Are You Cut Out for Social Media?

AYCOFSM??

great band

in all seriousness though, no I am not, and I should have realized this the first time I told someone on USEnet I wished he was dead when I was 15

I'm a no too. ilx is as close as it gets for me

What’s our working definition of ‘social media’?

I know I have laid myself open to nothing but acronyms and emoticons and links to Chris Cillizza think-pieces.

lol

For me it would be Facebook and ILX, but that would extend to the other popular platforms people use--Twitter, Instagram, etc.

😎

j. is going to single-handedly kill this thread I worked very hard to conceptualize.

Voting something in-between.

was amateurist really popular? i think not

i mean that was his charm

such as it was

I tried to cozy up to him a few times early on but he was having none of it.

Maybe popular is the wrong word. I always felt like he was taken to be very thoughtful, but I couldn't get past the tone. Anyway, I don't want this to be about him--my point was that I sometimes share the thing that drove me up the wall.

I already know I will not join commercialized social media unless under compulsion of force majeure. No Facebook, no Twitter, no Instagram, no Snapchat, no Tumblr, no TikTok, no Next Big Thing Everyone Uses, even if it turns my snoot into unicorns. It's bad enough being shadowed by Amazon & other retailers, and having an Android phone.

Thank you for existing, ILX and ilxors. This is a scene I can happily join without selling myself bit by bit. (see what I did there?)

I dont count ILX as "social media", nor most other forums, even Reddit. SM is more things like FB/Insta/Snapchat/Twitter.

So insofar as Ive always loved fora and blogging (Usenet, mailing lists, blogs/livejournal/ILX), I have always sat somewhere between bored despair and outright revulsion for the rest. I'm too old (SC/Insta), or I just Dont get it (Twitter).

I log on to twitter the most because I can refrain from posting and can be anonymous and it really feels like something I can make my own very easily, also it feels like a social leveler

then instagram where I can look at my friends' posts.

I can't bear to go into my facebook account these days, I’ve been thinking about why that happened, there was nothing particularly egregious about it in my experience, I guess I’m just embarrassed to share my experiences with people I barely know

it’s much better on ilx with people I don’t at all know tbh

I love some of tiktok

I can’t sh0t any of them successfully but I try now and then. I’ve been on a discord kick for a few weeks now, it’s ok I guess.

(xposts) Age is definitely part of it (I'm 58). I think back to arguments in fanzines...You had a month to temper your response. I remember one in particular, having to do, of all things, with Celine Dion (between two other people), and I thought, wow, that's a pretty nasty exchange. It would be a shadow of an echo of a blip today.

i'm basically just wishing happy birthdays on facebook. If I posted a photo more often I'd be more in line with the majority of major social media platform users. OP describing power users/vocal minority i think

i was pretty sure this thread was going to be about the 1975

OK, I guess I'll be the pro-social media guy.

I'm reasonably active on Twitter; I use it to post links to shit I've written, or when I have a new episode of my podcast going up, and then I engage with the people I follow. (I have many more followers than people I follow - basically, I'm on there to have conversations with people I think are interesting, and anyone who follows me is the audience for those conversations, is how I think about it.) I post a lot of jokes, making fun of bands and politicians and stupid news stories and whatnot.

On Instagram, I mostly post pictures of whatever I'm reading or listening to.

On Facebook, I post some of the same shit I post on Twitter, and I comment on a few friends' posts, but that's about it. I'm also part of a FB group which has occasionally yielded professional opportunities.

