Anil Dash

Sorry to be repetitive, but: Anil Dash - understanding DOGE as Procurement Capture https://www.anildash.com//2025/01/04/DOGE-procurement-capture/ Best government money can buy. "Citizens United" cemented that until hopefully overturned. "One Dollar, One Vote" (give or take inflation)

While this may be somewhat tongue in cheek, I often think of this post from Anil Dash: "I talk to a lot of consultants, freelancers, and small businesses who do web work, and I used to be a freelancer myself, so sometimes I get asked for advice on how to price one’s goods and services. I think I came up with my best suggestion today, and it involves only two simple steps: Slap the client in face. Tell the client your hourly rate. If the person looked more shocked, horrified, offended, hurt, saddened, or wounded by the slap in the face, then you are still pricing yourself too low. Your mileage may vary, this is not to be construed as legal advice, eye-poking may be substituted for slapping in some states." https://anildash.com/2005/05/12/pay_by_the_hour/

If I was a motivated SEO booster, I would just pay a room full of people somewhere in the world to "downvote" all of my competitors search engine results. The problem still exists. As long as there is an incentive to be gained from SEO spammers, they will find a way to influence search results. This transcends Google or DDG or any specific search engine susceptible to SEO abuse. There's a great talk by Anil Dash that I like titled "The Web We Lost" that centers around on this topic - https://anildash.com/2012/12/13/the_web_we_lost/

The Artist Formerly And Then Again Known As Prince had his own single-character font just for rendering His Symbol, and his PR company send around copies of a floppy disk with Windows and Mac versions of the font, along with these instructions for writing about him: https://www.milk.com/wall-o-shame/bruce_font.html http://anildash.com/2014/06/my-favorite-floppy-of-all-time.html https://parkerhiggins.net/2013/01/writing-the-prince-symbol-in-unicode…

Anil Dash actually wrote a great article about this. The short summary is you need real humans doing the moderating. All the tooling you create should be about enhancing those humans. http://anildash.com/2011/07/if-your-websites-full-of-assholes-its-your…

re: "He gets people fired for making jokes" This seems like putting a spin on things. Following a link in the article, you might want to read what Anil actually wrote (in particular, search for "Update"): http://anildash.com/2013/09/my-meeting-with-pax.html

The history told here has many errors and omissions and, I would say, paints a misleading picture. Markdown did not come up with the idea of lightweight markup languages (LMLs). It just happened to become the most popular one, for reasons that the article doesn’t really address. There were other LMLs before and after Markdown. (It does mention Textile later on, but doesn’t mention that there were a number of others, and that it was a field that had been steadily developing.) > What if you could just write out the text and then the link, sort of like you might within an email? Like: [Anil Dash’s blog](https://anildash.com)! No one would ever have spelled it like that. It would rather have been either “Anil Dash’s blog (https://anildash.com)” or “Anil Dash’s blog <https://anildash.com>”. > If mark_up_ is complicated, then the opposite of that complexity must be… markd_own_. I’m guessing this was intended to have actual italics. (Clearly it wasn’t checked after writing, or else the third underscore would have been shifted before the d.) This shows one of the problems of Markdown. (“_anti_commercial” later has the same problem.) Also why you should prefer * for italics rather than _ when writing Markdown, because in CommonMark it allows you to mark up partial words. Throw away Prettier’s Markdown formatting, by the way, it’s terrible and if you’re not careful may destroy your content, and it insists on underscore for italics. > Hitting the Mark > [Stuff about Markdown…

