The Unhappy Web Person
The smallweb draws a certain kind of unhappy cynic. Chronically online, this kind of person sees evil everywhere. Probably depressed, fatigued with the state of the world, and able to find something wrong, immoral or reprehensible in most things. This is the kind of person you are likely to find on Reddit. Here's an example.
I'm on the 32-Bit Café forum, where someone started a thread about Cauenapier's Town Square idea on his blog, which he describes like so:
You open the site and see a few other visitors wandering around at the bottom of the page. Maybe someone says hello. Maybe nobody talks at all. Either way, the site feels inhabited. It's a little space on the internet where people can chat, like a small café, or a small town square.
Naturally, an Unhappy Web Person (UWP) had a criticism:
But I kinda wonder if these kinds of ideas “belong” on the small web. These are all trying to help us “feel” the presence of others online, which I think is also a goal of the small web, but the small web partially achieves this by rejecting algorithms and, thus, limiting a site/person’s reach on purpose.
According to this UWP, a goal of the small web is to help us feel the presence of others online. This is partially achieved through the rejection of algorithms. And this rejection results in purposefully limiting a person's reach. OK, so now you have a person with a digital presence, namely a personal website or blog, a space where creative individuality is as boundless as its creator's imagination. And there's a rewarding feeling in finding this digital space as an act of serendipity, a lucky link, an ongoing conversation or helpful guide which brought us to this person's home on the small web, what the UWP calls a "dark forest" later in their comment. OK, that's cool. But there's no virtue in obscurity. Are we really to believe that being purposefully hard-to-find on the internet supports the small web's mission of helping us feel the presence of others online?
To cherish fortuitous discovery is not the same as purposefully limiting a person's reach online. Nor should obscurity be an objective, considering it's the default state of everyone creating a personal website. A project like Cauenapier's Town Square (which is a small interactive component near the footer of his website) is neither antithetical to the small web nor direct support for algorithms. It's just a human being adding a fun widget to their personal website. And the small web is really nothing more than that, just people having fun on the internet by cultivating personal spaces without seeking economic profit.