Would You Like To Browse My Delicious Snacks?
Exploring a new model for sharing the internet's content with each other.
The Teardown
Thursday :: October 24th, 2024 :: Approx. 7 min read
👋 Hi, this is Chris with another issue of The Teardown. In every issue, I cover how we interact with technology that enables our day-to-day lives.
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Fall Cleaning
In Shotgun That Imagination Juice, I wrote about autopilot-like saver behavior:
What do lots of people do instead? Rely on technology. You clip articles into read later tools like Pocket. You bookmark within your account at the major news outlets you choose. Maybe you use an elaborate and over-engineered automation to retain every bit of information you gaze at in a day.
I often do what I just described. I archive a sprawl of favorites, bookmarks, and likes everywhere. Hacker News. NYTimes. WSJ. Pocket. Strewn across thousands of text messages over the years. Hastily pasted in Apple Notes, Google (anything), Notion, and just about every imaginable information gathering tool.
The process is robotic and lifeless. I think of these disparate banks as fuel for The Teardown, but in reality, they aren’t. It might be that 1 or 2 out of 100 bookmarks actually drive home a post.
So, instead, I’m tilting back towards my imagination. Not just for The Teardown, but as a general guiding principle.
What was I doing with scattered bits and pieces of internet history?
Lots of nothing. And, I didn’t see an obvious way to change my behavior and start using that archive for anything.
I thought about alternatives for a long minute. Could I clip into one tool like Notion, or Apple Notes, or Google Docs? Short brainstorms led to the conclusion that any archive would soon turn into a zombie. Not extinguishable at first glance, and not alive and well.
I also looked at what I was doing in pure mechanistic terms. Was I behaving in an addictive manner? Well, it wasn’t substance abuse, but otherwise yes. My phone's Share button was a comfort mechanism: let me not lose that thing, let’s archive it until later, I promise I’ll come back. Promise.
The switch flipped soon after. I acted on a recent trend elsewhere in my digital life: blowing away the past. Not everything. Not some of the things with permanent housing like photos of my wedding or my kids in their youngest peanut shells.
But that 2-year-old article that I didn’t remember reading or saving? Gone. Some were older. Some were newer. I was indiscriminate in my work: I deleted years of saved articles.
Habit: Gone. Intention: Alive
The days following that clean wipe were strange. I would navigate to an article or tap a News app, start reading, and hit Share. The habit exerted every possible ounce of control over my brain and fingers.
But then something strange happened: I couldn’t clip what I was skimming to Pocket, the previous dark musty basement of past want-to-reads. My stroke of genius was to delete both my clipped articles and my Pocket account.
What about the habit? It died not long after the Pocket app disappeared from my phone.
I’m now reading and sometimes finishing and moving on. I’ll jot a mental note to revisit an article if it’s important. People see links from me over text, WhatsApp, or email when a piece is worth their time.
That social sharing process is part of the broader feature set of social media platforms. But link sharing isn’t fascinating to Silicon Valley product leaders and engineers. And, link sharing is ephemeral too. You share in a moment, discuss or decline as a group, and move on.
But a question comes to mind when you want something new to read: what are my friends reading? I trust them. Let me ask them. They might recommend something good.
A civilized exploration of the question reminded me of Yahoo. The genius and luck of David Filo and Jerry Yang’s project was the directory. The home page contained a bare-bone list of categories in which links to other sites lived. David and Jerry curated the directory by hand during the earliest days.
The magic of the directory was that we wanted it. The directory allowed people to tell other people what they liked thinking about. It was a digital book club. It was an early digital best-of list. David and Jerry's close friends could see what David and Jerry consumed on the internet.
That intention scaled as Yahoo became the index of interesting content for everyone.
Do we have a similar modern social directory today? Here's what I want:
Categorized lists of links.
A view into the categories and links friends create and save.
Some mechanism to clean dead links. You don’t want to visit a link if the internet's worker bees already know its dead.
Tons of link archival products exist across the web. Pocket is one of many. But Pocket isn’t designed around the idea that you’ll share your archive with someone else. Pocket is your trove of information and a place for you to see what’s popular across the entire Pocket universe.
But what I want is a way to see what specific friends are reading. And vice versa. I don’t want to scroll through tons of emails or group messages to find those bits of info. I also don't want interpersonal flame-throwing.
Removing that last bit means that my hypothetical platform can’t be the next Facebook. Instead, it should be a product that enables simple storage and sharing.
Enter, Snack.
A Delicious Snack List
I stumbled on Snack a few days ago via Hacker News. The poster’s pitch seemed straightforward:
I made a tool for curating and sharing links as lists.
What does Snack (the captioned tool) look like? A simple interface lets a user create one or many lists of links. You share a list or an entire profile with a single click and public link. Have a peek at my profile and example category below:
That’s it. What you see is what you get. There are two other basic features: choosing a username, uploading a profile picture.
Snack's simplicity is at odds with so much of the internet at first glance, but so refreshing. Hand curation makes it harder to fill a list with junk. The lack of features reduces misuse and amnesia. And sharing buttons give users simple paths to distribute their curated bits to others.
You might then ask: what’s missing?
The most interesting missing (in my view) feature is explicit social linking. To be clear, I do not mean a pure social network:
Users sign up with accounts as basic as mine.
Users aren’t discoverable. They are similar in function to a website that uses a noindex tag to avoid a search engine’s prying crawlers. Users are public but aren't searchable on the site.
Users link to and see each other’s lists through a request/confirmation mechanism. I ask to see your profile and lists and you give me permission.
Snack users can see each other’s treasure chests if they know the profile and list links. But you have to keep those links in active memory or stored somewhere. And, where would you store them? Apple Notes, Notion, Pocket, etc.
What if the product shows you your friends and their lists and links? You see a directory of your friends. They see a directory of their friends. Everyone gives explicit permission to everyone else. No one stores links anywhere else.
Snack reminds me that the simpler version of the internet is fun and useful, but also harder in many ways. Friction sometimes helps, and sometimes hurts. Early website skeletons were hand-coded in HTML. Directories like Yahoo required time-consuming interface munging and database code. Social interactions existed in message boards, emails, AOL, and clunky terminal chat apps.
Now any app and platform is extendable in many ways. Immense technological horsepower sits under so many large sites, and many smaller sites.
But some of the simpler products still work best. Another simple favorite? Feedly, first on the block in 2008.
It is for aggregating and reading content from authors across the web. Feedly does so via a structured text feed, distributed by any website that chooses to publish one. Any other site that knows how to parse and redisplay that feed can do so.
Feedly offers quite a bit more. But the base product performs that parse and render step without fuss.
And, Snack gives me a place to store and share categories of links without fuss and bloat.
Let's keep our fingers crossed for more of the no-fuss web.
Have been a Feedly user since Google Reader was discontinued. I still check older saved Feedly items (going back 10+ years) to see if there's something I need to get out of my link vault and into the world.