It might help to expand your horizons a bit. I see a lot of dudes on there I easily spotted for having limited range from the start. The trouble is people like this float too far off the ground and never come down to catch up. They usually lose their touch long before they gain the limelight, but are able to cruise a bit. The big tell: is "being a public intellectual" all they have? Do they have no experiences with the real world to temper flighty, assumption-based beliefs? Bad news. Even Zeno of Citium saw the world as a merchant while Stoicism was cooking in his head. You can't create or benefit from philosophy isolated from people who challenge your assumptions. Here's some people to get you started: On Malik (some interesting photography too): https://om.co/ Anil Dash (appreciates a good Prince pun): https://www.anildash.com/ Judith Butler, just about anything they put out in public. bell hooks (deceased, but has a lot worth reading) Adam Savage (lots of good life advice in Q&As): https://www.youtube.com/@tested Wil Wheaton (yeah I know, but he hit a new gear once he got past alcohol and started really dealing with his childhood trauma): https://wilwheaton.net/ Michael Rosenbaum (played a solid Lex Luthor and now does great interviews): https://www.youtube.com/@InsideOfYouPodcast Connor Trinneer and Dominic Keating (from Enterprise to interview show): https://www.youtube.com/@ShuttlepodShow/

There are some dueling abstractions, yes! There was a good write-up from Anil Dash that picked up one of my favorite pieces of the recent TabFS write-up[1][2], _Keeping Tabs on Abstractions[3],_ noting that the browser & OS are each running competing abstractions for tabs. The application's invention of the Multi Document Interface (MDI) has done weird things! And I feel like most consumer OSes have done little to try to unify or provide options in the OS level, to take back territory. I as quite happy & pleased when Google's Chrome on Android had tabs each appear as tabs in the OS. I have too many tabs, but I enjoyed that it was up to my launcher, up to my os to help me work with that. It gave me flexibility & options to approach the problem. Where-as, when Chrome went back to managing tabs itself, it's both been a disaster for me (new tab window shows me the start of my tabs, which has some years old tabs i only need occasionally), and a sadness, a defeat, that the OS can no longer manage this thing. > I do see the point of reattaching to shell sessions or attaching from multiple devices. I've recommended dtach[4] elsewhere[5] in this topic & here-by recommend it again! Very lightweight detachable proxy for persistent programs. I run vim inside of it, so I can attach/detach. Vim has terminals inside of it, so that's all I needed. [1] https://omar.website/tabfs/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25600338 [3]…

Speaking of Technorati...the site Technorati. "The Web We Lost" pretty much sums up what I miss: https://anildash.com/2012/12/13/the_web_we_lost/ The early 2000s had so much promise. The rise of reasonably easy to use blogging platforms, RSS, and web companies that were interested in playing in that world of distributed independent communication. Even Google was a different beast back then. It was the perfect balance: faster paced and more interactive than the days of manually editing files on GeoCities, but still mostly driven by indies doing things because they enjoyed it...instead of the cynical, marketing driven hellscape centered on siloed social media sites. My pet hypothesis is that we had another Eternal September with the rise of the smartphone. Some of that amazing stuff is still out there, but it's drowned out by the firehose of corporatism and "normal" people. You can even see it with the shift in web sites aiming to be primarily consumed on a phone screen instead of a regular computer.

https://www.anildash.com/2024/11/19/dont-call-it-a-substack/ is a persuasive argument for the opposite

The manifesto of "have a fucking website" or "I'm a fucking webmaster"[0] or "The People's Web"[1] is something that in the modern age, ends up as a commercialized newsletter or as an e-tip jar or blogspam with a thousand Amazon affiliate links. The website as a means of personal expression came about because traditional communications media ignored the niches they cared about. Fan sites and shrines covered TV shows or bands that didn't get coverage in mainstream magazines. Conspiracy sites arose because traditional media eschewed them. Today, every niche is covered somewhere, because the Internet became a business. A GIF site on Geocities was free. Buzzfeed took that idea and became a publicly traded company. [0] https://justinjackson.ca/webmaster/ [1] https://www.anildash.com/2019/12/23/the-peoples-web/

Is this the first time mainstream media is saying something? Prominent voices have done so for years e.g. Anil Dash[0], but no one seems to have gotten the memo; people who I thought would care have continued to either be on it or cite content from it, oblivious. Edit: Scrolling down to related stories shows articles criticising Nazi Substacks since 2024 [0] https://www.anildash.com/2024/11/19/dont-call-it-a-substack/

Anil Dash wrote something relevant recently: https://www.anildash.com/2025/11/14/wanting-not-to-want-ai/ His point (which I agree with - softly) is that Mozilla could approach this from a more nuanced perspective that others cannot, like not anti-AI but anti "Big AI". Facilitate what people are already doing (and outside of the HN bubble everyone is using AI all the time, even if it's just what we think is "dumb" stuff) throught the FF lens. Like a local LLM that runs entirely in an extension or similar. THere's no shortage of hard, valuable things that big tech won't do because of $$$.

