My Woes on Carrd

It's not too rare for a piece of anything made for professional adults to consume is eaten up by a disproportionate percentage of fourteen year old girls.

But what if it was a website instead, made for businesses, and again, used mostly by the fourteen year old girls of the web? That's Carrd's reputation for you, other than as anyone's extended twitter about me page, a replacement for tumblr about autobiographies, it's the new and hip way to introduce yourself to the web. Easy to use, drag and drop, place, write, style, done. That's your page! Kinda like a very easy version of Neocities. And again, this was made for...businesses. Professionals. People with things to do, products to sell. And then Twitter came along, realized that unlike their site, Carrd has no precious character limit to describe every bit of your personality and life and market yourself as a niche micro celebrity, and went at it. That's what Carrd is now, the about me's, the kinlists, the do not interact if pages.

It's basically a more lame, watered down, and sensitive as fuck Neocities.

So why does Carrd piss me off?

Well, it's mostly the ones who use it who piss me off, but there's so many things I could discuss involving the site itself. For one, there's a definite lack of freedom, as with all code-free drag n' drop editors of websites or games or whatnot. They're easy for normies to use, but at the cost of freedom. You have plenty at the disposal, sure, but the general layout and look of the site means that with what they give you, there's only a few designs that will look good, pleasing, or bring the eye towards the guy who made it. And you've probably seen them everywhere. Oh, look at it, it's just like a file viewer and a window, except pastel mint! And there's a Korean girl in the upper left corner! Sooooo pleasing, I guess. Oh, what about roman numerals instead of any descriptor to your pages? Now I'm sure to see what anime boy is literally you before finding if you want me to follow you or not. And don't get me started on the disaster known as scenecore or any -core for that matter. Webcore carrds are genuinely ironic.

But what if you want to do more than this? What if you...wanted a custom cursor? Or things falling in the background? Music on the page? More than 50 drag n' drops on your bio? Well, better coin up, sucker. Carrd Pro time. That's their subscription services that the cool and edgy kinnies use and share accounts with their friends and groomers to get all of that done, because simply embedding cool fancy code is paywalled. And having more than three sites. And not having a "Made with Carrd" thingadoo on the bottom of everything. And uploading content over 2MB or whatso. There's still a file size limit, even on the biggest tier. Fuck, even having a favicon is paylocked. And all of this comes for about twenty dollars a year, or if you want to get really fancy and go for an even bigger plan with bigger files and more sites and even more ways to build a website that you could learn from 2-4 hours on W3Schools, fifty a year. Some of this is useless knickknack for bragging rights, but some of it is literally just how websites should work. You can't download your Carrd without hucking up the fifty, by the way.

So basically, get limtied to a few styles because nothing else sucks, and pay 20 a year to have little sparkles when you click. What a wonderful way to make money.

Go back to why people who use it suck, Lobst.

So, about the people who use Carrd. The entire brain process of using Carrd to explain who you are has lead to an epidemic of forgetting your elementary-middle school internet safety lessons, and now, oversharing is the norm. I've seen people use NOT oversharing on your Carrd as a bullet point on a call out, mostly dealing with race, which is as expected knowing that I read Twitter callouts for fun. I've gathered a few examples here of the new norm of "who am I online?", where instead of introducing via talent and hobby, it's your identity points.

Notice how none of these really have a catch, a reason to be mutuals. Of course, they're on another page, but it still feels sad and silly that the first thing you see is enough information to doxx a few of these individuals. Did you know that you only need one's age, state, and first name to wittle down the results to around ten or so individuals. Swap around a few of those for other basic identifiers, you can still get a close view at a doxx. That's bad, to say the least.

Not to mention the sheer amount of non-identifying personal information in these bios. Using mental illness as a standpoint, a personality trait, a way to paint one in a romantic sadness, has become all too common. Hell, I did it a year ago, I'm still growing out of all of it, I'm anonymizing myself once more, disconnecting, and it's more than freeing.

But what if I still want to use Carrd?

Well, for one, share as little information as possible about yourself. Your basic information should only really be what you want to be called, and an age approximation. Do not make yourself vunerable to those who can take advantage of that. Fill it up with things you enjoy, so you can easily be found by others that share your hobbies or favorite bands. And for that matter, make sure your page is readable.

Peak example of what to not do with a carrd. Oversharing, nobody needs to know that you wrote that fanfic, because that's disgusting, what the hell do your homework. And about the layout, even taking these screenshots made me need to get an Advil. I'm serious. The background is flashing neons, everything is a gif, sparkles, it's so ugly. There's more to it, and for the faint of heart, here it is. It's become an inside joke within my group.

Share the misery with friends!

As a small wrap-up, Carrd isn't to blame as a platform for a lot of the glaring issues with it, well, except the pricing plans, because that's bullshit. Most of the problems with Carrd falls on the user, and if you can avoid those problems, feel free. Or just make a Neocities for that extra freedom, and for a lot of effort. Actually, no, just make a Neocities, gives you great bragging rights as well.