has anyone noticed that a lot of these posts are trending toward the unhinge? Has anyone noticed that many of the media we consume now seems to trend towards the unhinged?
Sanity Media began this trend early on! We are the pioneers of unhinged. If you are interested in posting unhinged media, Sanity Media is the place to do it
Why I started Sanity Media
If you have watched The Social Dilemma, read Stolen Focus or Hooked you probably already know that present-day social media is designed to be addictive. The more time you spend online, the more money social media companies make.
You may also be aware of how social media algorithms can inadvertently create echo chambers, where people are only exposed to views they already agree with. This leads to increased polarization and political extremism.
I’m trying to build a service that's more down to earth. A place where you can log in, read some news or stories that interest you, and then forget about it until the next day. No infinite scrolls, no constant streams of notifications, and no incentive to keep checking the site throughout the day. While it might be a hard task to remove echo chambers altogether, I hope can at least limit them.
How Sanity works
Here are the main features in a nutshell:
One of the fastest ways I can attract the first users to Sanity and start getting feedback is by posting about it and engaging on Facebook and Twitter. The thing is, I find them too addictive and full of dark patterns, which is why started Sanity in the first place. I always tell myself I’ll only use them for a specific purpose, or for 15 minutes a day, or only occasionally, and then I gradually get sucked into using them all the time. I start out by visiting once every few days, I check for new posts from a few people I follow, read some AI news, visit groups etc. With time, I find myself using them more and more until several weeks later, I check them throughout the day. This is more of a problem for me with Twitter but, to a lesser extent, also applies to Facebook.
So the question is - how to I get the word out about Sanity without using the addictive social media networks it’s meant to be the alternative to?
I'm focusing on writing content and optimizing SEO for now but it's a slow process. Any tips?
You can now comment on other posts on Sanity. And you can comment on other people's comments. It's not perfect yet and I'll be making UX improvements here and there over the coming weeks but the essentials are there.
You can leave up to 5 comments a day, so make them count!
#The unhinged series is my favorite series
So one of my favorite youtubers has begun an uncringed series and I fucking love it. I am a glutton for punishment and I love/hate a good cringe and boy does it deliver.
check out this video of this dude at a gym trying to pick up a lady, it's so horrifyingly cringy and just awful at every turn. You'll struggle legitimately to watch it without having to pause so I am so glad in this video we can go back to Charlie's comments every once in awhile. Otherwise I would've just straight up died.
Also why are all the creeps at the gym? Bruh, people go there to work out not socialize and somehow ALL the creeps end up there!?
Also it's always middle aged dudes, wtf is happening with human men, there is a midlife crisis pandemic, and I think that #WHO should look into this before people get hurt (if they haven't already)
We've just finished comments and added some UI/UX improvements to the site, making posts easier to read and the website, I hope, prettier and more aesthetically pleasing. What should we focus on next?
I think notifications would be useful, so that you can see when someone comments or upvotes your posts. This would be limited to a single notification sent once a day that contains a summary of everything relevant that happened.
Anything else that you think Sanity is missing or could do better? Let me know in the comments 💬
The slow descent into postdoctoral madness
If you wont read any more posts or comments from me, youll realize that my descent into madness was a swift one. Im a last years phd student (in fact 6 months to go and 3 more months hopefully to write) in biology who is grasping to his last bit of sanity at the moment all the while sailing through the troubled waters commonly referred to as the "terrible last year". With work piling up from the last 2,5 years, multiple projects requiring attention and people expecting me to perform well, there is also a constant dread for my future career so the pressure is coming from the past, present and the future ready to gang up on you any time of the day. A general phd in life sciences (and i dont count medicine because its not a real science, sorry early falcon) includes 3-5 years of laboratory labor, depending where you live and how fucked or blessed you are with your supervisor. After the terrible last year, you are kicked out to write your thesis and depending where you life you can be lucky if youre still hired by then or if they lay you off to write your thesis on welfare (social programs yeeaahh am i right ?) By then you are ready to defend your thesis and earn your well deserved title, unless you have decided to quit at any of those moments, which i have seen people do from first year right up to only having to write everything together. Afriend of mine recommended me to start writing a journal book but im terrible with such things...
You can now tag your posts! This will make it easier for your content to be discovered, both on Sanity and in search engines - a much-needed SEO boost. You can add up to 5 tags per post and the length limit is 35 characters.
A weird thing happened yesterday, Sanity got this surge of traffic from the US:
Google is the only referrer listed but that only explains 20 visitors and is consistent with the traffic Sanity usually gets:
It's almost entirely from users on Mac and Windows devices, all desktop.
I wonder what it could be, any ideas?
My money is on bot traffic, because it looks like multiple pages were each visited once, as opposite to a single page going viral.
I've also sent out a few CVs the other day so maybe it's a company checking out my work?
I updated the layout a bit to make it easier to find replies to your posts and comments. This is not backward-compatible yet, so you are only going to see the posts and replies created from now on. I'll run a database migration some time in the next few days so that older replies also appear there.
