Why Make a Blog in 2023

Modern social media (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc.) has worked as a tool for connecting large groups of people across vast interests, but it feels as if the larger these platforms get the less personal they feel and the weaker the connection among its users becomes. Your feeds become a curated mess of posts from people you know, mixed in with clickbait, mixed in with ads, mixed in with ads disguised as memes.

So I built Average Case, to have it as a place of my own. Primarily out of nostalgia for the earlier days of the internet and a desire to have a place of my own to design and write and share things I find interesting.

Part of me is glad to have these large platforms where I can easily keep up with relatives and friends all over the world, while another part of me does want to go back to an earlier time when personal blogs were ubiquitous online and early social media platforms like MySpace allowed you to customize your page with HTML and CSS. Today, unless you make a site like this, where do you get to have any sort of design choices in how your content is presented? You can share photos/videos/text on these large platforms, but the way they appear in your friends’ feeds and the design of your home page is completely up to the ever-changing whims of UI teams at these companies.

As for the name, average-case complexity is a computer science concept for the amount of computational resources an algorithm will use averaged across all possible inputs.
Average Case to me refers to just thinking about all of the inputs one encounters throughout their life. All of the writing, images, music, experiences, etc., and trying to distill that into some kind of output. That output is this blog. There’s no real plan here, I’m not even sure how long I plan on updating this blog. But for now, it makes me happy to have my own place to design and write and share the things I like.