oreohive activity log

'Okay, but for real though, why are you here?'

2025-02-28 | oreo

A little anecdotal story of how a project that merely started from a seed of hope to express myself has turned into an initiative to help others do the same.

'Who am I?'

I think it could go without saying that a decent portion of us Gen Z-ers don't really know who we are. But I'm going to say it anyway, because I think it's important here.

It's a commonly raised question as to 'why', though, especially when we start talking about gender, gender / sexual identity, and the kinds of things that can revolve these things.

After all, what could render such a seemingly widespread force of change, almost as if a little 'Order 66' planted in the backs of minds across almost an entire generation suddenly began showing fruits, except rather than instructing the defeat of Jedi Knights, it brought on a virtually insatiable lust to see the downfall of an oppressive, heteronormative and 'cisnormative' society?

Remember social media? Of course you do; you were probably scrolling mindlessly through TikTok, Snapchat or Instagram just ten minutes ago, assuming most of my Gen Z peers are much to go by.

Social media has become a pretty widespread cauldron of mixing different cultures together, to the startling degree that you can very literally fly to the other side of the world just to see an almost identically-presenting population doing just the same TikTok dances you saw moments before you borded the plane.

What if this is a double-edged sword, though?

I feel it could be, and I also think that one of these edges may be very frightening indeed for the future of individuality and the diversity it promises for so many to encourage.

A previous article of mine

Now, not too long ago, I pushed out an article about an extension to the latest Nintendo Switch title in one of my very favourite franchises of all time.

Without delving into it too deeply, Splatoon 3's Side Order focuses on an overall fight against a hugely powerful force within a digital, fabricated realm called the 'Memverse'. This force is ominously named Order, and it wants to see you stripped mercilessly and stripped raw of your individuality, identity and sense of self.

While this isn't so explicitly suggested in the game, the messaging is very clear to me that these are the kinds of sentiments the game stands for.

If you want to learn more about how I feel this is accomplished in Side Order's beautiful storytelling, you can check out that article after this one, Regardless, though, I more or less conclude it with the sentiment that we must preserve individuality, the freedom to self-express, our democracy and our individual liberties with everything we have.

I suggest, in essence, that every drop of energy our very beating hearts can muster should be devoted to preserving these liberties we hold and share, should a situation call for it that puts these liberties under threat.

We should stand against oppressive societies, say no to oligarchy, say no to authoritarianism and say yes to democracy (looking at you right now, America. Enough said.).

I'm convinced with a starkly solid certainty (even in today's wishy-washy norms of senseless brainfood) that no, you will not convince me that a woman's autonomy over their own body is a matter of politics, such 'discussion' or debate, especially when 'politics' looks like this.

Not when the scientific tools and methodologies are there, and people around the world have worked so hard to conjure them for widespread medical use and adoption.

The paint pot of self expression and culture

Now, when I wrote this article, I conjured in my mind an imaginary, metaphorical 'paint pot'; a bucket in which the virtually countless could mix together all their ideas, thoughts and feelings, to create something of beauty.

This paint pot would be a magical place in which ideas accepting of others would be able to mix with one another to form an unstoppable union of power, strength, and courage in self-expression and a determination to keep expression alive.

After all, that's virtually all art is; human expression articulated in such a manner that it is to represent or mean something, at the author's, painter's, drawer's, designer's, writer's, academic's discretion.

Alas, what I aimed to capture with the idea of the paint pot was that, assuming all ideas placed within were acceptng of other ones, they would live in perfect harmony, but not necessarily too separated. They would reside cohesively and without interrupting one another, but would bounce off of each other reproductively, stray away from the definitions and confines of their source 'buckets' and become something truly entirely new, breathtaking and beautiful. Remix culture.

However, what happens when this paint pot becomes so mixed in the interests of creating a 'common denominator'? What happens when you take the 'individuality' part and scrap it all in favour of making a unified sludge of nothingness in a painfully sterile lack of soul?

