the internet can be good, i promise

I’ve been posting quite a bit lately. Not on the blog, unfortunately (but expect a video soon!) - and not on social media, either. Instead, as part of my continued commitment to being a Web 1.5. partisan, I’ve been diving back into the online spaces of my youth to see how they’ve developed in the near-decade since I haven’t checked in on them - and I’ve also checked out spaces a bit older than that, too. I wanted to share some of my findings with you all, in an attempt to actually walk you through the process of leaving The Platforms™️.

I won’t bury the lede on this one - I have not actually been able to delete all my socials yet. Obviously YouTube has to stay given my intention to make video essays, and Instagram has been stubbornly but situationally useful for keeping up with local events. With that said, I’ve happily nuked my Twitter and Bluesky, and I look forward to assembling enough newsletters together to be able to finally vanquish Instagram for good (I’m about 75% of the way there, by my estimation).

But if you recall, the point of the Web 1.5. project is not merely to disengage completely with the Internet. It’s to replace your consumption of algorithmic social media feeds with consumption of self your own curated set of media publications, personal blogs, and specialized forums. I’ll cover each individually, and in doing so I can hopefully give you an idea of how to go about doing this yourself.

I - The Publications

My RSS reader of choice is NetNewsWire, and I’m overjoyed to report that the vast majority of left-of-center media publications provide RSS feeds. The first thing I did was subscribe to Jacobin, The Baffler, Dissent, NLRB Edge, and Aftermath. Even lamer publications provide them from time to time, and often times they provide a way to subscribe to an individual writer instead of the entire publication. (It’s been great to just subscribe to Elizabeth Bruenig individually instead of having to wade through the rest of The Atlantic’s sludge.) This has been a pretty massive improvement over getting my news from social media in general, and it’s been an absolutely titanic improvement over Instagram in particular.

One of the objections I sometimes hear to the Web 1.5. pitch is that leaving social media can often disconnect you with news and world events. First off, unless you are meaningfully involved in political organizing right now this second, you probably don’t need to be up-to-date on world events, and disengaging with the news will probably be a slam-dunk mental health win with far more upsides than downsides. Secondly, even if you are the sort of person who actually needs to keep up with the news, social media is a uniquely terrible place to receive and process it.

A common theme you’ll see throughout my anecdotes here is that sometimes inconvenience is good. It is, without question, more convenient to use social media as a news feed. But the nature of this convenience allows a ton of noise to block out the signal, and the sheer volume of it is very good at tricking you into thinking you’re “well-informed.” Perhaps this is not a universal experience, but one of the things that prodded me to take leaving social media more seriously was the totally endless barrage of infographics, platitudes, and GoFundMe’s that grew to such an enormous size that there was no way in the world I could vet them all to the point where I’d be comfortable believing them, let alone reposting them.

In theory, the people that you follow will perform the job of vetting for you. In practice, all of them are subject to the same immense volume of content that you are, and it is just as impossible for them to sort through it all. I have often had the experience of having a single viral post be shared on multiple Instagram stories that I follow, only to wait an hour and see another viral post debunking the previous viral post, sometimes literally back-to-back, and sometimes on the same person’s story! On some occasions there are several rival debunkings floating around simultaneously, none of which meaningfully engage with each other and many of which actively contradict each other.

Maybe this is not your experience - and I envy you for running such a tight ship. It has been mine more-or-less since I started using social media at all, and it’s with this experience in mind that I started using RSS. It’s obviously not the case that “official” media publications are perfectly accurate all the time, but takes much more time and effort to write a full article than it does to make an infographic, which tends to raise the quality and veracity of the information being presented. You might think that it also takes much more time an effort to read an article than it does an infographic, and that’s also true. That’s not a bad thing - it vastly increases the amount of information you actually retain from the things that you read, and it forces you to make more meaningful decisions about the things you actually want to see and the sources that you trust. I highly recommend it.

II - The Blogs

Many of the blogs that I’ve followed in the last two months also have RSS feeds, but their purpose is very different from the publications I mentioned. For me, blogs are how I replace the function of tweets - they provide cutting-edge takes about the things that I care about (and sometimes things I don’t), and they provide them in a much more fleshed out and creative way than tweets ever could.

Just as an example, I’ve recently been reading Kimimi The Game-Eating She-Monster, which is a blog that publishes extensive coverage and retrospectives on niche retro videogames. There were plenty of Twitter accounts that I’ve seen do similar things, but they simply cannot compete with the specificity and depth of a take that is 500 words instead of 280 characters. (Some would argue that tweets are not supposed to compete with long-form takes, but unfortunately they have, and continue to do so!) Kimimi’s posts are about games I genuinely would not have heard about otherwise, and the long-form nature of her content means that there’s actually enough space to place the games she talks about in their proper context without having to work under the tight constraints of a social media post.

