Online Hoarder
I’m a hoarder, an online hoarder, An e-Hoarder if you will; I stack piles and piles of hyperlinks, ideas and bytes like a squirrel stacks chestnuts, but for a winter that never comes. Because the internet, it never runs out of nuts, I mean, information.
The good
It all started when I first installed Instagram (Fuck instagram)… wait no, it was before. Since I was little I’ve had somewhat of an inclination towards accumulating stuff, and notebooks have been one of the most constant in this. I used to carry a small notebook with me when i was in highschool, and I would write small morsels of thoughts and ideas into them, i didn’t care if they where useful or not, I’d just put them there, drawings, single words that interested me, reflections about myself, others, the world, crammed haphazardly into those small pages (for real, i put them anywhere on the page with minuscule callygraphy and made little boxes that separated each idea, the end result was always unreadable), and for some reason I fucking Loved it, I liked going back and reading / seeing stuff that had occured me on a daydreaming session at 11:23 in in a math class, and seeing some of it be so nonsensical it was funny, and some of it leaving me thinking, almost something great.
Time went by and now I’ve transitioned to phone notes, which are much less Romantic but much more reliable, and having them synchronized (google keep) with my PC, laptop and phone has proven super useful for organizing myself, this shit is the glue that holds my life together. Tasks, shopping lists, blog stuff (which I then proceed to not write / finish), stuff to do with friends, conversations to have, gift ideas, general brain dumps and ideas, projects, random temporal notes…
Of course, these notes are less flexible than the notebooks in some senses, like no easy drawing / diagramming (which is something i used quite a lot in notebooks) plus the fact that you have to depend on your phone which is an annoyance by itself, plus the fact you are probably being robbed of your data each time the autosync polls (again, google keep).
But the persistence, oh the persistence. And the sync… Losing one of the notebooks was always a fear I had, which disappears with online notes. Some part of me dreams of making a crazy good OCR model finetuned to my awful handwriting /w multimodal symbolic reasoning to catch the structure of the pages and the diagrams and drawings… or just scanning it (boring aah) but honestly I don’t think I’ll come around to doing that any time soon.
All of this does pose the question: why do I value some of my thoughts so much, enough to keep them, store them and review them? Honestly I don’t have a good answer, it’s something instinctive that I’ve always done. I think in some sense, I view ideas (mine, and other people’s) as sort of tools, almost with physical connotations, that we can reach for / carry when needed, to help us better process, reason about, and understand the world. I plan on writing about this idea of ideas as technology sometime soon (hopefully), so stay tuned.
The bad
Anyways, that’s one way of e-hoarding. It’s not so bad though, I think It’s actually good and helpful, although I do still keep random useless thoughts now and again. But I do e-hoard in more ways, which are in fact not so good:
Notion bookmarks
I feel inclined to put them here ‘cause the amount I’m accumulating is getting worrying… These are the most useful / insightful set of digital knick-knacks I own (not counting the notes). My notion online repo basically consists of a set of hierarchically organized bookmarks of different links, mostly articles / readings / papers / blogposts / github repos I didn't deem starrable / cool internet Places… Basically a needlestack of stuff. Also it’s mostly sorted into categories like AI, maths, OS stuff, read and unread articles or books…
Firefox markers / Pocket (rip)
I don’t even have so many here, historically I had lots in Pocket which has Died, so I’m just including them to remember all links that were forever lost, i won’t ever forget you… As for markers, I used to have lots, but now only a few for the right stuff.
Youtube watch-laters / playlists:
Let me tell you, I’ve watched A Lot of youtube. Like, a shitload of it. I have learned a lot in it, it also made me a Very Confused Teenager (information overload, choice overload) and probably has contributed to my myopia to some non-trivial degree.
Although there are some very good pieces of art / information, lectures and just overall legendary internet videos, watch-later videos are mostly made up of stuff you saw the thumbnail and title of and thought: nice, I'll save this, it will be useful / interesting. Your decision of saving it makes it more important and more likely for you to see it than some other equally engaging video. Problem is, a nice title and thumbnail does not correlate to better quality “content” (hate that word, using it for the sake of generality).
