Yeah, that would tick me off too. I can already make my own graphics myself, so if that’s what somebody wanted, they could just ask, rather than run my creations under the mush dispenser. Disappointed to see they’ve already got @brennan on there.
Earlier in the thread@ribose remarked on the same thing. I appreciate you pointing it out again, though. Good to have it on record that this keeps happening.
Yeah I think perhaps this project goes to show that when you start with this initial pool of blogs and hand an upvote system to indie web fediverse types, you need more than mere intentions to prevent “non-tech content” from being drowned out.
Oh hey. I didn’t know you were on here.
I’m glad to hear that Bubbles was helpful to you. I hope it may also be helpful to hear that you have many more options than just Bubbles. There’s a list of various options maintained on the indie web wiki under the heading of Discovery. Personally my go-to suggestion for newbies is Bukmark Club, which is a directory of personal sites with links pages, but there’s also stuff like @enocc’s powRSS aggregator, @nim’s topic-based Octothorpes, Early Web Links, Quiet Portal, Marginalia, and more, not to mention the monthly blogpost threads here on the 32-Bit Cafe. I would also like to see more linking in general as a way to help others follow the thread of a conversation and discover new things.
You can interpret the votes however you want, but the site itself is telling you to view them as a competition. The site slogan is “Good stuff bubbles up.” The About page promises a “collective signal telling you what’s worth reading” and states that “You vote on the posts worth reading. The good stuff floats to the top. Everything else sinks over time.” With statements like these the project is directly equating votes with a measure of quality.
I unfortunately think the situation is going to get worse before it gets better, given that AI-generated/assisted RSS aggregators and readers are on the rise.
As pleased as I am to see a general revived interest in RSS, I really wish more care would be taken by developers who build new platforms out of existing RSS feeds – especially those who rely on generative AI to build their platforms. I’m old enough to remember the drama that went along with people truncating their RSS feeds circa the early 2010s in response to aggregators that were basically trying to steal and profit off of full text RSS feeds… Opt-out RSS platforms built in ways people find objectionable risk creating similar backlash.
Slight tangent here unrelated to Bubbles, but I’ve spoken previously about my annoyance with the Blogs Are Back aggregator. Back when I still used to have an RSS feed, the Blogs Are Back user agent would request my feed thousands of times from two IP separate addresses in the first few minutes after I posted anything new. What an unnecessary waste of resources! I don’t know if the aggregator itself is vibe coded or not, but given that the website’s front-end bears all the hallmark signs of Claude’s house style (see the “On AI” header), I wouldn’t be at all surprised.
I get it that it’s courteous to offer an RSS feed to visitors, but I shouldn’t have to worry about being unwittingly added to third party RSS aggregators that: (a) feed my website to Claude or some other LLM to categorize my writing or generate summaries of my writing; (b) use an awful slop logo to represent my site when I’m fully capable of designing logos myself; (c) unnecessarily waste resources by requesting my feed an extraordinary number of times; and (d) enter me into a popularity contest where readers vote on whether what I’ve written is “worth reading” when I have no interest in any of that.
To be clear, I don’t have issues with all RSS aggregators. I really love powRSS, for instance! Opt-in, no slop, no social media elements… powRSS is a perfect example of how to get RSS aggregators right.
I think in creating anything online, you have to weigh the costs and consequences. I’ve seen people have their homepage be blank or poisoned and there’s a semi-cryptic message to get to the actual contents of their site to avoid being scraped, I’ve seen people put hidden text in their headers or footer trying to nullify genAI scrapers like a good luck pendant, etc.
To me, I am just very apathetic to what people (and genAI) do with my work. I can only control my website itself, the rest of the world wide web is not in my control at all and I’ve made peace with that, that’s why my blog is on that silly genAI aggregator you linked. I’d much rather my work be stolen than collect dust, and I’d rather focus on writing and coding for good-faith humans than take the time to fight bad-faith actors.
Also, the “house style” of Claude is so broad! I hope no handmade websites get dismissed because of it. Like with writing, genAI “tells” are there because they are so often used by humans. I’d rather trust people are making their work than be paranoid that they aren’t.
That’s totally fair! I suspect we all feel a little differently about what ultimately ends up happening to the words we add to our websites. This is why I feel like the most courteous thing to do when adding other people’s work to a third party platform (like Bubbles) is to respect that some people might not actually want that sort of attention.
Opt-in aggregators give bloggers the option to refuse inclusion at baseline; opt-out aggregators rely on bloggers being aware that their blog has been added to said aggregator before giving them the option of refusal. Sure, you can proactively block the Bubbles user agent if you want to … but you have to be aware of it in the first place and dig through the FAQ to find it before you can block it! People who aren’t on Mastodon or who don’t use forums like this one might not even know Bubbles exists, especially if they don’t look at their logs (or if they physically can’t). They might have no idea that people outside of their own circles are rating their posts as “worth reading” (or not) or complaining that their post titles aren’t descriptive enough to stand out among other posts in the Bubbles feed.
I think that brings us back to @Coyote’s original point: “Not every blogger is necessarily expecting all their posts to get automatically broadcast to an aggregator, let alone writing with that broadened audience in mind. […] I’m inclined to point out that Bubbles is recontextualizing people’s posts as part of a competition that not all of them necessarily asked for.”