For about the last decade, I have also been the social media person for my employer or for clients. I actually find "speaking" in a professional (or academic) "voice" on Twitter, FB, Instagram and even LinkedIn to be interesting, and it can be a creative challenge at times.

social media was more or less fine before it was public facing. the combination of 1. real name/identity linked to account and 2. assumption that random people you've never met will (and should be) exposed to your content turned me away from it probably forever

twitter becoming a personal brand machine for people who don't need personal brands + a supposed networking tool for many has ruined a lot of the social world for me. i can't force my brain to adjust to it and if i had it my way i would live on an island where it doesn't exist. jobs requiring people to have a professional twitter presence is obviously very bad. i don't hesitate to say it's a general evil and i don't trust people who claim it's a social good.

facebook is sort of the same. i loved it when it felt like the posts i made were for my friends. then it blew up, suddenly you're adding everyone in your family and people you barely know and even though you aren't expected to open it up to complete strangers, it still becomes a performance where you must create a version of yourself for everyone you know. i stopped posting on it when that shift happened, it lost its intimacy.

uperson you have a much more neutral approach to this than I've been able to manage

I took my birth date off my facebook profile, felt really uncomfortable with the happy birthday posts. it's ridiculous i know but I didn't want to be in the spotlight like that

I think that encapsulates my aversion to facebook

i listed where I actually worked for a year and posted once innocently about a raise I got. somehow, it got back to my boss as someone squealed on me for posting that.

I then changed my profile to say my job was selling drugs

haven't had it happen since

I miss the days (2008) when Twitter was an amazing thing that beamed the thoughts of kristin hersh and kay hanley to my phone

98% of my Facebook "friends" are actually professional connections - other writers, music industry people, musicians, etc. The other 2% are a couple of my relatives, with whom I never engage, and one or two people I went to high school with. Every once in a great while, my brother will comment on something I post. But otherwise, it might as well be a LinkedIn page, with dumb jokes.

I took my birth date off my facebook profile, felt really uncomfortable with the happy birthday posts.

Did the same three or four years ago--uncomfortable, and also, the worst, cognizant of who posted and who didn't. (Probably got that from died-just-as-Facebook-was-invented grandmother; she used to always keep an exact count of how many Christmas cards she got each year.) I continue to post birthday wishes myself with most people I've actually met, with a secret system that indicates how I actually feel about you.

"from my"

the creepy thing about birthdate on FB is I've had friends die and their family members didn't know how to convert their profile into a Tribute page, so casual acquaintances who didn't know they died would write "happy birthday" posts on their wall. I don't mean the "remembering you today, my angel" type posts, but like they actually thought they were saying it to a living person.

it's also creepy to see FB accounts up 10+ years after the person died, and yet...someone my age that I didn't even know died of a heart attack in 2010 (she was a friend of a friend), profile is still there, still not a tribute page, page preserved in amber from 10 years ago.

Twitter is basically my newspaper, I'm on it a lot to know what's going on and be entertained, but I have no drive to cultivate my own online personality or brand.

I understand everyone's ambivalence about social media but I also wonder whether "I don't even have a Facebook account" might become the new "I don't even own a TV."

Personally I think some of it is good dumb fun. Plus a lot of stuff you can safely ignore and scroll past.
And it is all, ultimately, a voluntary leisure activity. It's only in your head to the extent you allow it to be.

I understand everyone's ambivalence about social media but I also wonder whether "I don't even have a Facebook account" might become the new "I don't even own a TV."

I think it already has. See also "i have an account but i don't even use it"

kristin hersh still beams thoughts at me!

i still have a facebook profile because i need it for work, but have stripped it of everything but my name. (xp lol) should probably change my photo now that neil peart has died

started using twitter because of work and have become pretty attached, but if i missed something, it's gone; i'm not a completist. the politics/trump stuff can become draining, but that's my fault for not better pruning my follows/filters

i'm on no others, which, i'm told, is where the real shit happens now. it's fine; i'm pretty old

85% of my relationships started one way or another on FB, usually because I'd start a convo online and then wouldn't feel so awkward talking to the person in public.

xp -- true! if only it was just that (these were the days when tweets were sent as SMS messages to your phone)

(at least in my circles, a lot of people have migrated to Discord, which feels kind of like a happy public vs. private medium)

jill hennessy liked one of my tweets so can't nobody tell me nothin about social media, forever

Yah the kids in my house are all on discord. It seems to be akin to a cross between a forum and a sort of IRC?

don't like the name discord, it sounds alt-right to me

the highlight of my Twitter career was zinging Prodigy of Mobb Deep and having him laugh at it

RIP

we've probably all been retweeted by Lil B at some point?