Instagram saves
this is the worst of them all, this is hell, fuck instagram. Not insightful. Not quality. Incites comparison. Highest category variance by far, which makes the overload greater. I swear the only thing I’ve gotten out of the insta saves have been cooking recipes, that i must concede. The rest, I'll never use. Time lost.
I just overall dislike this platform a lot, and I hoarded here like a dragon in his cave for the time I used it, not getting anything in return, in fact getting my Attention taken away purposefully and by design by the leeches that engineered this piece of shit engagement-boosting, save-inciting, shitty-art-curation-account-promoting, community-destroying platform.
So why do I do this? What sick impulse drives me to catalog all that catches my attention on the internet? This can’t be Good…
The ugly
If you are (like I consider myself to be) an observant little fella, you might’ve noticed I’ve been using the terms Good and Bad pretty loosely to describe this notion of e-hoarding. I guess the best way to define Good is by defining what i consider problematic about this e-hoarding behaviour:
Although it might seem the opposite, stockpiling links leads (for me at least) to a higher cognitive load. I store all of this with the intent on using it later (usually reading it later), which leaves me with the constant feel that i need to advance on it, and the pace at which i can advance on it is always less than the pace at which i can ingest it, so it always feels out of reach. Of course, this is less load than just having the stuff open on the browser forever, but it’s still a problem.
The searchability / reusability of the hoarded links is not always easy, so even if i saved them for future use / consultation, it’s not always possible since it often times is hard to find something amidst the chaos (even with the thematic separations) just because of the sheer volume of stuff.
Quality not assured: like the reasoning before about the youtube videos, I might save something after a title read or just shallow skimming of the text, which does not give a good indicator of quality or insightfulness.
Choice overload: choosing among more options leads to lower satisfaction with the choice. Quoting this article of The Decision Lab:
“The more options we have to choose from, the more confident we are about identifying exactly what we are looking for. Because of this, our expectations are set higher than they would have been if given fewer options.”
Digital decluttering (which now that i write it sounds like some fucking horrible linkedin term) is something I try to keep controlled (no million-tab-windows and PC always in suspension, i need less distractions), maybe that’s why I so obsessively hoard and classify trinkets and baubles in my e-trove, it gives me a sense of order, but in reality it’s not good. The thing is, this does not help fulfill that objective.
This one bums me the most, I think: too much consuming takes away from creating. The time I have is limited, and I want to be able to learn and read the stuff I see around on the internet, as well as creating some meaningful output from it. Not just lurking, actually synthesizing what I input and giving back either for me or for someone else. Too much information-absorbing and too little creation leads me into a state of saturation, but the thing is that the former is much easier than the latter, so an effort must be made to achieve an equilibrium.
There’s a bunch more lenses from which to see this:
- an information overload problem
- a fomo problem (after all, there would be no e-hoarding if there was no need to preserve links, which would mean there’s no problem loosing them a.k.a missing them)…
But I won’t get into those since it would be too long.
So this is the Bad. The good is more understandable now since it is the negation of the recently described problems. Good is higher signal-to-noise ratio (both on choices and in quality), convenience of reusability, lower cognitive load, equilibrium between creation and consumption, and so on.
Ok, so what?
By now I’m getting tired of writing this, so here’s the bottom line: I want to cut back on this e-hoarding thing and solve the problems I just described as Bad.
For this i need some specific plans to carry with consistency, not intensity:
Start writing more: not needed to be long form essays, short stuff like this works, to get thoughts out and practice. Publicness, like in this blog, adds accountability to the process.
Consume with care: set a max and a min things / articles per day / per platform and stick to that, ideally at consistent hours. Books / ebooks are exempt from this.
Somehow set a priority queue and don’t let in new stuff until it is emptied. This would mean setting the priorities though, which is tough.
Letting more things go: Why can’t I just forget the links and instead feel the need to save them? Actually, no reason, not every link lost is a missed opportunity, life goes on. This is probably the most urgent thing to do.
Or binging obsessively for a few days to get stuff out. Nah just jokin.
For the hoarding of ideas (not the readings or links), create some sort of search / retrieval system to solve the chaos of finding something related to a concept. This is just an idea though.
For now I’ll leave it here. I’ll check on this post in some time and see how the issue evolved, having now these guidelines. Thanks for reading!