2026-02-18 02:51:00
Hey everyone,
welcome to the Bearblog Creation Festival!
With this, we want to host a space in which you feel inspired to create something for the platform and its users, and we'll gather the links here and do a little roundup after it ends.
Have fun!
2026-02-17 23:20:21
So, I read this post yesterday from sameoldstory basically asking this question:
What is the point of having a low-traffic blog?
I was originally going to write an email to them specifically, but decided why not make a post about it?
I understand their sentiment. Why blog if it's not gonna be seen by a ton of people? If you don't care who sees it, why not just journal? It was the question I asked myself the first time I started doing this almost a year ago.
When I first started blogging, I was in the first stages of shifting to the indie/alt web. I was tired of the black box algorithms, the addictive nature of social media and technology design.
Why don't I post on social media? Their point of posts being seen by hundreds of thousands of eyes is one of the main reasons I don't want to be on social media. When you are visible to THAT many people, you're bound to get some feedback and some toxic feedback at that. People who haven't had a human interaction for probably a week now pushing that problem onto you. I don't want a bunch of people (much of whom might not even be real people) passively engaging with my works. It's too easy to leave a hate comment and walk away in a second. I like blogging because if people want to reach out, they TRULY want to contact you, and you know almost for certain it's a real person.
Because of my low-traffic blog, I've been able to foster a community that I never could have with social media. Social media tends to lead to parasocial relationships, not real ones. I've made real friends because of my blog, this is something that I was never able to with social media.
Social media also doesn't facilitate nuanced or really any thoughtful interactions and posts. Sure you can write a giant ass wall of text underneath your Instagram post, but nobody is going to read that. They'll see the picture, like it, and move on. We live in an age of 6 second attention spans, and social media revolves around that.
When people like my blog, it's because they've made it to the end of the page. When people email me, it's because they've been somehow positively impacted by what I wrote, so much so they opened up a separate tab or window just to reach out. That means a hell of a lot more to me than comments. That's a REAL thoughtful interaction.
It's a quality over quantity approach. I've had more quality interactions thanks to blogging than I ever did with social media. Yeah, it's not as big, but that's what I like about it. The smallness of it. The more close-knit community on this platform. We all know who the popular bloggers are on here, and we can reach out to them usually, and they will likely respond. You can email the guy who made this website, and he will likely respond. There isn't this aura of untouchableness on Bear. It's real people talking to other real people.
I journal, but that's more for my own mundane purposes. Maybe I'll make an "Absurd Pirate's Mundane Blog" that just talks about my boring life rather than trying to "say" something like I do here. Slice of life stuff and all that, but then again that's mostly what I use my microblog for. Sorry, I'm rambling.
I love my blog because it's me, from start to finish. It's my CSS, it's the template I chose, the links link to my other stuff, the art is from my friends. It's a culmination of myself, and unique to me. Social media only gives you a profile picture, a bio, and if you're lucky a banner. It doesn't let you truly express yourself really.
The tl;dr of it all: I love my low-traffic blog because interactions feel more real and I can fully embrace my creative side in it's design
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I just woke up, I took today off because I've been having a really rough day yesterday mentally and need a mental health break. Been kinda struggling dealing with this masquerade with work, and all the time it takes away from me. I hate the meetings that seemingly spend half the time trying to justify their own existence for the sake of having them. I'm tired of these out-of-touch boomers at the top and the nepo-babies dictating where I do my work. It's obvious they care more about control than they do the well-being of the people that work there. When I was dealing with the trauma of escaping that shooting, my options were "get over it" or take unpaid leave (functionally removing any income from my house). My medical marijuana card came in clutch for that... This is America and all that.
2026-02-17 20:31:00
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A few days ago, as I was going through my RSS reader's unread posts, one particular post about AI from BearBlog Trending caught my eye because it had an interesting title1. I proceeded to read it. While it started decently, it soon devolved into something that sounded like classical AI-bro propaganda: AI will free us from the boring and hard stuff and will bring us to an epoch of prosperity never seen before. At the end of the post was an Elon Musk quote.
