Ethics in times of growth design & Writing online should be personal

Philipp Temmel -

My name is Philipp and you are reading Creativerly, the internet corner where I unpack my musings, curate and write about noteworthy apps and software, and explore the latest trends in design and tech.

Hey and welcome to Creativerly 311 👋

This new issue of Creativerly reaches you with a slight delay. I am still sorting quite a lot of things out in my life, so I enjoy every single minute that I am not spending in front of my Mac. Nevertheless, I am still excited to you this new issue of Creativerly, packed with fresh news and updates, insightful articles, and ... a new post on the topic of why online writing often loses its personal touch in favor of polished prose. I had this post in my drafts for a while, but since I recently been increasingly enjoying not only the independent and personal blogs of designers, developers, marketers, and people who just enjoy posting online, as well as the independent media reporting on all kinds of topics from tech, design, and politics, I felt the urge to finish it up.

I do not want to preempt too much, but I see a lot of people who start writing online are trying to adapt a certain style, and with the evolvement of AI, it feels like a lot of people are publishing bland, monotone, impersonal, and inauthentic writing, with the potential goal of reaching a broader audience. However, what makes writing so enjoyable is the personal, fun, humurous, and sometimes even vulnerable touches only a human-being can deliver.

We need more of that.

And in my new post down below, you can find out why. Enjoy.

Approach writing in public as conversation instead of a performance

Whenever we are writing to friends and family to explain, share, or discuss something, we are authentic. The tone of the conversation is natural. We focus on writing personal, clear, and to the point to help them understand rather than impressing them. While doing so, we are comfortable showing personality and imperfection. As a reader of such a messaging and tone, I feel personally addressed and connected. Any kind of complex ideas become more digestible through conversational, fun, and to the point explanations. Additionally, any kind of humorous flavour and personal anecdotes in such messages, make the content increasingly memorable.

But still, so much of todays online writing is the absolute contrary of that. Once people start writing for the public, some of them tend to write in a different kind of style, not as personal, and instead with the force in mind to come up with something great and polished. What is the reason for that? What creates the mind-shift that we go from personal, fun, memorable content, to impersonal, bland, academic-style prose as soon as we publish online?

Let's dig a bit deeper.

Read the whole post here:

Approach writing in public as conversation instead of a performance
On why online writing often loses its personal touch in favor of polished prose, exploring how authentic voices like 404 Media and Marisa Kabas are changing the game, and why crafting engaging content that feels relatable and memorable - without sacrificing your unique perspective, matters most.
CreativerlyPhilipp Temmel

Fresh Updates & News

Automattic and others back Openvibe →

Openvibe, the app that integrates multiple open social networks like Bluesky, Mastodon, Nostr, and Threads, announced that it received an investment of $800,000 in a round led by Czech Founders VC, which includes backing from Automattic (WordPress.com and Tumblr parent company), and Tensor Ventures. The idea of Openvibe is interesting. As social media is fragmented, and as a result a lot of people are signed up to and active on multiple different platforms, Openvibe allows those people to use a single app to post, consume, and interact with posts. I have been using Openvibe every now and then, but what turned off are its UX quirks like displaying the icons to interact with a post, tiny and cramped together on the bottom left side of a post, while there would be so much more space to the right to follow familiar design patterns from other social network mobile apps, overall the app feels quite complex, and the look and feel of is peculiar. John Gruber wrote about why the app feels weird in more detail.

Additionally, and it seems like this hardly ever gets reported when Openvibe pops up in the news, it still feels a bit off to me when I read about the CEO's, Matej Svancer, career history, which includes a YouTube channel called 'KRYPTO Mates' on which Svancer posts videos in which he talks about and embraces Bitcoin, his meetup with Jack Dorsey, and some other crypto-focused topics. Before Openvibe he even founded an app called Tweetoshi with which he combined Twitter, Bitcoin, and democratise business model of social media (according to the LinkedIn description), whatever that should mean, but the header image of its LinkedIn page says It is like Twitter, but with Bitcoin! awesome, now I get. After that, he built plebstr, a client to experience the decentralised Nostr protocol, which ultimately became Openvibe.

