The amount of time I spend on my phone killing time or seeking distraction out of habit is regularly concerning to me. Not capital “C” concerning, like what state will this world be in when my kids inherit it. But lower case “c” concerning, like am I rotting my brain on this stuff, when I could be doing anything more constructive.

I picked Instagram as my app of choice a while ago and then further refined that to be a source of inspiration. Mostly following artist, musicians, sports, and skateboarding. But that intent has been massively diluted over the years. My anecdotal experience is one jammed up with ads, suggested accounts, and often more videos than pictures. So lets test it with some real world tracking, ten days, scroll through 15 post, and see what gets served up.

There is always room for conformation bias doing something like this. But this little exercise certainly confirmed my anecdotal experience of feeling like I am seeing more and more stuff I didn’t intentionally sign up for. The pipeline is rotten and more of it keeps coming into my head.

I built my first website in a high school technology class in 1997. It was equal parts enticing to create something from nothing and have that something act as vehicle for even more creativity. Unrelated, it was the beginning of me never fully understanding how code works. It was just HTML, but it still felt like magic, like I couldn’t really hold it in my hands without it slipping away.

Not until 2005 did I really dig in and start a blog that I regularly posted at. Consistency was king and I fell in love with the process of writing, something school never imprinted on me. It turned out being thoughtful about the things I found interesting, inspiring, and frustrating scratched an itch I didn’t know I had.

On the topic of frustration. The two most viewed post on that now dead blog, were: 1. A “how to” on making cycling knickerbockers from army cargo pants; and 2. Sharing an infuriating week of shitty customer service with Comcast, my then TV and internet provider. Both got picked up by web crawlers and run on other sites by real humans. A thing I don’t think happens anymore.

In the early 2010s the rise of social media stole my attention and time. It was convenient, low effort, and all your people were there too. The blog slowly died and my low calorie images and words went out to the world through someone else’s pipes and tubes.

Like many, I became jaded with the enshittification of those same platforms almost a decade later. The “you are the product” sentiment really started to come into it’s own. Habitual line stepping in a way that stopped being subtle and became the norm.

I’d like to see what my friends are posting. Are they even posting? No, I don’t want your recommended post, and also not your ad. Wow, that is a lot of ads per post, I tracked it for a week and the ratio is sometimes 6:1. Yes, I looked at one post on about marble racing, but that doesn’t mean that is all I want to look at now.

In 2018 I stood up a new blog, 180Lunches.com. A return to form, where that form was a creative outlet that I could invest more in and by extent have greater ownership of. Square Space advertised on nearly every medium I consumed, so they got me too. Incredibly easy to use, but expensive and cookie cutter. It worked, but over 8 years I was frustrated by weird quarks and performance issues.

Top 4 things that made me leave…

• Price, $16 a month for a play thing no one really visits is stupid
• Search never worked, I had a hell of a time digging up old post
• Mobile browsers just stopped working at some point
• Lack of customization, for the price I expect to be able to drop some code in, nope

So now I’m here, it is 2025. I am done posting on social media, maybe for good. I’ll still scroll a reel from time to time, but if I write anything or have a thought worth sharing. It will be here. Enjoy.