This is my first blog post on my long-abandoned NeoCities site. I will try to update more often, really.
The old internet always held a kind of magic for me, getting lost in reading other peoples' long-form thoughts, collected images, and whatever else they felt like sharing. It feels like going to an estate sale and getting an intimate peek into what someone's life was like; seeing all the things they have collected over their lives. It feels calm and meditative, just a peaceful visit. This is in stark contrast with most social media, which feels like standing on a busy street corner. You hear a never-ending flow of snippets of conversation, and your mind works overtime trying to piece it all together into a cohesive narrative. I used to pride myself in being able to look through a social media feed and deduce whatever the trends were, whatever the popular memes were, without even directly coming into contact with said meme or trend. Just hearing the talk was enough to inform my worldview.
I stopped using social media a couple weeks ago. My only holdout is youtube. Over the span of several months, I have been slowly eliminating the social media sites/apps that I use, but two weeks ago I finally stopped using reddit, my biggest time-suck. I want to say I stopped because of enshittification, but that's not why. I watched the algorithm change, I saw it shifting to show me content that it deduced I'd want to see. That bugged me, sure, as I don't like feeling as if I'm in an algorithm bubble, but that's not what pushed me over the edge.
I was scrolling through my home page one morning, when I saw a post on r/collapse. The OP was writing about the presidential debate, and how we have no hope, that we're witnessing our country collapse in real time, etc. As I read, I could feel my pulse rising and I felt that familiar disconnect of fight/flight panic, but I managed to close the tab and step away before it spiralled into a full-blown panic attack. Since then I decided that reddit was doing me more harm than good.
To be honest, it feels weird not being tapped into social media. I found out about the assassination attempt of donald trump an entire day after it happened, via a youtube video. Part of me wanted to go and see The Discourse, but honestly my mind feels better being oblivious, so why would I go back?