Death to Bullshit

I’m pleased to introduce Death to Bullshit, a site and blog that explore the themes of information, bullshit, and craft.

We’re bombarded by more information than ever before. With the rise of all this information comes a rise of the amount of bullshit we’re exposed to. Death to Bullshit is a rallying cry to rid the world of bullshit and demand experiences that respect people and their time.

I’ve wanted to make this site ever since I gave a talk on the topic a while ago. In fact, I’ve been publishing links to the blog for years now. But I had a vision I wanted to execute (namely, a bunch of ads floating parallax-style next to the content) that I never had the time to complete.

My brother Ian (@frostyweather) started working for me just three weeks ago, and I thought this site would be a good sandbox for him to learn the ropes of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. And I think that experiment was successful. Ian rose to the challenge and made some pretty sophisticated stuff. In fact, I’m pretty sure he wrote more JavaScript in 2 weeks than I did in the first 5 years of my career.

The idea was to create a design that used the absolute bare minimum of styling, which is a bit of commentary on the over-designed nature of a lot of sites these days.

Death to Bullshit without bullshit mode on

But the real fun begins when you click the “Turn bullshit on?” link.

Death to Bullshit with bullshit mode on

It’s got everything modern Web experiences have and then some.

  • Carousel full of banner ads? Check.
  • Fixed-positioned elements that you can’t dismiss? Check.
  • Annoying popup that forces you to either like a Facebook page or admit you are a racist? Check.
  • QR code? Of course.
  • Hideous clickbait floating in a parallax stream along-side the content? Check.
  • Infinite scroll of even more clickbait? Check.
  • Social widgets begging you to share? Check.

And on and on it goes.

My hope is that this site will lead to conversations about how we can better create experiences that respect users and their time. From the site:

As the landslide of bullshit surges down the mountain, people will increasingly gravitate toward genuinely useful, well-crafted products, services, and experiences that respect them and their time. So we as creators have a decision to make: do we want to be part of the 90% of noise out there, or do we want to be part of the 10% of signal? It’s quite simple really:

  • Respect people and their time.
  • Respect your craft.
  • Be sincere.
  • Create genuinely useful things.