I deleted everything I said on Reddit
(you should too)
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I was a little drunk and pissed off about the Internet Archive lawsuits (the article is ironically hidden behind a paywall; toggle reader view to read for free).
The creation of this website marked a turning point in my relationship with the internet as it currently exists. This was foreran by abandoning my Twitter account sometime prior to the start of the pandemic. When I noticed that every interaction started to feel like an attack, I knew I had to leave. I’m still recovering from the mindset that site put me in. Being surrounded by terminally-online discourse, bad-faith arguments, and interaction bait does not make your skin thicker; it makes you a paranoid and aggressive animal devoid of the ability to trust others or hold a normal conversation. You don’t need me to tell you that this is by design because the sickos at Twitter (and Instagram, and Facebook, and Reddit, and TikTok, and…) have discovered that this is when you are at your most profitable, as a highly-malleable product to sell to advertisers and other interested parties.
When I made this website, I did so because I believed/believe in a future return to an unprofitable, decentralized internet; digital houses not colonized into some monstrous digital metropolis, but dispersed evenly across the world-wide countryside and occasionally collected into small communities.
Like cities, social media websites are otherwise-empty shell-containers. They are nothing besides a location in which to store content (videos, images, interactions, etc.).
Users create the value, sometimes by virtue of their mere presence on the platform. There are a lot of ways to look at this relationship, "free labour" being one of them.
The owners of social media platforms would like you to believe that their website has the inherent value of providing a place of congregation; a centralized place where
all of a type of content or style of interaction can be found without having to look very far. I believe that this is the very concept that baited internet users out of their personal websites,
webrings, and small forum communities in the first place. In theory, convenience like this isn't necessarily a bad thing, but the purpose of social media is obviously not as
mutualistic as this idea suggests.
The actual value is now twofold, “effective ad space” being the devil we already know. The other, newer, more disgusting value social media platforms generate on their own is through data-scraping.
Of course, both of these values are intrinsically tied to your continued presence on, and use of, the platform. If everyone simply stopped using Facebook and Instagram,
even if they left all their previous posts intact, Meta would fold within a week (and what a nice thing to watch that would be).
Genuinely mutualistic platforms exist, where the users and their value-adding contributions exist in symbiosis with the container.
These are websites kept online by the donations and volunteer efforts of the communities they support.
People donate because they can spare a few dollars each, and the continued existence of the website is important to them.
One must only look as far as Archive of Our Own as a good example.
In sum, a website as a shell-container should stay in its lane. It is analogous to a market square or a courtyard—an empty framework, and that's it.
Why on Earth would it need to turn a profit?
I began the work of erasing what traces of myself that could be found through a Google search (besides YouTube, the only major platform I still hold a candle for). It wasn’t enough for me to delete my Reddit accounts. Again, I was angry. I wanted to hurt the people I felt were a significant part of the problem that led to the current procedural destruction of the Internet Archive. At the very least, I couldn’t sleep thinking that they could continue to profit off of anything I had made. I used a tool called Redact to transform all of my posts and comments into gibberish, then I deleted my accounts. Did this “hurt” Reddit? Not really, no. However, I do feel relieved knowing that I have no stake in that site anymore. It is the least I can do to not be a part of the problem, and I intend to continue this effort on other platforms until I’m no longer tied to this era of the internet at all.
