If that doesn't mean anything to you, then imagine writing blog posts in a real nice post editor, then dragging some files around until it's on the internet. This gets around the fact that I hate writing HTML or Markdown, but don't want to run some sort of overwrought Wordpress install on my own server so I can post twice a year about video games or whatever.

In other words, I don't want to think or study harder than necessary!! I just want to write!!

This is all free, requires no technical know-how, and includes multiple screenshots. I'll write a followup post talking about modifying the default theme with your own CSS, but for now this should get folks started.

EDIT Sep 10 2024: HEY now that this is blowing up again, a quick update:

I was wrong when I said this is "all" free. Publii is free, Neocities is free, Cyberduck is free, BUT Neocities won't let you upload files via Cyberduck unless you're paying $5/month.

However, you can still upload files via the Neocities interface for free. It just takes longer and is a little clunky. And you don't have to use Neocities anyway - you can upload this static site anywhere. It's completely portable, which is part of why I like Publii vs. many other solutions.

If you can't afford the $5/month, you can still do this, you just need to upload the files manually. I've also heard good things about hosting at Nearly Free Speech, which is much cheaper, though I've not used it myself.

Anyway, please ask if you have any questions, I'm more than happy to help! And if you do make a site using this, LET ME KNOW i wanna see your cool wabsites thanks

Seems like as good a time as any to reshare this.

What makes this real fun is when you realize that TikTok quietly hides comments with external links by default to keep people in its ecosystem, but doesn't tell you. So if you try to, say, cite a source to prove disinformation your comment appears to you but no one else. This further confuses threads and makes pointing to factual data or debunking someone's bullshit all but impossible.

I've become convinced that TikTok is an amazing platform for misinformation, if only because it is built to destroy context. Videos appear out of order via an algorithm, no one can link to anything external to cite sources or point to authority, and surrounding discourse is frayed and scrambled. It's shockingly easy for absolute nonsense to take root and spread among people who want to believe it unchallenged.

This is part of how you get the "Venezuelan gangs have taken over multiple apartment complexes in Colorado, the cops have ceded the ground to them, and our only hope is the Hell's Angels who have promised to come in and solve the problem with racialized violence" story in right wing circles. It's also how you get the "Chase Bank Glitch" story where dozens upon dozens of TikTokers posted about how gullible rubes are doing a viral check fraud scheme en masse when there's no real evidence of that ever happening.

It's an entire platform built to facilitate stories of people eating tide pods or that someone put razorblades in Halloween candy.

Eventually all for-profit social media is just going to have a bar along the bottom:

(thanks @sirocyl for the correct CSS for the chyron scroller!)

The primary problem is that while the answers which ChatGPT and other generative AI technologies produce have a high rate of being incorrect, they typically look like the answers might be good and the answers are very easy to produce. There are also many people trying out ChatGPT and other generative AI technologies to create answers, without the expertise or willingness to verify that the answer is correct prior to posting. Because such answers are so easy to produce, a large number of people are posting a lot of answers. The volume of these answers (thousands) and the fact that the answers often require a detailed read by someone with significant subject matter expertise in order to determine that the answer is actually bad has effectively swamped our volunteer-based quality curation infrastructure.

Remember folks, worker solidarity can work

It's hilarious what companies think they can get away with irt volunteer and unpaid labor while also like... being soley made up of that labor. Like even reddit didn't lean so heavily on their mods as to have entire pieces of site infrastructure held up by them.

There are 3000 of these things and apparently each one is aiming to be its own disaster article