• 11 Dec, 2025 *

My wife the other day was looking up haircuts for our two year old and walked up to me showing me her phone and asked, "is this an AI child". As she kept scrolling there seemed to be no end to these phantom impossibly smooth-skinned and perfectly tussled hair children. "Is it AI" is the new "is it cake", the cake being orders of magnitude less harmful. The fact that my wife is searching for 2 year old boys haircuts and can’t find a damn actual photo of a real child’s haircut is fucking infuriating. The general availability and accessibility of generative AI for content generation has hastened enshittification.

For those of you who have not heard of this term, "enshittification", this is the definition per Wikipedia:

Enshittification, also known as crapification and platform decay, is a pattern in which two-sided online products and services decline in quality over time. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to users and business customers to maximize short-term profits for shareholders.

I first started using the internet in the early 90s, when a simple website was used as personal expression. The world of BBSs, E-Zines, and personal sites is not gone, it just can’t compete with the algorithm. You want to find the "best robot vacuum 2025"? You’re going to get SEO-optimized AI slop from a site like "bestvacuumreviews2025[.]xyz" written by no one, for no one.

So what is one to do? You could become an off-grid mountain hermit, or you can carve out a bit of the internet for yourself. I’ve been calling it, "de-shittification". I am starting to realize you can have a better online experience, it just takes a little intentional setup. This is what has been working for me.

This is a technology that has been around forever, and essentially is a way for you to subscribe to feeds from different news sites and blogs. Prior to using RSS I was using Google news and hating it. Now I pull all of my threat intel blogs, investigative journalism, and other information into my own feed.

The reason that using an RSS reader is so important in this process is that you can collect sources of information that you find credible, useful, or just enjoyable. This way you can keep track of all the sites that you find along your journey that aren’t roided out on ads or affiliate links.

I personally self-host Miniflux which is a pretty simple barebones RSS feed aggregator, with robust API, which is perfect for my needs. But if I were to suggest a hosted aggregator I would go with Inoreader; it has a pretty decent suite of features for a reasonable price.

For more on RSS check out this blog: https://blog.remainna.xyz/you-should-use-rss/

Search

I assume you have probably "googled" something in the last couple years, and you have probably noticed search results have degraded immensely. It happened so gradually that you may have just let that pass by.

I just pretty much assumed that we were stuck with this, and now needed AI to filter the results for us. While AI searches are great, why can’t search just be better? Well it can. While free options like DuckDuckGo and Brave are definitely alternative search engines I wouldn’t necessarily say they are better.

Though I haven’t tested and benchmarked every search engine out there, I have been testing out using Kagi. The experience is refreshing... you know, searching for something and finding it without having to dodge a bunch of paid results and trash content. One thing to note here is that Kagi is a paid search engine, which I think is perfectly fine based on my experience thus far. Some of my favorite features are the ability to block, down rank, or up rank domains in your search results and the ability to filter out AI generated images from image search. For more details of the features check out their docs.

This is something that is dependent on so much per person. Obviously social media for some people is a way that they make their living, while others use it to keep in touch with their friends and family, and some use scrolling their feed as a way to decompress from their long day. However you use it, I think most people have the common experience of having wasted enormous amounts of time on it. You click on one video, then scroll, look up, and all of a sudden you’ve lost time.

There are plenty of people who give it up completely, and good for them. But there are plenty of us that still would like to use it, in a healthier way. The way that I handle this is by "containerization", and what I mean by that is introducing friction to accessing the social media that I want to limit my exposure to.

There are a multitude of apps that allow you to set timers and lock you out of apps based on your time usage settings. For me I put all of my social media, into a separate user profile on my phone. There may be some other Android OS variants that have this ability, but I use Graphene OS which is a security and privacy focused Android OS. This profile which I have all of my social media in, essentially is turned off not allowing for notifications or anything to get through into my main profile. When I want to look at any of my socials, I need to leave my main profile, put in a pass code and wait for it to load. I have found that this friction is good enough for me to significantly reduce my usage.

Where to find content

At first I was having issues with alternatives to what I normally would consume, but over time you start to gather sites that you like. A lot of the time it’s been sitting right in front of you, such as someone posts an article on Bluesky, Reddit, or HackerNews; if you like the content, just add the blog or site to your RSS aggregator.

Other than organically finding content, you can always follow Kagi’s Small Web feed or Bear Blog’s discovery feed (the blogging platform where this site is hosted).

Wrapping it up

There is so much more around this subject that I would like to share, but I must wrap up for fear that I will never post my first blog. That being said, I will definitely be having more posts around my attempts at de-shittification.

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#de-shittification #enshittification #genai #puters #ramblings #small-web