he linked back to the ILX thread ten years ago!

also Ripper Owens was upset that I dismissively mentioned his blip of a career in Judas Priest in less than illustrious terms

It is not those fears. It is fears of hate speech, grooming into hate groups, and generally a far wider set of risks than solely those. As such, people are just as likely to be victimised specifically due to being vulnerable as to get help. One of the most well known supporters of the UK law is a woman whose trans daughter was murdered. Doesn't mean she's right and I'm sure we'd all agree lived experience only goes so far, but the idea there isn't a wide range of incredibly bleak possibilities in the current internet suggests a lack of attention being paid to specific stories like SV's itt, of which there are many.

In any case, why must support and help for people live on social media?

Not saying there aren't risks of centralised control based on hate but that doesn't mean we should never consider any controls.

In the UK situation it seems the opportunity is there to define this more specifically or continue the conversations being had itt.

I'm not at all saying that being online all the time and social media are GOOD for pre-teens and teens. But an evidence-based response would be opening up 3rd spaces for teenagers and promoting them gathering safely in person to do things that don't cost money, incentivizing residential development that's less suburban and isolationist, making the world safer for kids to practice independence and be together. To say nothing of regulating GUNS FOR THE LOVE OF GOD. Like, we hand young people a world where they're demonstrably at risk, make them practice being shot and avoiding being shot, and then make a moral panic out of them not going places?

If girls measurably feel worse about their bodies after viewing IG posts and are X % more likely to harm themselves, that makes perfect sense and yet here we are in a GLP-1 world where dysmorphia and the destruction of the female body is praised and promoted in what feels like every sphere. But we can't fix that because there's an unbelievable amount of profit to be made.

I can't recall ever hearing anyone protest this, so I wondered if there's a specific age people think it makes more sense to draw a line at, if people simply prefer to not mess with the status quo, or what

― rob, Tuesday, 16 June 2026 bookmarkflaglink

Ok Rob.

I am looking at under 16s and going from there. Feels stupid that people who would be able to vote at around that age shouldn't use it.

Sorry xp to Ronan, I wrote that before your post. And it's obv a US-centric take.

Imo the issues around white supermacy and hate groups etc and protecting kids from "radicalization" is probably different in the UK. At least in the US we have no business being self-righteous about it when white supremacist ideologies are coming from the highest levels of our government.

"In any case, why must support and help for people live on social media?"

Interesting, why did we to this place as a society?

Feels like this ban is a cover on a lot of these questions

xp That's helpful in orbit, thank you.

I still think there are crucial qualitative differences between the experience of listening to music (however morally depraved or extremist) and the experience of ubiquitous networked sociality with your peers and with a globe full of strangers. And I get that the solution to "pdfilia and victimization" is to compel the platforms to stop these practices. But if we're going to point out that tech like face-based age verification is a) dubiously effective and b) a massive privacy intrusion with foreseeably awful longterm consequences, I think we also need to be honest that moderating content is also a difficult problem. Even if platforms could be compelled to hire legions of moderators to quash this stuff, that has its downsides too, e.g., deep trauma for those workers, but also helpful info for trans kids being moderated out anyway. I guess I just don't see as clean a separation there in terms of the consequences.

Feels stupid that people who would be able to vote at around that age shouldn't use it.

― xyzzzz__, Tuesday, June 16, 2026 12:56 PM (three minutes ago)

well I agree with you there! as I said upthread (I think, hopefully not another phantom post), I would have tried bumping it to 14 as a pilot and seen how it went. I forget how schooling works in the UK, but in North America I can also imagine drawing a line not at age but at junior high school v. high school. Not that there's some magical difference between those two statuses, but it's a division that is already somewhat baked into society

lots of xposts now, sorry

The music example is so, so different. Like talking to people online over a long period of time is just way, way different. But maybe the other problem of trying to discuss this is that in itself is just one really specific example. Like there's also all the extremely violent videos or whatever of real events. And we mention newspapers but social media is intertwined with how people consume news also. The entire experience feels quite large and multifaceted.

