I'm going to be real with you here: I haven't used this website nearly enough. I could say I'm busy with day-job stuff and my many projects, but I'm really not. At the very least, not enough that I don't make time to trawl through the absolute sludge of modern social media. And oh how I trawl. I really get down in the fucking muck of the Twitter "For You" timeline, I even go down into the comments section of whatever post I'm so fascinated, disgusted, confused or amused by. One by one I pointlessly try to block the ever-growing swarm of ticks that just rephrase the original post, that parrot a paragraphs-long ChatGPT hallucination that they couldn't even be bothered to proofread, much less write; blue ticks that try to bait angry dunks, copy-paste the real replies and bury them under their boosted bullshit, or just straight-up spew random nonsense hoping for 4 cents' worth of engagement. And I think I know what I'm doing there. I'm pretty sure I'm wishing it was 2019 or 2020, when the comments section would yield a meaningful explanation, a tasteful joke or an artful dunk, even if the memes trended a lot more gaudy back then. But as I let the stupid phone suck all my serotonin out through my eyeballs, on a deeper level I do know what I'm really doing. I'm wishing it was 2006, that I was roleplaying on a MUSH and chatting on MSN and waiting for my friends to get on Phantasy Star Online. I want to be checking Hell is a Forum or TheFriendSociety, or, I mean fuck it, even 4chan was good once, long before the Stormfront cretins astroturfed the place hard enough to make impressionable new posters feel like they were the weird ones for not being racist.
And why am I not still doing that, anyway? Well, the forums are gone. MSN is long gone too, the MUSH or MUCK or MUD or whatever it was fared about as well, and as a 32-year-old with obligations I just can't find it in me to level a new PSO character to 200. But really, there's a lot of things that have survived. IRC servers are still alive, if much quieter. There's new forums, there's old forums that survived, there's sites to browse and games to play and so much more to do than just stare slack-jawed at social media. So why, then, do Twitter and YouTube monopolize most of my free time?
The short answer is: people are there. Almost everyone I know online will check Twitter at some point during any given day. It is, despite the new management's best efforts and the old management's worst blunders, still extremely good as a low-pressure social environment for casual chatting. It very literally fulfills the original promise of the internet: instant worldwide communication. What we end up doing with that kind of network is often dumbfucked, whether externally driven by black-box algorithms that gleefully promote conflict to generate content, or just because there exists something of a troll in all of us, but the promise has been so thoroughly fulfilled we take it for granted; so granted that we let Facebook fall years ago from the place to plan a party to a hellish AI-generated slop trough for boomers, who once told us for all our childhoods to 'never trust anything you read on the internet', to now chug misinformation and modern chainmail like so many Michelob Ultras on an overcast day.
There's another answer hidden in that one, though, a more personal one. It's that the old internet operates within a climate of openness I'm simply no longer accustomed to in the modern climate. When you connect to an IRC server, anyone who feels like it can /whois your name and find out your IP. The average level of sincerity is unfathomable after a good 10 years of saying "this rocks" when something sucks. Your Twitter follower count does not follow you onto SomethingAwful or NeoGAF. When you post in a forum thread, it is not just washed away as quickly as it came down the endless waterfall of a "timeline," it sits there, and everyone else has to look at it every time they check that thread, and everyone is free to respond to it in perpetuity. There was a time we all believed "once something is on the internet, it's there forever" - we knew it, because it was true. And yet, on a long enough timeline - and more importantly, especially on a platform-based internet, it's false. You will wake up today and see this week's "Main Character of Twitter" generating post after post, and you will wake up this time next week and the posts will be long-buried, the character will be forgot, we will all have moved on. You can still find them if you're looking for them, but you can find most anything you're looking for on the internet; why would you be looking for Bean Dad? Do you even remember who that was, or what he did, or what people were saying about him? Or did the words Bean Dad just get stuck in a wrinkle in your brain and leave the rest behind, like so many other digestible little nuggets of discovery-algorithm-friendly Content passing you by? (For the record, I think Bean Dad was some guy who watched his kid fail to open a can of beans for like, an hour, and just didn't help at all, then went on the internet to pat himself on the back for being so good at parenting that he can't even teach his kid how to use a can opener.)
Lately, though, I'm disillusioned with timelines. I need something more spiritually fulfilling than 280-character shitposts with instant feedback. I don't really care if I miss the next Bean Dad. I think a lot of people feel like this, and their answer is to 'just unplug.' But I don't see why I should unplug so dramatically as to forsake the entire internet. I have spent most of my life on the internet and I do not regret it. The internet lets me talk to people on the other side of the world in real-time. I like doing that. I have met friends on here who became so close that I moved in with them. I have met friends on here that I fell in love with. I have no interest in completely unplugging myself from this. What I want to do instead is try to use the internet more consciously. To double back from all the dark patterns and algorithmic-slop brainrot bullshit and remember the internet is a lot bigger than 3 or 4 websites. I'm not going to act like now that I've said this I'll just completely disappear from Twitter or Bluesky or whatever else comes along, because compulsively scrolling down Feeds is a habit I have deeply engrained over more than a decade and also, again, everyone is there. But ideally the next time I'm thinking of spinning up a "thread" maybe I will forego the mental microwave-chicken-nuggets of dopamine to open up Notepad instead and actually compose my thoughts in a format where I don't have to navigate around a 280-character limit, on a website where nobody is incentivized to make 2 cents by replying "Wow such beautiful 😍 The" to it forty times in a row.
I mean, I dunno. Maybe.