Juha-Matti Santala
Community Builder. Dreamer. Adventurer.

Blog posts in category “Opinion”

Rare opinion pieces about topics.

  • Apr 30th, 2025
    Systems of the dead stagnate

    Creators turn their ideas into products and frameworks to sell you the idea. And then other people follow those to the point and become purists who think any change or improvement is no longer following the System™. Don’t be like that: find inspiration from others’ ideas but don’t tie yourself to a stagnated systems of the dead.

  • Apr 9th, 2025
    Life without advertisements is a great life

    Even in modern society, filled to the brim with ads, it’s still possible to reduce the amount of advertising that reaches you to quite a minimum. And let me tell you, it makes life so much better.

  • Feb 5th, 2025
    Look for deep discussions, not a mentorship

    I have recently gained new ideas for how to approach finding mentors through deep discussions and long-term perspective.

  • Jan 1st, 2025
    Human curation over algorithmic recommendations

    I want to learn and explore new things based on recommendations by other people rather than machines design to maximise engagement.

  • Sep 18th, 2024
    Do one thing well and communicate with others

    I want software that does one thing, does it well and interoperates with other software so I can use the ones that provide user experience I enjoy rather than being tied to a single option by a big tech corporate.

  • Jul 24th, 2024
    Art forgery, LLMs and why it feels a bit off

    There’s a phenomenon that explains why art forgeries and LLM generated pieces spark negative feelings in us even if the output is as good or even better than one made by a human.

  • Jun 30th, 2024
    Why a personal site rather than social media presence?

    Kev Quirk answered the question in his blog and I wanted to add my two cents on top. It’s a topic close to my heart as a website owner and personal web advocate.

  • May 25th, 2024
    A lot of advice is a product of survivorship bias

    Chuck Wendig wrote nicely about the survivorship bias in advice writers give.

  • May 22nd, 2024
    Inflexible systems grind my gears

    It’s a tragedy when a computer saying no can cause an otherwise doable interaction to not take place.

  • Apr 3rd, 2024
    Sharing podcast episodes is weird

    Podcasts operate on top of open RSS but trying to share an episode with a friend is just a weird and bad experience. In a radically better world, it wouldn’t have to be.

  • Jan 27th, 2024
    Please, don’t force me to log in

    The current accelerating trend of requiring accounts and logins for everything has to stop.

  • Feb 8th, 2023
    In defense of Quote Toots

    Three blog posts in a trenchcoat: I write about quote toots (and why I'd like to have them), the desire to have same features in all apps and the problem of monopoly over content & delivery.

  • Jan 19th, 2022
    Rant: Please stop ruining the search

    If I want to watch a Nicolas Cage movie in Netflix on a Friday night, I'd search for Nicolas Cage and expect to get movies starring him as a result. I don't and it sucks.

  • Oct 17th, 2013
    Computer illiterate generations – what should we do?

    There has been a lot of discussions during the last years about the IT education of young people. Today, the topic once again popped out in Finnish news when Finnish Broadcasting Company wrote a news piece about the level of IT education in Finnish elementary schools.