Welcome to my Linkblog where I share interesting articles and blog posts I found about social media, Indieweb, geopolitics, Chinese and Malaysian stuff, cute cat videos or anything funny and interesting I find online.

FYI: I also share links in the “Weekend Tales” of my Substack newsletter, Tai Tales. The newsletter is geared towards Chinese and Malaysian culture.

Being on the Internet

How to Surf the Web in 2025, and Why You Should

David’s article really resonated with me because I’ve been thinking for a long while now to create a newsletter (or three) to surface barely heard voices.

On Substack, for example, the voices I hear are overwhelmingly from the United States, and it is incredibly hard to find voices from Asia and South-East Asia. It’s a source of huge frustration for me because the most common narratives about my part of the world is from the United States, and a lot of times these narratives are distorted, skewed to American values and is not what is really happening in my region.

Yet, when I try to speak up on Substack, I get harassed as I’m a minority voice talking about an uncommon and often demonised narrative. On top of that, my posts never get seen as the algorithm is prioritising US voices and Substacks. Worse, they are also boosting only popular ones, which means the most popular narrative is the loudest.

I have occasionally shared links to South-East Asian Substacks and blogs, and each time I do, I get messages of gratitude. However, I still wondered if my tiny act of rebellion would do anything to move the needle in terms of being heard in an English-speaking Internet overwhelmed by Western voices and narratives.

David’s post reminded me that yes, I should put in some effort to help surface more unknown corners of the Internet. Maybe we won’t get rid of the algorithmic complacency sweeping society now, but at least we’ll do some tiny thing to help create a messy but human algorithm instead.

Being a Mastodon Moderator by Mark Wyner

As a Reddit moderator, I already know the answer to this article would be – it’s not easy 😉

Algorithms are breaking how we think (video)

This video made me realise I am a strange person. I actually don’t like algorithms feeding me information but actually do this shocking thing called research.

Yes, I hate algorithms with a passion and do not depend on them for my news or information sources.

I realised that “algorithmic complacency” was real during the US folks migration to xiaohongshu (Red Note). I was puzzled why so many seem surprised that China was well developed and futuristic… Then I noticed a pattern – most comments from US folks say that the algorithm didn’t show them this China. Which, of course, led me to think – then, use search? But I realized nobody was interested in doing that extra work.

Our modern society is nothing but a delicate house of cards.

A story from Vladimir Campos on Medium ‘Why are we increasingly relying on the cloud for everything? Why do all things have to have an app that has to be connected to the Internet to work?’ Read ‘Our modern society is nothing but a delicate house of cards.’ by Vladimir Campos on Medium: “

How have my blogging habits changed? – The Wallflower Digest

“I really enjoyed this post by Alice about how her blogging habits have changed, and especially the part about she no longer microblogs. It’s such a habit of mine to post directly to Mastodon when I can just post on my blog … I am working on adjusting my workflow for social media publishing so that I write a note in my Obsidian vault first before sharing it to the web. I’m working on it, but I’m not sure how successful I’ll be. Old habits die hard!