The Web Worth Paying For
Tuesday, August 15, 2023
I was listening to Celeste Headlee interview Anil Dash on the latest episode of the Slate podcast What Next: TBD, and Dash said something about the kind of web communities we should build, and encourage, to combat the rise of white supremacy among wealthy and influential tech leaders and the communities they fund:
How do we make there be a community that has its own recipes and how many of the apps you use every day are home cooked meals made by somebody you love in a community that you’re from? It can be that, it’s happening again.
This immediately struck me as a perfect description of what I like about Micro.blog and Omg.lol. Each is made by a person or a small team who are constantly involved in the community, who we can report bugs to, suggest features to, or just chat with, and who greet criticism head-on with clear explanations of why they hold their positions, and who maintain a willingness to change their minds.
I’m not saying they’re perfect – after all, like you and I, they’re people, so of course they’re not perfect. But that’s just it: they’re people, and they treat their users like they’re people, too.
We get all of this because we pay a really, really reasonable fee to join these communities, relieving them of the need to pursue increasingly questionable methods of revenue generation.
That’s the web worth paying for, and I’m happy to be here.