--

The paint bucket exists not without the preservation of individuality - is this being comprimised?

This is not something I don't feel I really stressed in this previous article, then; individuality is a key part of this 'bucket'. Without it, it can't happen. It's a cornerstone.
As such, it's important we blend these ideas in the right way. So maybe 'blend' isn't the right word? Combine? Maybe not. Concatenate?

How does any of this relate to social media, though?

Well, social media is a passive act to many of us. Despite having been what was once a very 'active' task, the exploration of the digital world around us has become very much habitual, arguably almost ritualistic in its nature and how it's woven itself into our lives, often times without really asking first.

In theory, the mass, widespread adoption of social media sounds like a net positive for self-expression and individuality, the very things we stand for. However, in practice, the commercialisation and capitalist incentives behind these platforms are, perhaps, slowly cleansing the surface of social media services to create not a bumpy, diverse wall of mixed cultures, but instead a smooth, flat, investor-pleasing canvas upon which they're to paint only their own narratives, often ones dictated by a computational algorithm designed to pick the ones that'll rake in the most cash.

Care to stick around while I elaborate?

I appreciate these are some lofty claims, but please let me bake here, because '[letting] people cook' on the internet got too boring.

--

Social media's inception; the dawn of it all

YouTube.

Need I say more? That's it, section over.

Okay, fine; I suppose not all of us were born back in like, 2011, or whenever YouTube came into being in a form even remotely resemblant of the giant, earth-shattering monster of a presence it is today.

2011? Sorry, I meant to say early 2005. You feeling old? Me too, and I'm what, like, two?

Yes, 2005 was the very dawn of that same monstrous presence we see today, after all these years of never failing to find us just the perfect obscure Spongebob meme from almost a decade prior at 2am.

Just me? Got it. Maybe I'm just too fire for the algorithm to have neutralised my tastes just yet. But let's talk about how the algorithm might still be purging those less fantastically resistant, cool and awesome to resist its gravitational pull to a future of complete unity and conformity.

Any user of the platform today will be more than familiar with its infamous recommendations system. As I've already mentioned, it's a bastion of originality in deploying just the perfect Scheißepost when you (sometimes definitely don't) need it most.

However, what if systems like it are, rather than emphasising our own quirks and individuality in allowing us to express them and explore those of others, forming a blanket of mainstream appeasement in order to cover up these bumps and imperfections in our culture, to make for a seamless coat of conformity and almost entirely uniform authority of positive-feedback-loop-driven 'trend'?

The social grey sludge

I watched this video this evening. I am so very glad to have stumbled across this video, and, by extension, its creator, for it is easily one of the very best things I've watched this year so far.

It caught my attention in being so indicative and representative of thoughts I hold and suspicions I've held for a while at this point, so I figured I'd share similar thoughts of my own here.

I don't wish for this section to drag on all too long, for I think I'd just find mysef almost aimlessly regurgitating what the video has already said so very well, so if you wish to investigate this particular topic further, I encourage you to learn for yourself how this video outlines these concepts, ideas and theories about the world we live in so very beautifully. Even if it's a longer watch, I assure you it'll almost certainly be worth it for you.

The bottom line, though, is the following:

• Back in the early days of YouTube, videos on the landing home page were manually curated by humans.
• These systems, over time, were replaced with automatic, algorithmic solutions, in which some videos were more computationally boosted.
  
