Over the last few months, I’ve been grossly aware of the how algorithms have been shaping my life. Content being directly streamed to my brain with no friction whatsoever. It’s been taking away from my attention span, my focus, my enjoyment and my well being. When I got into homelabbing and self-hosting, I thought it was going to be my solution to this. No more corporations, no more algorithms, I can collect the content I want to watch and listen to. But something felt missing, I think I was missing the core of the issue. Yes part of the issue is algorithms made to keep me consuming, but another piece of the puzzle is the over abundance of content available. Since there is no end to the content stream, there is no time to reflect on the content consumed. There’s always something else to watch. This is where I went wrong, instead developing a curated collection, I pirated all the music I’d ever want. Yes, the access was nice but it left me with the same decision paralysis from before.
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