Honestly, I was just excited that I got to be used as an example!
Thank you so much for sharing all those different resources. Now that the day job has settled down again, the plan is to dive into each of them an absorb what I can.
I’m so confused. I used the search bar at the bottom to look up my blog, just out of curiosity. Two of my posts were linked on there. Clicking my blog’s title or using the URL search bar didn’t show my blog at all.
I’m fine with not being on there and it’s probably a good thing but I’m so confused about what went on there!
@Coyote thanks for the Octothorpes mention. I’m a little late to this conversation but really appreciate hearing everyone’s perspectives as someone building something that can function as an aggregator. Our whole point is to support human-scale use of the web, so we’re trying not to do the things that are bugging people about Bubbles.town. Our scraping policies are: only look at urls the owner sends to the server (or explicitly agrees to have scraped), only scrape once every 5 minutes, only display information from the site (ie no “run through an LLM to tag it”), only store metadata, not content. Besides that, what would help retain trust that a service using Octothorpes isn’t abusing access to your sites?
See also further discussion with @Grubdogin the comments. We’re wondering how many people do or don’t share Ben’s experience of RSS feeds not showing you new voices.
I agree with the fundamental premise of the problematic aspects of aggregates, but there is quite a bit in terms of specifics I disagree with.
Bubbles is still relatively new, and I think that’s a large reason for a lot of posts about the platform, it’s not dissimilar to Bear’s discover feed having posts about Bearblog. But that said, I see a wide variety of topics on Bubbles, including the ones you specifically reference in your post. I think it is a little cynical to assume that people (specifically people who use Bubbles) wouldn’t be interested in niche specific things. If anything, Bubbles has widened and diversified the kind of blogs I look at and what I read on a daily basis specifically because there are many blogs that I wouldn’t have added myself to my RSS feed.
In regards to anxiety and competition, I feel as though that is more indicative of the specific blogger than the platform. Metrics exist, you can track your site’s traffic, does it matter? Do the upvotes on Bubbles matter, or the gained visibility? To some people, yes, but if that added dimension is an issue, you can email the guy running it, Ben, and ask for your blog to be removed.
It’s annoying and frustrating (unethical, even) that the process is opt-out and not opt-in, but Ben has gotten back to me the same day each time I talked to him. Bubbles is not Facebook or Reddit, there is not an immutable fixed corporate quality to it.
I completely agree about your points on other directories and tools that should be more utilized, and that people should link to each other more, but I don’t think this is an either/or situation.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that the criticisms are valid, but I think using Bubbles and upvoting what you want to see and positively engaging with it is the answer to mitigate the negative aspects of it. I still think it does more good than harm for the blogosphere.
Whether or not you see a variety of topics on there isn’t what’s in question, nor is whether or not people have niche interests. This is what’s in question:
Bear in mind, dear reader, I am not asking if you have an interest in these topics. The question here is whether or not the degree of interest in each topic is perfectly equivalent and evenly distributed across the voter base as a whole. If it is not—if in fact some topics are more popular than others—then that necessarily entails that some topics will have a competitive advantage over others, which means that we can expect some patterns to emerge.
You could disagree with me by arguing that a pattern has not emerged, or you could disagree with me by saying that my explanation for the pattern doesn’t explain it.
If all you’re saying is that some Bubbles readers are into gardening and incense, then that’s consistent with what I’ve said.
Great post, resonates with the instinctive ick I have about Bubbles and its popularity-based system (which imo is antithetical to the concept of using the web as a hobby space). I’ve had to ask for my site to be removed twice because it somehow ended up there again after the first time but to his credit, Ben was very apologetic the second time I asked.
I would definitely say that I use blogs I’m subscribed to to find other blogs, although I feel like I’m not always great at linking to other people’s posts from my own. This is probably because I tend to jot down a very vague idea for a post semi-based on something I’ve seen elsewhere, but not come back to finish it until weeks later by which time I’ve forgotten the sources that actually inspired it.
I’m not really a fan of button walls though; I prefer links to be a bit more contextualised so I have some information on why I should click through to the site (or better still, a specific post from which I can then explore the rest of the site at leisure).
Haha, I would 100% take floundering in obscurity over the upvote system, but I suppose that just demonstrates that different people running independent sites want different things out of it!
obviously we can all have our different, equally valid reasons for doing the same things, but for me the indie web has appeal to me over social media specifically because the lack of algorithms means the content isn’t trying to “game” any algorithms. It means influencers and advertisers are mostly gone, since their incentives align more with social media. And it creates an environment where we can unlearn the harmful ideas that normalized optimizing for views. Basically, I’m here because the internet is otherwise too big and I want somerhing human scale, where the internet isn’t fuli of strangers.
I feel like testing out new aggregation solutions on the indie web is worthwhile, like blog content searches and keyword-based aggregation and such. Not everything has to be purist human linking (though human linking is great too.) And I think upvote systems have some value in constrained contexts. But bubbles was kinda doomed to take a certain shape if that became the main mechanism of curation.
but to his credit, Ben was very apologetic the second time I asked.