Alvin Chang    Archive    About me

How I learned to enjoy the internet again with Pinboard

Posted: 6/6/2023

Last year I left a career in newsrooms and became a full-time professor. For the fall and spring semesters, I was doing the high-wire act of balancing teaching with several freelancing projects. It was incredibly fulfilling. But it was completely chaotic and no less stressful than working in a newsroom.

Then my first ever summer break hit, and I realized – for the first time in my professional career – I could build the exact morning routine that I want.

My requirements were actually quite simple:

I quickly realized Pinboard could be used for everything I want. It's supposed to be a bookmarking tool, but I've used it as a content-discovery tool. Here's how:

Finding curators

Pinboard allows you to subscribe to other people's bookmarks, so I spent some time searching who bookmarked some of my favorite things on the internet – and then I looked at what else they've bookmarked. I also spent some time going through the "popular" pins and seeing who bookmarked links I'm also interested in. If I liked their taste, I subscribed to them. They know that they are posting public bookmarks, and you can subscribe to their bookmarks anonymously. So I call these people my "curators" even though they have no idea that they are part of my feed.

Here's what is incredible: People only pin things that they want to keep. This keeps the content quality incredibly high. There's so much good stuff on the internet, but I end up only seeing the really good stuff. I also end up seeing stuff I'd never see before, before there is no algorithm at play. It's just a straight, chronological feed of what people bookmark.

And remember, there is no follower count or retweeting or influencing. People bookmark things for themselves, which I find to be the most meaningful stuff. For example, the other day I discovered someone bookmarking links on the concept of kintsugi – "the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mending the areas of breakage with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum." Just beautiful.

Building a reading list

Every morning, I go through the last day of pinned posts. I open up a new tab using Arc, my new favorite browser, and I browser it like I would a magazine on Sunday morning. (I don't actually read magazines on Sunday morning, but I imagine this is how it would feel.)

I occasionally find things to add to my own Pinboard, or sometimes I go down completely random rabbit holes. It's absolutely delightful, and it feeds my curiosity. In just a few weeks, I've learned so much about the most delightful things.

Feeding my projects

What I'm actually looking for is ideas to feed my book project. I spend the rest of the day researching very specific topics, but that means I miss a lot of ideas that bring serendipity to the topic, rather than just sheet breadth and depth. (I suppose "richness" is like the unexpected herb in a savory dish.)

Space to think

Most of the links are what I call "slow" content. It doesn't trigger my fight-or-flight response, which is what working in a newsroom does.

Even if I see the exact same viral news story as everyone else, I encounter it through this quiet feed, rather than a social media machine. I don't know that it's gone viral. I don't know what the online outrage looks like. Instead, it feels like I get to discover it and form my own thoughts around it.

I'm an introvert. I get physically tired being on social media, but it's hard to resist the endorphin boosts that are designed into those systems. Avoiding that drug helps me reserve energy to think.

It's fun

When I co-created The Listserve, our team talked a lot about "corners of the internet." The internet can be a weird place that displays a large breadth of human interests. But the current internet flattens that into either super-popular things or super-personalized things. It feels like going to a new city and taking windowless cabs to only tourist destinations and a curated list of places made by your best friends. That means you miss everything that you'd see walking around, getting lost, exploring a weird-looking building or a colorful shop. When I first experienced the internet (AOL Online!), the idea that I could go anywhere and see anything on the internet was incredible. This is the first time I feel it coming back!