Smarter Every Day Neopoligen Pitch

Transcript

Hey Destin,

I'm Alan, and this is a pitch for a collaboration.

I've been working for the past two years on a free, open-source app to build personal websites. My pitch is to collaborate on a Smarter Every Day video that looks at the app and uses it as a foundation to talk about how social media companies work. And, frankly, how toxic they are.

It would also talk about how the internet and websites work from a technical perspective. Discussing what it means when we talk about "servers". How HTML works and, even better, how approachable it is.

I started college at the dawn of the web and will always have fond memories of those times.

Possible Topics

- What's HTML - The raw material that web pages are built off of

- Making a HTML page on your computer by just opening a file named hello-world.html and typing <h1>Hello, World</h1> in it

- What's CSS - The tools for styling and layouts

- What's JavaScript - Making the page do things. Clicking buttons to make a counter example. Color slider example

- What's a website? - A collection of web pages

- What's a web page? - It's an HTML file that you load into a browser

- How do you get the pages? That's where servers come in

- Your computer can be a web server for itself

- A tour of Neopoligen

- Making a site

- Making pages

- Playing with your own HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in templates

- How social media networks work

- Social media site lockin since you can't move your stuff

- Owning your content instead of putting it on a social media site

- How algorithms work on social meida sites for engagement and how they aren't trying to give you what's best for you they're trying to get you to spend as much time on them as possible to play more ads which is how they make money

- In the business world, "If you're not paying for it, you're the product"

- In the open source world, "If you're not paying for it, that's because other folks are dedicating their own time and money to it to make the world a better place"

- How tracking works. Show the "We and our 756 partners store and/or access information on a devicce" unnder "we care about yoru privacy" on Spotify screenshot from 2024-04-21

- Being constrained by the tools. E.g. you can only post in certain styles on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter/X

- How databases constrian what you do. How free form creation on the web is super powerful

- Anything anybody in the world has ever done on a web page, you can do on your site too since you have control.

- The importance and impact of results

- How the online ad industry works

- Tracking

- Privacy

- Moderation and censorship

- Copyright and fair use

- CDNs

- Network Effect/Lockin

- First Mover Advantage

- 80/20 principal

- How Algorithms work and don't work in our favor. How they start off good for us and then go bad

- Open source software

- Avoiding venture capital and explicilty making it not a business.

- Proving a tool.

- Talk about how lots of folks of a certain age got their start playing around with MySpace. This has a similar vibe. (We've lost the spaces where we can play. It used to be striaght HTML which you, then MySpace but the supported, easy to get started playes are fewer and farther between. (todo, check out itch.io or whatever it's called)

- Talk about the abstration to HTML, but how you can still get to the HTML. It's like being able to repair your own car. (or make your own legos)

- Theming

- How you don't have to do anything other than make content, but you can dig into themes as well. (or just CSS for styles)

- The front end vs the command line.

- Plans to build in an editor.

- Errors are important.

- The preview server with error messages and status

- working locally

- Everything is just text files. Eventually, folks will make "GUIs" for it, but it probably won't be me (I've got too many other things to do first, but that's the beautty of an open format, anyone can do it.

- There's no database. It's just files, but on of the biggest things I've realized is how constraining a database is. Companies need to squeese things into something they can parse and process and datamine. This is way more sloppy. It lets us draw outside the lines. Or, really, even better, define our own lines.