Why I Built Slowclap

There’s a point at which noise becomes silence. The fans and air conditioners struggling to keep up with the oppressive heat fade into the background, but they’re still there, humming, drilling into my temples. Later I’ll wonder why I’m having trouble focusing. Before bed I’ll turn off one of the fans and then “Oh… That’s what quiet sounds like.”

Sometimes it’s easier to notice the absence of a thing than the thing itself. We acclimate. People are resilient. That’s what they say, anyways.

Last year, we bought a new house and started fostering to adopt a kid in the same month. “This is going to be the hardest month of our life.” I said, a smile stretching across my face. I was wrong, but hey, at least we still have the house.

This sort of thing is hard for me. Not the kid I was convinced was going to be mine pretending that she’s happy to go home because she can’t bear to disappoint her mother. Not saying goodbye to a kid who I spent the last year pouring every ounce of energy into helping, and her running onto the bus like it was any other day. Those are the sorts of thing I’ve always been remarkably good at.

“Oh… That’s what quiet sounds like.”

No, what’s hard for me is being a human. I like to let my work speak for me. I’ve heard that’s honorable, but for some reason I’ve been spending a lot of time self reflecting recently, and I’m fairly sure it’s just cowardly. When your work speaks for itself, you don’t have to. When it’s a character in a story getting their heart broken it’s not yours. When it’s a character telling a bad joke it can still be funny even when it’s not funny. I can be funny, but you really have to get to know me.

I’m really hoping I can be funny here. With you. Probably not in this first post though. Maybe in post number two. For now, I’ll let my work speak for me.

I built slowclap to help people. Everywhere I look there’s someone building things despite the world crumbling around them. Stupid stuff, pointless stuff. Memes and jokes and heartfelt posts and helpful information shared for free.

Everywhere I look there’s people refusing to give up on their dreams despite the omnipresent hate and greed. It’s so easy to look at the world today and think that everyone is in it for themselves, but I can spend five minutes hanging out in the pockets of the internet that haven’t been commodified and even in half of the ones that have and prove that thought wrong.

I could tell you that I had the idea for slowclap over a decade ago. I could stroke my beard like Nostradamus and say I saw all this coming. I could tell you that it took until recently that I felt confident enough to build it. I could tell you it’s the platform that I want as a writer. One that lets me write and let people see the weird dumb way I open up my heart and hope they see something in that worth supporting. I could tell you I built it because I genuinely think that shifting the balance, even a little, towards people showing appreciation for the amazing stuff people are building could fix so much of what’s broken on the internet.

But the truth is that’s none of that is why I built it now. I built it now because I lost my daughter. I built it now because sometimes when something is broken you just need to fix something else.