Today in Websites

Well we finally know what happened to Kate Middleton and it’s cancer. I hope I speak for every delulu-ass rabbit hole dwelling conspiracy lunatic when I say first: this is not what we were hoping for, and second: we were right. They were, in fact, hiding something and this should go down as a case study in the worst possible way to manage health news about a public figure. It really makes the whole “blaming her for the bad photoshop” episode hit different, huh? Anyway stay tuned next week for a flood of think pieces on What All The Conspiracy Theories Mean.

The dwindling remnants of G/O Media are also suffering from a cancer named Jim Spanfeller. It boggles the mind that one person could be this consistently bad at running websites, but the notorious herb has now set his sights on Kotaku, demanding that the site’s gaming journalists turn instead to producing game guides at a ludicrous rate of fifty a week. Even the gamergate alumni anime avatar Kotaku-haters on Twitter are like “damn, that sucks.” I think you could grab anyone off the street anywhere in the world and they would be better at running websites than Jim Spanfeller. In a way, I guess that makes him the greatest at being the worst to ever do it.

But yesterday reminded me how much there is to love about the whole idea of websites—the infinite promise that you can register a URL, put some text in a document, and anyone can find it and read it. Before there were “Platforms,” the platform was everywhere, nobody owned it, and everyone was already on it.

If the Discord gang is any indication, this newsletter’s readership is packed with website sickos, so let’s talk about websites.

You should take that in any way that you feel moved to. Some questions I have include, but are not limited to: what’s the first website you remember? What was the first website you visited repeatedly? What websites are indispensable to you now? If you ever made websites yourself, what were they about? How did it go? Do you still make websites? If not, why not? If so, what are your current best tools and practices? What kind of website do you wish you could find today? What website questions do you have for everyone else?

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