Mainstreaming the Internet Was a Mistake
After almost 30 years of sharing myself online, something has changed.
I can't pinpoint exactly when it changed, but I do know it's tied to exactly who the average internet user is these days. In the early days of my internet adventures, the people you'd find here were here intentionally. To participate in what the internet had to offer in the 90s and early 00s, you had to show up on purpose. You had to have a genuine interest in it and put in some effort to be here.
Because of that, the communities that existed were populated by curious and open-minded people looking to engage with similarly inclined people. The assumption was that we all had more in common than not, and our differences were what made us interesting to each other. Good faith was a major driving principle of online discourse. It wasn't universal or perfect, sure, but it was present enough to make the whole thing feel fundamentally different to how it feels now.
You'd eventually become familiar to everyone in these communities, so anything you posted would usually be contextually understood in relation to what they know about you. Nothing you said was seen as a completely independent thought that couldn't possibly have any nuance to it. What seemed like a half-baked opinion was probably part of a larger conversation. When I started blogging, I was writing specifically for people who either knew me, or at least had the capacity to assume nuance.
But as the internet started to become more ubiquitous, the type of people using it expanded to include, well... everyone. And unfortunately, "everyone" sucks.
Context collapse started happening. You'd post something for the audience you'd built of people who "get" you, and suddenly, it's being shared with people who don't. I want to say this started with the advent of microblogging where it was hard to convey nuance with only 160 words1, but it was happening on blogs and forums too. Random people were showing up without the ability to infer that the context behind the content and jumping to conclusions and making assumptions based on their own limited view.
The worst part of it is not the resulting conflict, but the experience of being judged by someone who has no idea who I am but is completely confident in their assessment of me, based on a contextless fragment of something I've said. I know I can't control how others decide to view me, but when they don't even have the full and correct information to work from, it feels unfair. You just can't fuck with the neurodivergent's sense of justice like that.
It actually reminds me so much of high school. Your reputation was often shaped by people who had never even spoken to you beyond anything surface level and weren't particularly interested in doing so. They didn't know you. They only knew that one thing you said or did and that was it. That was who you were to them. And unlike high school, the internet doesn't end. Even if you manage to get rid of one bully, there's always another gleefully waiting to take whatever damage they have out on you.
That's what happened to me earlier today and why I'm writing this now. Some entirely random person decided that a joke I made about a meme2 on a Bluesky profile that I literally only had for close friends (so, people who know me) was such a heinous crime that I deserved to have them go through previous posts I'd written in a vulnerable state and use them against me. All whilst trying to tell me that I'm the bad guy for being ✨mean✨ about a meme3.
While it's true that Bluesky profiles cannot be private, I had set my interaction settings to followers only. From that, it should have been obvious that my profile was for my friends. But I unfortunately didn't know I still had quoting enabled, so this allowed for someone who didn't know me from a bar of soap to come in and literally bully me for a joke that wasn't for them.
This is what has changed about the internet. We have to share it with an abundance of people like this who believe that it's possible to form strong and accurate opinions about people they do not know based on a single post. AND that it's totally acceptable to let them know because of course, your opinion is the only one that matters when it comes to someone's literal lived experience of being themselves.
In my nearly 30 years online, I've shared a lot of myself. My opinions, my vulnerabilities, and my terrible jokes. I'm not going to stop doing that because this space and the people in it matter to me, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't wish we could go back to a time when the internet was for the curious and open-minded. For those looking for community and not a fight. There's still a little of that going on, of course, but it's in nooks and crannies now. The World Wide Web was ruined by normies.
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I do think social media made it worse though. Especially after capitalism got its grubby little hands on it. Reach = engagement = revenue. And of course, outrage travels faster than nuance ever could. ↩
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I deactivated my account as soon as it happened because I was already iffy on the idea of being there and this was a final straw type situation, so I don't have the exact meme to share. But it was something along the lines of "I don't know about that because I'm employed". My quote was something like "Yeah, let's blame capitalism for the reason we are ignorant 😂". ↩
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I do have to give this person props for actually checking my profile before coming for me, but they did it specifically to find information to directly hurt me, not to get context. They just wanted ammo. ↩
I largely agree with your post, but I want to take issue with framing it as a problem caused by the internet becoming more populated. The early web was incredibly homogenous due to its limited accessibility, and those with access all having to be relatively privileged. Indeed, back when it was only available to universities it had a single culture and a singular "netiquette", where September became known as the time of the year when a bunch of new users would be forced to assimilate to that culture. It's not a time to romanticize, particularly when contrasting it with the current internet which is far more accessible and diverse.
To be clear, we agree on the actual issue you're describing though: the internet is full of strangers! I believe this is largely caused by social media being designed to keep you endlessly scrolling across endless posts and people, which you cannot hope to get to know the nuances of individually. You're systemically incentivized to group people based on assumptions made from a handful of their posts at most. It both dehumanizes people and removes the social consequences of being mean to each other, which causes "everyone" to be negative and bullies (and really, I don't think people are intrinsically mean or bullies; we're all products of our environments). Plus social media is _also_ designed such that users and posts can go viral, which means specific posts get tons of comments from people who don't know each other, exacerbating the issue.
The reason I think we should frame the problem as "the internet is full of strangers" instead of "the internet has too many people" is because it means the solution isn't to kick people off the Internet or re-homogenize the internet. It's to design our social media so we have more repeated interactions with the same people, so they are people with nuance, while the network as a whole remains nice and diverse. We can and should still encourage diversity within one's friend group, and ensure the network is "porous", rather than closed off networks creating echo chambers. I think that'll lead to a much more humane web.
You're right! I did originally have a paragraph about not totally romanticising the old internet because it did have its downsides, but it didn't feel quite right and I couldn't figure out how to rewrite it, so I ended up omitting it.
I definitely don't want the diversity of the current internet to disappear, just the inability of many of the people on it to handle said diversity! 😊
oh no! you made a joke on the inernet!!!
seriosly tho fuck normias lol
Right?!
I'm writing a similar post right now, actually... About how the discovery of *revenue* tied to the internet kinda ruined it for everybody (those of us who were here before that, and those of us who had never had the opportunity to see that things online could be different, actually). I'm sorry you were bullied out of a social space. Unfortunately, this is the state of the world we live in, and it fucking sucks. I feel sad for friends who forgot the earlier days and are stuck in walled gardens of social media, but are so comfortably chained to it they're unwilling to "make the switch" and rediscover the open web. Oh well.
It's especially frustrating that even with offering to help my friends set up their own spaces to make it easier for them, they'd still rather stay on social media. ðŸ˜