A Weblog · Human-sized Services:

Humans making websites was what made 1.0, back in the Netscape Navigator days, great. Blink tags, under construction logos, and multi-colour Times New Roman font. It was joyous because it was the web at human level.

Then we went to corporations. We had Tumblr, and Facebook, and Twitter. Corporations mining your creativity for profit.

It seems we are now on our return, retrograde orbit back to human-scale once more.

I whole-heartedly agree.

The thing about human-sized services is that they do not scale. That’s not bad. Actually, it’s good. A human-sized service will not work if millions of people try to use it. It probably won’t work if thousands of people try to use it.

The problem with services that scale is that once they do scale, they become a shitty experience for the individual humans that are actually using them. That’s the experience that should be centered in any of this—it’s the only reason we should even be doing any of this.

And for what it’s worth, you should go check out the human-sized services that Andrew recommends farther down in his post. They are all excellent, and are run by good folks.