplice, and the countless other people I've come across in the past whose work has made my day a little bit sunnier, every time.

Because that's what we need more of on the Internet: things that inspire joy.

We've had enough keyword-stuffed recipes, so filled with ads that the page doesn't even load right.

We don't need another grifter looking to make a quick buck by spamming social media.

We need real people making real things, inspiring others, and sharing the joy that is existence. Because if we can't share what's fundamentally human when we're online, then what's the point of being online at all?