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The past few days I have been refreshing twitter almost non-stop. It’s the same morbid fascination as you have towards a car accident. Elon’s approach to ‘management’ is fun to watch from a distance — and must be deeply frustrating to go through.
As a millennial, I have survived the death or slow collapse of many a social site. I started socialising way-back-when using MSN Chat, AIM, IRC and the like. Graduated to MySpace, LiveJournal, FF.net… all gone now (well, except LiveJournal, that was just sold to the Russians and became a shell of its former self).
Back in the day, the internet was this incredible place. I ran a little fan forum for the Turks, from Final Fantasy 7, and somehow met a group of people who would go on to become life-long friends. So much so that they are coming to Thanksgiving next week <3
But various things have turned the internet into this stressful, wretched, angry place where everyone is either trying to get your money or your attention. The quirky little hobby websites have been replaced by soulless SEO articles… sorry, ‘listicles’. Online stores are a mess of pop-ups, count-down timers, upsells, cross-sells and limited time offers. Amazon is a disaster of random third party merchants who may, or may not, send you the item you asked for.
I’m lucky to have had the internet. As mentioned before, I met some of my closest friends online. Heck, I met my husband online!
But now? My email inbox is a swamp of spam, my twitter feed is full of strangers shouting at each other, and I’m honestly just kind of done.