Sigh...
I didn't want to jump to conclusions too fast and went to read more from that blog. I didn't make it very far, as the second post was an ode to X, Grok, and Musk. The tone of the post was kind of like an AI-written text, but I'm not sure about that. What struck me even more was that the post had a considerable number of likes, more than I usually see on posts by some established Bear bloggers. Instinctively, when something online contradicts my expectations or views, my reaction was to think, "These must be likes by bots."
But what if people-and not a small number like I thought-still like people like Musk, Thiel, or Bezos? What if, despite everything abhorrent the majority of these ultra-rich have done to our society in the last decades, the average Joe still finds them cool, trustworthy, and worth looking up to? How could one still harbor such feelings toward such devilish people?
This encounter was another reminder that I'm probably too deep in my own idea bubble, and the worst part is that I don't seem to be able to want to see the other side, either.
You can reach out by sending me an email.
I won't link it in my post, but if you were reading the BearBlog Trending these past days, you probably saw it too.↩
2026-02-17 15:17:00
Before short form content and social media really took ahold of my brain, I was a fairly avid reddit lurker. To be honest - I still somewhat am.
The self organization of a subreddit being focused on (mostly) one topic and groups of people discussing said topic was a good system for browsing, researching, and digging into certain things, although that may be a slight bit of nostalgia talking. Even then, the so called 'circlejerk' was definitely visible on most larger subreddits. But I really enjoyed the smaller subreddits, subreddits that felt somewhat isolated to the normal trends passing through the larger ones.
Without sounding elitist, the smaller subreddits felt more like a community; on the right subreddit, you had posters with their own individual styles that you could recognize if you lurked enough, and there were metas about what was funny, what was acceptable and inside jokes. My school had an active subreddit that was uniquely shitposting based.
I can't put a finger on when exactly a shift happened. Maybe it's been a slow and steady decline in general.
At some point reddit became more of a mainstream website, and started becoming more of a social media. "Reddit wide" movements became a thing with the ellen pao and net neutrality posts, and more cross-reddit posts became a thing. Then someone figured out reddit was a fantastic place for political rally posting1 as well as financial shilling2. Then the pandemic rolled around, traffic spiked, and GPT was released.
While the other problems were preexisting, AI slop has truly been a death knell. Not only are there constant ChatGPT'd posts (which optimistically you can consider as letting non english speakers join in on discussions and pessimistically consider as completely fraudulent posting), but posts in 'drama' subs like /r/AITA are fed into short video generators (usually with some minecraft or subway surfers in the background) to be churned out for ad revenue. In fact, reddit is both profiting from bulk selling posts to labs as training data3 while serving generated content back. Model collapse, anyone?
This isn't to say that any of these problems (sans AI) weren't a problem before; in fact, reddit was never that original of a platform (hence it being an aggregator). But with them came the death of the small subreddit. Subreddits that are small and human are now a rarity, usually legacy subs that had a relatively structured history.
You could honestly type in any word into the search bar these days and get either a) a sub with 500k+ b) an AI astroturfing subreddit c) porn of some kind. There's no longer many public square type communities - many have migrated to discord4 or isolated forums.
Which is not to say that's a bad thing. Perhaps this is just the natural order of any social media website. Facebook saw similar declines, and even then a bedrock of boomers still use it as their mainstay. I just miss the platform of small communities, and I guess I'm tired of swapping platforms. Maybe you can't really recreate the magic of anonymous internet communities in the new era of the internet.
I still can't believe the_donald started on reddit↩
the robinhood/gme saga has ruined financial discourse for all eternity↩
https://www.wired.com/story/reddits-sale-user-data-ai-training-draws-ftc-investigation/↩
which is the worst form of maintaining data and discussion since chats were not meant for such↩
2026-02-17 05:29:35
Here at Bear, we do a lot of responding to other people's posts, so here's one from me: the point of my low traffic blog is just because I enjoy writing it. That's really it. Honestly.
