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Since 1999 (more or less) (less lately)

Infinite scroll was a mistakeThe web is an evolving medium. It’s not the same as it was 30 years ago, for certain, and it’s not even similar to how it was 10 years ago. A very static medium had interaction poked and prodded into it over the years, and now the web is still leaning hard into the “consumption” side of the equation for a lot of people.The metaphor of pages and bookmarks for the web harkens to physical media, and undoubtedly helped us understand how we could interact with the web. Back and forward buttons made navigation simple across sites. All of these things are incredibly still in place, despite so many attempts to move people away from the web over the years.Pages are, by their nature, finite. With books or printed matter, pages can only be so large. It’s a physical limitation that the web doesn’t have so, naturally, the concept of pagination quickly came into being – especially when browsing directories (phone book metaphor) and search engines.Aza Raskin invented infinite scroll in 2006, and you can still see the positioning on the original blog post.“The problem is that every time a user is required to click to the next page, they are pulled from the world of content to the world of navigation: they are no longer thinking about what they are reading, but about about how to get more to read.”This is, on its face, true. However, there’s an inherent unspoken assumption here that the world of pagination was bad, and that moving from one modality to another was also bad (which was one of Humanized core values: modes are bad.) The core idea here comes from the space of distraction-free computing: just let people read things. Get the interface out of the way. Make it invisible. Make it go away.And here we are, nearly 20 years later, and we have infinite content everywhere. We have so much fucking content that we don’t need to think about getting to that operating systems have removed scrollbars and containers and are making interfaces unusable in the name of having an infinite, forever scrolling pane of content underneath. Raskin said in a BBC article that he did feel bad in the way his invention got implemented.The thing we lost was significant: scale.When I pick up a thick tome of a book, I can infer a lot from it. I know it’s going to take me a long time to read. It may be very detailed. It might be interesting in parts, maybe boring in others. This is nearly literally judging a book by its cover, but we do so as humans because we are curious and want to know what’s happening before we start something. Ignorance is bliss, but curiosity is exciting.When I visit a web page with infinite scroll, I have no idea how much stuff there is. The front page of Reddit just keeps going. Thousands, millions of items that one could spend their entire life reading and never finish. The same goes for any social media site or your photo library or a YouTube search or just about anything. Instead of encouraging exploration on a user’s terms, it’s exploration on someone else’s terms. It’s overwhelming.From Raskin’s original blog post: “Don’t force the user to ask for more content: just give it to them.” (emphasis his)This notion of Infinite Push Forever has permeated everything. Our news is beyond 24/7. TikTok memes are born and die at hyper speed. Attention spans are not what they used to be. It’s become a cultural phenomenon and a way of being.Maybe it’s time to discourage push and bring back pull.---Moccamaster
7.19.25I last bought a coffee maker in 2020. The OXO Barista Brain 9-cup coffee maker, long championed as one of the good models, made its way to my home via a Bed Bath & Beyond coupon just before lockdowns started here in the US. I had been doing pour over coffee at home for a little while with Chemex and Clever Drippers, but I somehow found myself inadvertently breaking the glass carafes a little too much so I wanted to opt out of all of that but still have good coffee.The OXO, as of today, still largely works fine. But a month ago I noticed it didn’t pump the water tank out completely, leaving a little in the bottom. And then it did it one more time, another day. That was a flag for me to start shopping a bit. I ended up deep diving into a bunch of coffee nerdery – a nice place to visit but not my cup of… tea – and decided to go with a Moccamaster coffee maker that I found for a song on craigslist.The Moccamaster appeals to me due to its simplicity. It has a sterling reputation for making very good coffee (which I can now happily confirm), but the units are hand-built in the Netherlands and are dead simple. The OXO still had electronics and was predominantly middling-quality plastic. The Moccamaster does still have plastic baubles and bits, but it’s good quality stuff, and the body of the unit is metal. There is a switch, an old-school physical switch, to turn it on and off. There is no timer. No automatic function.The unit itself is nearly unadorned. Each part involved in routine coffee making, save the water reservoir, can be fully removed, cleaned, and replaced. Moccamaster hasn’t radically changed the design of their units in decades, outside of colorways and capacity. They still service every unit they’ve sold, and parts are readily available.In contrast, the OXO is a mostly-closed unit. I had a bad carafe at first (leaky) that OXO replaced, and also had a pump problem early on – they stood by the nearly-new unit and replaced it, for free. And it made good coffee.But having a little problem again prompted me to refocus on what’s important. I mean, it’s a coffee maker. I want to think about it enough but not too much: I’m good with measuring out grounds and water, but I don’t want to do a pour over every day. I strongly considered the Fellow Aiden, as I love its aesthetics despite its astronomical price, but its UI issues and dependency on an app were extremely off-putting. What happens when Fellow as a company goes away, or is bought out, or posts something on social media that our current regime hates? Yeah.There is something to be said about creating simple things that are built to last. There’s a notion of quality and care that is all-too-often ignored or just frittered away because it isn’t “efficient” or cheapest, or won’t buy enough yachts for the person in charge. When one buys a product, one doesn’t have to buy into the ethos or values of the company it comes from – there is no ethical consumption in capitalism – but it is damned nice when those things DO line up.And it’s nice to have a good cup of coffee.---Why Things
7.10.25I've come to realize in the past few years that I've been taking notes and writing more about my experiences with things. My leased car. My e-ink notebook. The apps I help design. Things like that.And that's mostly because it's simpler to do so.They're less complex. Tim Cook won't give two shits if I write about how terrible Liquid Glass is (and I still might do this, but it feels too myopic) but if I write about the erosion of our societal bonds, well, that's a lot more difficult.Technology isn't our enemy. But the way technology has, over the past 40 years, been hoisted upon us is a dereliction of our humanity. What we owe each other. What we owe ourselves. Not to get terribly nostalgic this time, but it definitely felt like 20+ years ago technology was part of the palette. You could get a digital camera, certainly, but also film. You could read the news online, yes, but also you could get a newspaper. Things like that.It's no coincidence that stuff that isn't tangible is easier to control. The thing you're reading now is, mostly, fully under my control. I have an ulterior motive. What happens when it's the ulterior motive of someone terrible, who also happens to control heavily-trafficked parts of the web and also is in cahoots with someone who wants to discourage people from, say, doing important things like organizing or voting? Yeah, we know what happens.We let that social contract lapse and we're now seeing the results. We're learning how few people in positions of power are truly looking out for us. We're inundated with the new tech thing – this streaming service, this autocomplete robot, this shiny phone – when we've barely absorbed what the last decade, hell, the last two decades of technology has done to us as people and as a society.We're all alpha testers now. We're all out there trying our best and patching together ways of being and ways of working and ways of living, and just when we kinda get a grip on something... good news, the entire interface is now different. Or the tool we relied on is deemed obsolete. Or the company that made it is acquired and sold for parts.The ephemerality of the internet has always been a challenge, and now it's being fully exploited against us. Any new technology should, frankly, have a cooling off period of research and understanding. How does this thing impact people? How will it be used in bad ways (because it will)? What good is it? IS it good? I realize this drops back into "what is good" but that's a question that we, collectively, need to answer and agree on. Values. Mores.Without that, technology will continue to be "inevitable" and continue to "accelerate" and "drive growth" without providing any real benefit for people who use it.As I said, writing about things is easier.