scroll less, do more
humbly presenting: POPOUT.NYC
They always tell you to make something you’d want to use.
I have never followed this advice, at least not professionally. I have built data platforms for landlords, dashboards for semiconductor financial analysis, pipelines for health insurance billing… I have built a bespoke ontology to encode information about cloud infrastructure cybersecurity in a fundamentally new format.1
If you stopped reading halfway through that paragraph, I don’t blame you.
The nature of my jobs thus far, the companies I’ve worked for, without exception: esoteric and deeply nerdy. In other words, boring! Nothing relatable, nothing I could explain to my parents, or would share on a date without some chagrin.
I must offer this preface, because to me this new project is special.
Get up, get out, get something
I’ve spent the past month2 developing what boils down to an automated version of something I was doing anyways. I’ve always had an investigative lens towards social media, seeking greater understanding, a feel for “what’s going on”. Likely, this is rooted in a certain lack of self assurance (that I might know what’s going on already, or be able to make it happen), but let’s set that aside.
Whatever the underlying psychodynamics, a recent manifestation of this is my keeping a close eye on what interesting venues in New York are hosting. An umbrella descriptor for this type of event is “popups” - temporary installations or appearances where goods, services, or activities are offered in a location that otherwise would not feature them.
Popups are most often publicized exclusively via digital flyers3 on sites ill-suited to sifting through them. In practice, this means that finding such an event requires diligently cultivating a set of venues to follow and scrolling your feed consistently, skipping past engagement photos, fit pics, and ads to figure out what you want to do this weekend. Ew. I do it, but only because there has not been a better way - until now.
Enter: POPOUT.NYC
The modern social media landscape does not reflect the needs of the people4. It is more concerned with serving you content that promotes engagement, getting your eyes back to the ads. It is (for most) not a tool - you are being used more than you are using.
Enough preaching. I built a thing: https://popout.nyc
POPOUT aggregates digital flyers and displays them in a minimalist format designed for ease of use and quickly getting to what you’re interested in. No doomscrolling here. The ethos of POPOUT is squarely opposed to the engagement farming described above5. Get in, get what you need, get out. This is perhaps not a good business model, but I also don’t really expect to make any money off of this.
Building it has been an interesting project, validating and valuable in and of itself. I need no further ends from this, but I hope it can last. I’ll be writing more about the development process and underlying architecture soon, but wanted to share the what and the why before getting into the how.
For now, please check it out, let me know what you think! I would love to get feedback, especially any constructive critiques. I refuse to use any skeezy tactics to elicit engagement, but I’m not above asking you for it directly :)
commit history don’t lie:
alas, the once common physical flyers of the New York club scene have been relegated to literal coffee table books, which are perhaps the most distanced format from the original that I can imagine
Per the 3M+ views and 2.6k bookmarks on this tweet (xeet?), others agree.
if the “anti social social club” riffs weren’t blown the fuck out already I would consider an “anti anti social media” hoodie