I enjoy doing it.
If people come around and read it, that's great! I hope you enjoy poking around my site. Explore! Go find some old things to read, you'll probably enjoy those, too.
If you don't enjoy it, that's cool. There's literally a million other websites out there. I'm sure you'll find something to tickle your fancy. Godspeed, friend.
If a thousand people look at my blog, I'll keep writing it. If nobody does, I'll keep on doing it anyway, because it's fun to do. Also, I know a few of you like coming around here, because you've emailed me and told me so. You know who you are. Look at me waving at you! Hi, friends!
So there you have it: the point of doing it is just to do it. I'm not selling anything, I'm not trying to push a world view. I'm just here for the fun of it.
Thanks for reading.
I appreciate you.
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2026-02-17 03:00:00
Every now and then, I'll be exposed to a world I have otherwise nothing to do with: Child surveillance.
What I see is infuriating.
Not only are children nowadays pressured by their parents to turn location services on their devices on, but the parents also set up notifications for when the child arrives and leaves a place and alerts for when they stray from the path. They also get weekly, if not daily updates about what their child did at school via an app or a message by the teacher directly.
This is nuts! This is not normal. This is not how I grew up and this is not how those parents have grown up either. They know it is absolutely possible to do without, just like it has always been pre-2015, but they choose this. Parents' paranoia is allowed to completely overrule the child's own right to privacy, completely unchecked. Emotions run high with anything child-related, so anything goes that could potentially even help the safety of a child a little. The trade-offs are ignored.
A newsletter I subscribe to (Dense Discovery) has a section advertising apps and services, and in a recent one, I was shocked to see that they would advertise what's probably the worst child surveillance tech I have seen in a while:
"Bark is a parental control system that uses AI to scan texts, social media, images and videos across 30+ apps. It offers an app for existing devices (iPhone & Android) but also, it seems, custom hardware. The goal is to alert parents of potential dangers like bullying, self-harm content or predatory behaviour. It outsources parental vigilance to an algorithm, which is either reassuring or deeply unsettling depending on your stance on digital surveillance and trust. (Looks like it’s currently only available in the US, South Africa and Australia.)"
This isn't quirky or an issue to be neutral about; this is completely dystopian, and I'd expect more people to be deeply uncomfortable with this shit and resisting it, child or not. What exactly is "reassuring" about any of this? You are way too comfortable making money off of advertising the complete dehumanization of children.
You are treating them worse than prisoners, in ways you would never ever accept, in ways that wasn't even possible yet when you were a child!
You know what also counts as "child protection"? ==Protecting their human rights==.
"Everyone has the right to respect for his or her private and family life, home and communications."
"1. Everyone has the right to the protection of personal data concerning him or her."
2. Such data must be processed fairly for specified purposes and on the basis of the consent of the person concerned or some other legitimate basis laid down by law. Everyone has the right of access to data which has been collected concerning him or her, and the right to have it rectified.
in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, Article 7 and 8.
"1. Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence.
in the European Convention on Human Rights, Article 8.
"No one shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to unlawful attacks on his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks."
in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Article 17.
And very similarly:
"No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with their privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honor and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks."
in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 12.
These are not exclusively about protecting people from the state, but having privacy in general.
There are also the constitutional rights, whose wording depends on where you live. It is likely not mentioned explicitly in there, but inferred.
In Germany, for example, the right to informational self-determination (control over your data + privacy) is inferred from the general right of personality and privacy from Article 2(1) in connection to Article 1(1) Grundgesetz (GG).
"(1) Human dignity shall be inviolable. To respect and protect it shall be the duty of all state authority."
"(1) Every person shall have the right to free development of his personality insofar as he does not violate the rights of others or offend against the constitutional order or the moral law."
People do not just begin to be people with rights when they reach adulthood. We should act accordingly.
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