Underrated websites & does advertising actually work? (Spam Mail #4)

Hi there,

Shout out to Carlos this week for sharing an incredible AskReddit thread of underrated websites. Seriously, go sink some time into it.

There’s a public domain music library, a PDF search engine (!) and of course the Internet Archive’s library of open source content, plus so much more. I picked out some of my fav fun links below.

See you next week.

💩 Cool shit

Random and awesome links from the web to end the week with.

Boil the Frog - Put in two artists and make a Spotify playlist with a (nearly) seamless transition from one to the other.

Pointer Pointer - Photos that point to where your mouse cursor is. It’s so stupidly simple but I love it.

Tip of My Tongue - An actual tool to help you find the word you can’t remember.

Every Noise At Once - An “algorithmically-generated, readability-adjusted scatter-plot of the musical genre-space”. Listen to samples of every music genre.

Falling Fruit - A collaborative map of urban harvest. Find your local public fruit trees.

Real Time Lightning Maps - What the title says. It’s pretty cool.

Get Human - How to skip the robots and talk to a real human customer service rep.

Dummy Credit Card Generator - Generate fake credit card numbers. For devs to test eCommerce sites (or when you don’t want that free trial period without putting in your own card).

💎 Word gems

Thought provoking long-form reads (or listens) to savor on the weekend.

🎧 Does Advertising Actually Work? (Freakonomics Radio)
Part 1 & Part 2

Not an article but a two-part podcast challenging the conventional wisdom that advertising must work because so many businesses spend a lot of money on it. Measuring the actual impact of ad spend is complicated, and this doesn’t touch on long-term brand building, but the empirical take on ad effectiveness is thought provoking and has some bold findings:

Doubling the amount of advertising would lead to about a 1 percent increase in sales.

Degrowth and MMT: A Thought Experiment (Jason Hickel)

I’ve been reading about Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), and it has really flipped my thinking on government spending. In a nutshell; because governments print new money to spend, they don’t need to worry about where it comes from. Taxes regulate how much money is in the economy, rather than fund the government’s spending. It really hit me with the COVID-19 stimulus packages; if governments can just create money for that, why can’t they do the same for anything else that improves our lives (healthcare, education, employment, infrastructure, the list goes on..)? That’s where I found this article.

The narrative of “fiscal responsibility” is a ruse that’s intended in large part to prevent people from demanding that governments provide job guarantees and universal public services (remember, governments are happy to create money when it comes to financing wars and pumping up asset values, but when it comes to paying for public services, they say it’s not possible).  Why would governments do such a thing?  Because if people have access to a public job guarantee doing socially useful work, and if they have access to high-quality universal services, then why on earth would they ever agree to do socially unnecessary, meaningless or degrading labour for private firms, if the goal of such firms is primarily to accumulate profit for the holders of capital? They wouldn’t.

The Substackerati (Columbia Journalism Review / Clio Chang)

Media tends to go in cycles. New formats begin with varied and diverse voices before consolidating into a few major publications. In the early 1900s there were over 21,000 newspapers in the US (source), and in the early 2000s everyone had a blog. Now newsletters are having their moment. Substack (which I use for Spam Mail) promises a ‘better’ business model for individual journalists and writers, but Chang astutely argues Substack won’t fix the core issues of mainstream media. Given historical precedent, I agree.

If you visit Substack’s website, you’ll see leaderboards of the top twenty-five paid and free newsletters; the writers’ names are accompanied by their little circular avatars. The intention is declarative—you, too, can make it on Substack. But as you peruse the lists, something becomes clear: the most successful people on Substack are those who have already been well-served by existing media power structures. Most are white and male; several are conservative.

How to get over ‘never good enough’ (Psyche / Margaret Rutherford)

Read this. It breaks down destructive perfectionism and gives real, practical advice to combat it.

Perfectly Hidden Depression (2019) – is based on how a dangerous kind of perfectionism-fuelled depression can affect someone’s life; how even if someone scores low on a standard depression inventory, they can be living with deep-seated emotional difficulties and unresolved traumatic experiences that might ultimately threaten their will to live. This is the syndrome I call ‘perfectly hidden depression’.

If you ❤️ what you read share this with a friend to Claim Your Brand New PS 5.