Defaults and Taste

This morning before heading to work, I read Wiwi’s post, Be the Default. It resonated deeply with me, and made me want to share a few recent thoughts of my own.

When people aren’t quite sure what they’re supposed to do, if just one person steps up and shows that “you can do it this way,” that behavior very likely becomes the “default.” …Once it’s set, changing it is extraordinarily difficult. — Wiwi

I really liked the examples in the piece as well. Living in Fukuoka now, I see plenty of signs in the subway stating that people can stand side by side in two lines and shouldn’t walk on escalators. In Fukuoka, people mostly stand on the left (most of Japan stands on the left, whereas Osaka stands on the right).

Despite constant reminders that standing side by side is fine, people still instinctively leave the other side open. Although official campaigns have recently led to more people standing in two rows, the vast majority still leave the right side clear.

Standing on the right often comes with an invisible pressure. No one has ever directly hurried me along, but I’ve heard people click their tongues behind me. Tokyo takes this to an even greater extreme: in major stations during rush hour, if you don’t clear a path and hold up the crowd, the pressure is intense. Even on single-file escalators where leaving a lane open is impossible, people will simply charge up them as if they were stairs.

Another thought relates to SEO. In early 2025, my blog inexplicably lost traffic and got deindexed by Google.

Around the same time, to share my life and observations in Japan, I launched another site called 日名遊實 (Hina Yumi), focusing more on practical tips and information.

日名遊實 | 一起探索最真實的日本 日名遊實是由愷開設立的部落格，致力於撰寫日本大小事，並揉合自己的觀點把我看到的日本呈現給讀者 日名遊實 | 一起探索最真實的日本

As it turned out, articles I considered genuinely helpful barely got any SEO traffic or rankings. Instead, a post that simply listed Japan’s top companies by market capitalization received the most exposure—and all it did was list those rankings. The original intent of SEO is to surface the most useful content for readers, so in a sense, it isn’t entirely unreasonable.

The most “useful” piece of content for readers isn’t necessarily a good piece of writing. Still, seeing so many AI-generated content-farm articles occupying the top SEO spots feels disheartening. How did today’s web end up rewarding this kind of output?

I’m not against using AI. But when obvious, unedited AI output—stuffed with keywords just to game rankings, leading to pages cluttered with interstitial ads and bloated text—becomes the norm, it turns into exactly what Wiwi described: a default. Once everyone adopts it, fixing it becomes nearly impossible.

Recently, I’ve been reading a book called Filterworld, which explores how algorithms shape our culture and taste.

The book quotes Voltaire’s definition of taste: “To have taste, it is not enough to see and know the beauty of a work. One must feel it, be moved by it; nor is it enough to feel it vaguely; one must discern all its nuances.”

I think this is the best articulation of taste I’ve encountered recently. Taste is being able to feel what is good, and articulate why it is good.

Alongside blogging, I’ve also been experimenting with short-form videos. Given my current rhythm of life, I know I don’t have the bandwidth for long-form video production. Yet whenever I make a short video, I find myself thinking about how to cater to the audience and craft things people will like. The background music, hooks, captions—content filtered by algorithms has grown increasingly homogenized, and ever more boring.

When trying new things, rather than calling something terrible before even giving it a shot, I think it’s much cooler to actually do it and only then critique it. For instance, I think someone who completes their master’s and PhD at NTU and then declares higher education useless is cool; I think someone who makes 100 YouTube videos and then tells everyone to escape YouTube is cool; I think someone who builds ten products using AI coding and then concludes that having a product alone is useless is cool.

I’ve gone a bit off-topic, but in any case, I want to keep carrying the torch of setting defaults!