Neocities.org

Bravo! I enjoyed reading! I love these quotes, "How internet discourse change if we allowed people to learn in public, which of necessity means making mistakes?" and "good internet just as importantly depends on our tolerance for incompleteness and imperfection." Finding human pockets of the internet is what keeps me surfing and doom scrolling. Those fleeting moments give me hope.

Thanks so much! =)

"everyone’s feeds became well-crafted soundbites", accidentally read as well-scrambled soundbites and it seems to fit my overall feeling of social media sites. I could relate a lot to your writings on academia as well (I also left, for various reasons). I made a short comic panel about social media recently with a similar conclusion that going at our own pace instead of feeling pressured to post seems better.

Overall I could relate a lot to your writing and it was kind of refreshing, actually, to just read someone else feeling frustrated about the whole experience

This was a great piece of writing. Very relatable too. Made me think a lot about my own social media use and experiences (I'm currently on Mastodon, but I have my reservations) among other things.

i love your distinction between a private journal and a public blog -- i think the web has made externally-oriented the default rather than internally-oriented! if we write something but no one reads it, what was the point? similarly if we had a thought/reflection. i often wonder whether we'd be happier/healthier if we were internally-oriented primarily, if sitting and daydreaming were a natural activity on its own.

Thank you all for your kind words. I was kind of frustrated by how much time this essay sucked up, so I am glad that my curmudgeonly opinions resonate.

Also, sorbier, you remind me of the Pascal quote: "All of man’s misfortune comes from one thing, which is not knowing how to sit quietly in a room." A good reminder humans have been dealing with this long before the internet.