  This was arguably fairly warranted by the sheer volume of content that YouTube was suddenly befuddled with, almost as if overnight (as people began feeling the urge to comply with the company's initial slogan for the product in 'broadcasting themselves').
• However, the ultimate, end goal in these algorithms has been to increase watch time, consumption time, and, ultimately, attention.
• It's said that we've started, built and developed an attention economy, especially as ads have become more and more centric to the funding / business models of these platforms, and eyes on content, along with user engagement, have reigned king and queen respectively in how these pieces of content 'should' be prioritised by these computational algorithms (which lack feelings and aim to do only what they are told).
• Ratings of 'viewer satisfaction' were engineered as efforts to boost quality content to the top of our feeds, but this ultimately meant that a generalised feed of what was successful from a blanket standpoint was to be created.
• As such, our algorithms are now 'personalised'; built to adapt based on our own viewing habits, preferences, styles, and 'satisfaction'.
• Any and all data these gargantuan companies can scrape from the bottom of a user's willingness to accept a Terms and Conditions document can constitute a greater supposed accuracy about these models and methods. As such, 'data is the new oil' in the provision of information these corporations can use to refine their models and profiles of individual users and 'customers'.
  
  This trend is only reinforced by the incessance of companies like OpenAI unethically going as far as to treat anything available on the internet as theirs, for the training of their artificial intelligence models, of which the intelligence still remains very much artificial. Credit where it's due for the transparency, though.
• In positively reinforcing what's deemed as 'trendy', though, these companies in their such algorithms create an effective grey sludge of cultures, not one that's emphasising of the individual quirks, but rather one designed to be of a 'squeaky-clean commercialism' appealling to as broad and generic an audience as possible.
  
  This leads to a one-size-fits-all mass production mill of content so generic it could probably make that one particular almost hopeless substitute teacher fall asleep.
  
  [Props to you if you're a teacher who lets on more emotion than a sandbag, by the way.
  I plan soon enough to do an article on how it can often feel like kids don't really perceive teachers as human beings and how atrocious this is, not that this typicality for some teachers to be pretty much robotic helps these matters too much.
  Thank you for helping make my time in education less agonising for my ADHD brain.]
• As such, the 'paint pot of individuality' becomes a blender of human matter and creation, ironically enough, not too dissimilar from generative AI technologies like ChatGPT and the really icky image generation stuff, of no real soul, character, or charm of its own, only the cookie-cutter character defined by the demands of widespread appeal and compliance with a mainstream.

--

What makes this place different, then?

'the oreohive organisation' is unincorporated. We are, as an organisation, barely (if at all) acknowledged as such beyond our own internal documentation, of which we have little.

We're literally two or three friends working in the back of some college courses.

Even if that may change someday, we have no intention of becoming a public company, nor such a startup.

The problem right now for these kinds of tech companies is that they must grow, and to stagnate, even in the accomplishment of some goals, is frowned upon.

For investors and shareholders, for Twitter to earn billions and billions a year still puts it in the red if that's what they were earning the year before.

Thus, there is planted deep within these corporations an incentive (and necessitation for company survival!) for perpetual financial, monetary 'growth'.

This means further and further raking in money and profits from these kinds of services, thus further and further chipping away at the user experience, and further and further bleeding us as consumers of money, free will, liberties in using their services, or some amalgamation of these degradations.

Facebook, right now, feels like ninety percent promotional AI slop, and the amount of this clearly designed to be predatory in deception (e.g. tricking 'boomers' into thinking these cakes are real and the recipes were written by humans rather than being manufactured by a generative AI) or promotional of a product or service (e.g. AI-generated marketing material) is honestly appalling, at least to me.

What happened to 'social media'? This was a point rightfully raised in the video I mentioned earlier; is the term 'social media' now disingenuous? Where has the human connection gone?

--

Our aims, then

Well, the oreohive organisation says no to this.

While we can't do anything about these mega corporations for as long as they are fuelled by the self-benefitting cycles they have generated for their countless revenue streams, we sit here in the back with our own little website.

Well and truly an 'archive of our own', I suppose.

Are we protected from the outside? Not necessarily. It's possible (and likely) that companies like OpenAI will trample all over our Terms & Ethics of Use, and use our content for generative AI training. But that'll be what that'll be.

We're not affected by a mainstream. We aim not to create a mainstream-fulfilling sludge, but rather the paint bucket I proposed, in its true nature as I invisioned of emphasising originality, not smothering it.