Fwiw the bit I find uncomfortable is why we think adults are fine to consume all this but not kids.

Also great point on the moderation, rob, it is absolutely harrowing the stories you read about people doing that job.

But if we're going to point out that tech like face-based age verification is a) dubiously effective and b) a massive privacy intrusion with foreseeably awful longterm consequences, I think we also need to be honest that moderating content is also a difficult problem. Even if platforms could be compelled to hire legions of moderators to quash this stuff, that has its downsides too, e.g., deep trauma for those workers, but also helpful info for trans kids being moderated out anyway. I guess I just don't see as clean a separation there in terms of the consequences.

100% on all of this. MODERATION COSTS MONEY. That's why the platforms won't do it. They would have to pay workers commensurate with the amount of psychological damage it does, and give them better working conditions, etc when in reality they choose the cheapest and most powerless labor force they possibly can, intentionally discarding them and any outcomes from the work.

Also:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38088464/

Most social media platforms censor and moderate content related to mental illness to protect users from harm, though this may be at the expense of potential positive outcomes for youth mental health. Current evidence does not offer strong support for the relationship between censoring mental health content and preventing harm. In fact, existing moderation strategies can perpetuate negative consequences for mental health by creating isolated and polarized communities where at-risk youth remain exposed to harmful content, such as pro-eating disorder communities that use lexical variants to evade censorship. Social media censorship of content related to mental illness can also silence positive discourse about mental health, create barriers to accessing online support and resources, and hinder research efforts on youth well-being. Social media content about mental health can have important positive impacts on youth mental health by facilitating help-seeking, depicting positive coping strategies, and promoting a sense of belonging for struggling youth, but these benefits are minimized under existing moderation and censorship practices. This article presents a call to action for evidence-based social media policies and for practitioners to consider the clinical implications of social media engagement when connecting with young patients.

I'd love to know what that censorship looks like because from what I can tell, social media and discussions of mental health go hand in hand, to the extent of people diagnosing themselves.

Fwiw the bit I find uncomfortable is why we think adults are fine to consume all this but not kids.

― LocalGarda, Tuesday, June 16, 2026 5:07 PM (nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

lol I agree with you but, again, our biggest media outlets that everyone relies on for news and being part of a society are now owned by right-wing billionaires who openly publish lies (thanks WaPo) and are anti-queer and anti-trans and lots of other things so I'm afraid that ship has sailed and again the reason is a truly staggering amount of money.

xp To be fair, that article is from 2023 and some of the literature it's drawing on is even older and might reflect a pre-Trump paradigm where platforms were taking a more active role in moderating and were more responsive (relatively) to public criticism. Post-2024 that seems to no longer be the case really.

Those kinds of unintended consequences of well-intentioned policy are rife for sure. I definitely agree that the big platforms could afford to hire many more moderators, but I more or less basically think no one should have to do that job (as LG just said).

I don't have all or maybe any of the answers here. Part of why I'm open to age restrictions is a feeling that we should try *something* which I fully concede isn't a great place to start.

i mean the usa isn't implementing this sort of ban, right? they are v much against it unless i'm wrong?

18 states including my own have age restrictions of various kinds. Some ban social media accounts entirely under a certain age (ranging from 14 to 18), others require parental consent. I have no idea how effective any of it is. About 6 months after Tennessee's kicked in, I wiped my cache and tried creating new accounts on Facebook and X, ran into no age verification at all. And while there was talk that all existing users would have to verify their ages in order to keep their accounts, I've seen no sign of that. (Unlike the porn age-verification restrictions, which did go into effect pretty much immediately — although a lot of the scuzzy clip sites based overseas are just ignoring that too.)

Oh, meant to include this link: https://avpassociation.com/us-state-age-assurance-laws-for-social-media/

sheesh what a mess

For whatever reasons and I have no idea how representative this is, neither of my kids has been much bothered about social media. They both have Insta accounts that they rarely use/only use to share memes with friends. One of them is pretty active with friends on Discord, but that's about it. Social media per se doesn't seem like a big deal to them.