I actually don't think this is true. I think a lot of folks who are (understandably) angry at the Big AI companies want people not to want AI in Firefox. Which is a slightly different problem. https://www.anildash.com/2025/11/14/wanting-not-to-want-ai/

This might give you some insight: https://www.anildash.com/2025/09/09/how-tim-cook-sold-out-steve-jobs/

I've not paid much attention, but Gruber discusses it here: https://daringfireball.net/2024/11/regarding_and_well_against_substack Anil Dash (quoted by Gruber above) has even stronger feelings. https://www.anildash.com/2024/11/19/dont_call_it_a_substack/

Considering Anil boldly stated "MCP is the coming of Web 2.0 2.0" https://www.anildash.com/2025/05/20/mcp-web20-20/ I'd bet now the golden handcuffs are off, it's AI VC money time baby

Aside: where do the extra slashes in the submitted anildash urls come from? frequent reoccurrence. An rss feed somewhere? Some scheme for him to track outside shares? heh https://www.anildash.com//2025/04/19/ai-first-is-the-new-return-to-off…

For everyone talking about why things are being done like they are, take a look at this article linked to in the post: Understanding DOGE as Procurement Capture https://www.anildash.com/2025/01/04/DOGE-procurement-capture/

That discussion was well underway in 2011. Here’s two random finds (I guess Google search isn’t completely useless yet…): https://techcrunch.com/2011/01/01/why-we-desperately-need-a-new-and-be… https://www.anildash.com/2011/01/03/threes_a_trend_the_decline_of_goog…

Yes. https://www.anildash.com/2019/12/10/link-in-bio-is-how-they-tried-to-k… It's an attack on the web, to promote censorship platforms that replace it.

Sam Altman's doomstead is in Big Sur: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-manifest-des… Anil Dash is right, billionaires are high on their own supply: https://www.anildash.com/2023/02/27/tycoon-martyrdom-charade/

> wasn't considered an issue before Meta came along This is false, there's been frequent discussion around how indexing and search should be performed in a privacy preserving way. Meta is just the latest concern. [1] https://www.anildash.com/2023/01/16/a-fediverse-search/ [2] https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2018/07/cage-the-mastodon/

This hasn't worked the previous times it has been tried. https://anildash.com/2020/07/21/a-federal-blue-checkmark-wont-solve-on… I wonder if prosecuting people who post horrible stuff would have a deterrence effect, though.

You have to be careful with "naughty" words, like if your description includes the name of a company on the Dept of Treasury's shitlist[1] Some of them are fairly generic terms. I remember when this was posted[2] on HN (payment troubles caused by writing "Blue Sky" on the memo field in a check, because a company called "Blue Sky Industries" was caught doing business with Iran). Supposedly Venmo will also flag your payment if you put "ISIS" or something like that in the description [1]: https://www.treasury.gov/ofac/downloads/sdnlist.txt [2]: http://anildash.com/2014/02/21/here_is_a_thing_that_happened/

This article is from Dec 2016, and Anil Dash wrote about this in 2012: https://anildash.com/2012/10/05/the_blue_collar_coder/

There's a small resurgence of those old tacky websites on Glitch https://glitch.com And some more context by Anil Dash about the old web / Geocities web dying out https://anildash.com/2012/12/13/the_web_we_lost/

I was perusing Anil's archives, and came across this post: http://anildash.com/2001/09/terry-wallace-a.html Sadly, the hyperlinked findings in his blog post were 404'ing but luckily were previously archived. Enjoy. For more about Terry Wallace: http://web.archive.org/web/20021202032952/http://www.geo.arizona.edu:8… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Wallace_(geophysicist)