Although Matej Svancer mentioned in different interviews that Openvibe will never ship features based on a blockchain or integrate a blockchain directly into the product, he still seems to be active on his KRYPTO Mates YouTube channel, sharing crypto stuff, he was a speaker at btcprague, a crypto conference in Prague, Czech Republic (seems to be the biggest bitcoin event in Europe), and according to LinkedIn, there is still some sort of involvement going on in Tweetoshi. I don't know if I would rely on his words 100% when he says that crypto will not reach Openvibe.

Bookshop.org introduces eBooks →

Bookshop.org connects readers with independent booksellers all over the world. Every purchase you make on the site financially supports independent bookstores. I love that. And now, you can even browse and buy ebooks from local bookstores via Bookshop.org too. Thanks to its iOS and Android apps, you can enjoy the full reading experience. Ebooks bought via Bookshop.org also financially support local, independent bookstores, which makes it the superior option over Amazon.

The only unfortunate thing is that it seems like the app is not available globally, as I am not able to download it here in Austria.

OpenAI is furious that DeepSeek stole its data which it stole from all of us →

Those news are the most hilarious from the past week, since it not only describes OpenAI as a company, but also the whole AI landscape. Imagine how pathetic you have to be to get furious about some other AI company stealing the data, you have stolen from hundreds of thousands, even millions of people without their consent. They are shocked that a company would train their models on someone else's data without permission or compensation. This is pure irony. In fact, this is irony on another level. OpenAI is a company that has had a continuous presence in the news because of the large amounts of data it obtained without consent from load of people. Besides that, it is currently being sued by the New York Times for training on its articles, and OpenAI's argument is that this was perfectly fine under copyright law fair use protections. So, a company who obviously has no idea about copyright law, now gets furious and someone stole the data it has stolen beforehand. Pathetic.

Mental Wealth

❯ How to build something that lasts – “Modern American culture is obsessed with the new — instant gratification, fleeting trends, etc. — while often neglecting the systems that can endure. This fixation on the new has fostered a society where short-termism thrives and chaos reigns. But my own brush with mortality forced me to confront a different, more urgent question: how do you survive long enough to unlock the rewards of exponential outcomes?”

❯ Explore vs Execute – “Founders are arrogant by necessity. Most startups fail, and yet these cocky founders are absolutely sure they are the exception. “Rules don’t apply to outliers like me,” they scoff. (Actually most aren’t so certain—the honest ones are scared shitless, hoping they can figure it out before everyone finds out they’re a fraud and they crack. I find that the ones who are genuinely, deeply confident that their success is assured, are most likely to fail; they are disconnected with reality. Reality wins.)”

❯ Ethics in times of growth design – “In an ideal world, designers create user experiences that drive business growth while following ethical principles. However, creating and maintaining this balance between growth and ethics is one of the biggest challenges a designer can face when growth is often the word in their job title rather than ethics.”

❯ Personal Science: Self-Experimentation from Quantified Self to Qualified Self – “When you think about people conducting experiments at home, you might picture scenes from old horror movies – a wild-haired scientist in a dark basement, mysterious bubbling potions, and mad declarations along the lines of “It’s alive!” Fortunately, the reality of personal science isn’t so dramatic. It can be as simple as a few careful observations about our own lives: noticing how different foods affect our energy, tracking what helps us sleep better, or documenting changes in our mood.”

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Appendix

❯ ICYMI

In case you are looking for an open-source Framer or Webflow alternative, Webstudio is the tool you need to check out. Powerful, feature-rich, and offering a lot of flexibility. In the deep dive I wrote about it, you can get a first look into Webstudio, its features, and how it compares to its main competitors Framer and Webflow.

❯ Quick Bits

Till next time! 👋‌‌‌‌

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