What we can do right now, though? Chase your originality. Chase your quirks. Love your oddities.

Cherish the you at the centre of it all.

Virtually any moral, civil human reading this who hasn't already bowed to the fate of endless capitalism, consumption and blatant consumerism is beautiful in their humanity and their differences, providing they accept those of others to ensure compatibility with the harmonious 'bucket' I talked about in that previous article.

If that's you - if you stand for equality not in the smothering of difference, but in the stitching together of diversities to create something beautiful - may we prevail in our love for each other and our differences againt this worldwide greyscaling.

While it may sound like I'm being dramatic, there's a fair amount of context I've brushed over here in order to keep things briefer than this otherwise could have been, so once again, I do encourage your consumption of the video I mentioned earlier, if anything on this internet this evening.

Also, I don't really know how I could possibly start this website on the basis of standing for human expression and the validity of human emotions without being able to take it upon myself to be a 'drama queen' every once in a while. :)

--

'Nice talk, big guy. So what are you gonna actually do, then?'

For a start, I'm not big, but thanks.

Honestly? We're not too sure. But I think I perceive a beauty in that, while we find our feet, so to speak.

My first plan of action is, once we've matured enough, to create tutorials, assets, resources, boilerplates (essentially starter packs) and guides available for free for the general public to help others set up these 'activity logs' just like I have mine here. The rebirth of the blog? BRING IT ON!!!

This, in the grand scheme of things, was actually rather easy to set up, and I can only imagine that a lot of the issues I ran into as a complete web dev novice would be caught easily by the provision of a standard, 'this works!' verified toolkit we put together and vet ourselves, once we have a bit more experience.

Other than that? We're more or less just here to cheer you on.

That idea you have? If it respects the rights of others and doesn't infringe on other people, we probably love it. Go on. You can do the thing!

We're here to create free revision resources, materials and posters for classrooms and schools around our country and around our world.

We're here to create tutorials and guides for nerdy stuff that aren't riddled with ads.

We're here to publish our Notion revision materials we make for our own studies to the world, in the public interest.

We're here to show you quote analyses in English Literature without paywalls, subscription fees or mandatory account creation.

We're here to show the world how to build a website free of loads of cookies, tons of telemetry, and all sorts of old crap in the backend slowing your browser down.

the oreohive organisation is not plagued by the chase for investor-pleasing. it's driven purely by passion and a love, not just for open source software, but for the creation of tools, assets, resources, guides and works for legitimate, ethical public interest, as an effort of expressing oneself and sharing knowledge and insights.

We're here to help people make their own cool stuff, just like we do. You can be just like us! Just check out our GitHub.

Think our code sucks? You're probably right! We're open source; you can help us grow!
Please open up an issue or a pull request; you probably have more an idea of what you're doing than us, and we'd absolutely love to hear your constructive feedback on what we could do better. :))

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Conclusion

So, that's more or less what we're largely here for. To address this problem, in one way or another.

To try our very best to encourage others to help us all in refocusing on the human, and recentring our lives and the (increasingly digital) experiences we create to put our human, organic, expressive nature first, accepting and celebrating our differences. Just how we feel it should be.

Pretty much every design choice and decision we bake into our services and experiences emphasises our humanity and organic nature.

Ever wondered why a bunch of our titles are entirely lowercase? I just think it can come off as more relaxed and casual sometimes.

I feel not everything needs to be so tightly conforming to ideas of professionalism; while there are a few things we take seriously, we're here to have fun, spread positive messages and enable people like ourselves to achieve their goals in their tech hobby projects.

As such, I like to let the human behind the screen shine through sometimes. A human sat and wrote these words for you to read right now. That human is me! Hi!!!

You're human, too. You have the power to change the world. However, our power only grows exponentially when we come together.

So, you here for the ride? We'd love to have you on board.

- oreo and the bees