keep_it_neat

Do you remember when the internet was neat?

When you could open a browser and stumble onto weird, fun, useful, hand-made things — things people built because they wanted to share something. When apps did one thing well instead of nagging you every time you open them. When you didn't have to scroll past 2,000 words of "let me tell you about my neighbor's grandmother" to get to a recipe.

It's not like that anymore. Ads, trackers, accounts, push notifications, dark patterns, upsells, "are you sure you want to leave?" nags — most apps that used to do one useful thing now exist mostly to extract your time and attention.

Cory Doctorow has a word for it: enshittification. The slow decay of platforms as they prioritize extracting from users over serving them.

I started Keep It Neat as a small series of replacement apps for things I do every day. No ads. No tracking. No nonsense. Just the actual thing.