howdidyoufind.me

a website about how people found this website

Sep 24, 2024

I made a new weird website, a website that tells the story of how people found it. By definition, since you’re some of the first people I’m sharing this with, it’s pretty sparse right now. So please visit and add to it.

howdidyoufind.me

This is the website’s invitation:

If this website was tracking you (it isn’t), it would purport to tell me where you came from, or more specifically, the last website you were on before you were here. But trackers only tell the story of the last mile of travel: a bit like saying that a handmade quilt you ordered online came from FedEx.
This website wants to tell a different story, a deeper story. How did you come to find yourself here? If you clicked on a Facebook link, what prompted you to click? If it was shared by a friend, how did you meet that friend? If you were searching Google, what were hoping to find? Why did you decide to check your email at the moment that you did? What did an algorithm see in you when it chose to place this in your newsfeed? When did you come to follow the account whose post caught your eye? Who were you trying to flirt with when you first downloaded that messaging app? If you could trace back the chain of circumstances and relationships that brought you here, to the paragraph you are reading right now, what story — short and simple, or long and winding — would you choose to tell?

Visit howdidyoufind.me

Once you visit, share to become part of someone else’s journey.

🐌 Snail mail

Replies from readers

Celine Nguyen

had this to say about befriending neighbors and beneighboring friends:

I’ve started to feel that everyone I know with a satisfying social life puts a LOT of energy into reaching out, planning events, trying intentionally to incorporate other people into their lives—and it seems especially important to have that intentionality as people couple up, have kids, &c. for me and my girlfriend, it’s especially important to have a life that is not purely based around the very normative heterosexual nuclear family setup, but one where other people are near-family and are very much present in everyday life! so I’m fascinated especially by multi-family setups and people choosing to live with close friends as well, not just a partner + kids

☣️ Algorithmic detritus

Side effects of a world driven by software logic

Sami Reiss

on why people are committing crimes against midcentury homes:

Aesthetically it creates a cycle of uniformity. With the “right” furniture, a home sells for more money. And selling a home is the only real way to make money. Homes are investments, homes stay staged—in the photos we see—and seem to eternally be for sale. And so taste, downstream, has oozed and devolved to a reality in which many think staging furniture is actual furniture. And while there is better furniture out there, definitely, buying it signifies, to me anyways, that you are living in your home and not flipping it.

M. E. Rothwell

argues that our subservience to the Cloud is a full-circle moment:

We spend every waking moment shoveling packets of data, an endless stream of zeros and ones, up into the sky. Our messages to friends and family? To the CLOUD. Our work emails? To the CLOUD. Our GPS data, willingly given and tracking our every movement? To the CLOUD. Our money — and I mean real, fiat money, not the cryptobro’s wet dream? It’s in the CLOUD. Our photos and TV shows and biometric data and news and banking and memories and the curated exhibitions of our boring lives — all are offered up to the CLOUD. It is He, *Dyēus Himself. He has returned.

🏃 Escape attempts

Acts of algorithmic resistance

Traffic Cam Photobooth is a website that allows anybody to locate their nearest publicly available traffic camera and use it to take pictures of themselves.

The pleasure gallery is an archive of sexts sent and received by a group of friends.

Survival printouts are at-risk materials printed from the internet for safekeeping (by

Paul Soulellis

A delightful story about hijackers of One Million Checkboxes.

How to monetize a blog shows and tells the absurd incentives of web advertising.

Greenwich lets anyone discover and contribute related links for any webpage.

Every Outdoor Basketball Court in the U.S.A. is documenting the stories behind 59,507 courts using satellite imagery.