So we are glitchyowl and kickscondor - this is a collaboration between us - an attempt to make 'blogging' more expressive and visual, possibly to break a piece off and reboot it, now that it's fallen out of fashion. The Web seems to have converged on a color called 'gwalb' - gray with a little blue. We've gone from home pages - which users could dump endless animated gifs and marquees on to - to giving everyone a rou…
> Are we on the right track here? You probably mean on an intellectual level, not in terms of user adoption. The lack of specificity about who your audience is the toughest part, intellectually, about what you’re doing. First let’s assume it’s the Everyman. Why do people like a 680x680 picture / selfie of themselves? One reason Instagram has demographics much closer to the real world than Medium does: people already…
There are negatives to nostalgia - but this isn't necessarily one of them. I would use vaporwave as a counterpoint. (Or any resurgence of a genre.) The nostalgic element is the familiar part; the artist might then be unfamiliar. I personally discover new artists all the time in these nostalgic genres.
Not arguing against your general points about writing vs fashion. (And you make a lot of fun points!) But I don't think a rebirth of hypertext styling is dead in the water. Podcasts were originally seen as just the rebirth of AM radio. And they were - but it turned out to be time for that - and enough innovation transpired that they stuck.