But I haven’t limited the blogs I follow to my own niche interests - Substack (which has RSS support, at least for now) has made a huge impact on increasing the viability of written content online, and it’s through Substack that I discovered Audrey Robinovitz’s Eat Your Lipstick, a blog that reviews novelty perfumes with unconventional scents, including sweat, vomit, and funerals. I have not, and probably will never buy any of the perfumes Robinovitz covers. It is nonetheless an absolute delight to read her opinions about them in some of the most genuinely beautiful prose I’ve ever seen in critical writing.

This is simply not content that social media would allow me to access - case in point, I discovered Kimimi through a recommendation I received on Sonic Retro and I discovered Eat Your Lipstick through word-of-mouth. The age where social media enables you to see novel content on the Internet has long since passed, and it’s been replaced by a paradigm where social media serves to narrow the breadth of content that you see, rather than increase it. Furthermore, it’s much more likely that a long-form take is worth listening to because, again, inconvenience is good, and people generally only take the time to read and write articles about things they’re genuinely passionate about.

I encourage you to check out both of the blogs I mentioned, as well as the folks mentioned on this site’s pals page. But don’t stop there - if you take the time to look, the overwhelming likelihood is that there’s a writer on the internet that is covering the thing you love in unmatched specificity, and they’re just waiting for you to find them.

III - The Forums (etc.)

No project that aims to replace social media would be complete without replacing the “social” aspect as well, so in addition to replacing the information I’d otherwise find on The Platforms™️, I’ve done my best to replace the communication as well.

The first few steps are simple. First, please for the love of god stop having critical business communication in social media DMs. Email is universal, infinitely configurable, and designed to be easy to organize, archive, and distribute among large teams. If you don’t like it, it’s because (1) you just don’t like working (which is fair, but that’s not email’s fault), or (2) you haven’t taken the time to set up filters in your inbox. Just take an hour or so to do it, and you will find that “Inbox Zero” is actually astonishingly easy to achieve and maintain, provided that you actually check your emails once in a blue moon. That’s something you should already be doing if you’re doing serious business anyway.

Second, find communication venues that are designed for long-form communication. Inconvenience is good, and the sort of slack-jawed cockfighting that defines social media discourse is just harder to start in a traditional forum environment. That’s certainly not to say forums are free of toxicity, but there’s generally at least an expectation that posts meaningfully contribute to the threads they’re a part of, and the chronological organization and thorough documentation of forum threads make it actually possible to understand the full scope of a discussion between several conflicting factions. Even on social media platforms where chronological feeds are still available, keeping track of “the discourse” when there’s literally hundreds of thousands of interlocutors who are seeing their own individual perspectives on a situation is nigh impossible. It’s a state of affairs that basically demands you construct straw-men to argue with to have any coherent idea of what is going on.

The main forum that I’ve rediscovered during this process is the aforementioned Sonic Retro, but I’ve also found more niche discussion venues, including a modern-day BBS. For those unaware, the Bulletin Board System (BBS) was the primary software used for online communication prior to the invention of the World Wide Web. There are apparently many dedicated communities of retro computing nerds keeping the dream alive, and as far as I can tell, they genuinely use these boards as their primary discussion venue with each other.

The forums that you’ll be interested in will obviously be different from mine (and they probably won’t be on BBS), but my point is that if you’re the person who likes actively engaging in conversations online, you owe it yourself to give your discussions a better venue than the comments section or the hostile, superficial, and increasingly impossible to parse Twitter thread. I can confidently say that I have no desire to engage in “dialogue” on social media ever again for as long as I live. The posting wars are much more fun when you can meaningfully engage with all of the combatants.

IV - Conclusion

I am so tantalizingly close to being completely off social media that the few remaining engagements I’m forced to have with it are even more painful than normal. Once you’re not constantly scrolling on it, its clear and obvious dreadfulness becomes much more apparent. I react to having to open Instagram in much the same way that SpongeBob and Patrick react to having to travel through the perfume department. It genuinely feels like re-entering an active war zone, a violent reminder that “the Internet” remains a demonic presence in the lives of most, with the vast majority of people having resigned themselves to the idea that it can never be better than the bubbling cesspool that it’s become.

I hope that I’ve at least made you consider the possibility that it’s not true. It is possible for you to engage with a screen in a healthy way - at least for your mind, if not your eyes. I’ve got a much longer piece on the Internet and its discontents coming soon - until then, if you know of a great blog, newsletter, or publication I should be following, send it my way. You know how to find me.