I think it’s possible if not likely Facebook will eventually just die out, I can’t imagine anyone under a certain age is bothering to join it. Wouldn’t be surprised if it’s the same case for Instagram, X, etc. My son only uses discord, and only with his school friends. Beyond that he goes on Reddit to read about chess and micronations, and that’s really about it.

Yes I agree^^^^^^

maybe in the US, but I have bad news for you about FB's global popularity

From my earlier link about state-level policies, I think regulating purposively "addictive" algorithms is probably a good idea and it should also be done for adults!!! But it won't be, because that's what advertisers & media platforms want algorithms for in the first place.

Targeting "Addictive" Algorithms and Platform Features
In 2024, California and New York became the first states in the nation to attempt to combat negative mental health consequences of social media by prohibiting the use of "addictive algorithms" or features designed to increase use in relation to minor accounts. California and New York both prohibit the operator of an addictive internet-based service or application from providing an addictive feed to minors without parental consent; and California asserts that even parental consent does not shield a provider from liability for harm caused to a minor from their service. While California's law was challenged in court, a federal judge recently permitted the law to go into effect while the case is being tried. This year, Arkansas, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maine, Montana, North Carolina, Virginia, and Washington all tried to follow New York and California's lead with their own addictive feed legislation. Connecticut successfully enacted its bill to prohibit social media platforms from using features designed to increase use by minors, and Arkansas replaced its previous social media law with provisions that included a ban on certain addictive functions for minors. Washington's and Montana's legislation also saw some limited success, with both making it through the first house of the legislature, but ultimately failed to pass this year.

xp to tipsy: Yes. There is a path through a lot of this and it includes things like parenting, improving the environments kids are living in, having enough entertainment and stimulation and community/belonging/socialization opportunities that online isn't the only place they can go. Ever-present devices were probably a bad idea, social media was probably a bad idea, and I do see and hear about people already self-regulating and moving away from using technology like that. There are new models of phones coming out (I guess?? I'm just learning) based on different ideas of how people should own and use phones (Nothing Phone, Fairphone).

Discord is only really social media if you count reddit (and ilx) as such, no?

xposts

well part of the reason Discord is popular is that FB is barely "social" anymore anyway

being in a discord server is fundamentally much closer to being on ILX than to being on facebook. it's a chatroom app. whether that falls under 'social media' idk. i assume it will under any laws that aren't targeted specifically at algorithmic content

Yeah, discord is not really social media obviously, not in the same way at least.

I just don’t know if even worldwide Facebook is going to hold on. Maybe it’s wishful thinking.

FWIW, my gloss on the social media studies pov on this q: if you want to call Discord (or WhatsApp) social media, go for it as long as you have good reasons.

Reddit I think meets the definition no matter what (networked communications, user-generated content, open to the public), as would ILX even if message boards are then soc-med avant la lettre

FB has like 300+million users in India alone, and in lots of countries like that the internet is kind of synonymous with FB. So it's less like not being on FB in the US and more like not having an email address (hmm, that might be a dated comparison tbh)

My oldest kid (who's 21) said to me just the other day, "I'm so glad I have almost no visibility online at all." I think one effect of growing up around this stuff has been a disinclination to be out there at all.

Glad that the algorithmic and addictive elements of social media have come up— this is the primary difference from other forms of media, afaic. Newspapers, music, films, whatever— they can be extremist and violent, certainly, but none of them *rely* on addictive and algorithmic processes of engagement baiting as their ultimate form. Even traditional websites, extreme ones included (rotten.com etc) didn’t rely on these tools to get engagement.

"For whatever reasons and I have no idea how representative this is, neither of my kids has been much bothered about social media."

There is definitely a backlash among some of the younger crowd against social media. It might not be as much of a thing in ten years

Re: mods. Reckon machine learning* automations could probably do a lot of the heavy lifting with flagging content. Pay/conditions etc. that's just longstanding unionising for better pay and conditions/the struggle is real.

*Get the ILX bot on the job imo

I'm the advisor for my college newspaper and I've seen a general reluctance by student reporters to create work-related social media accounts; this goes back at least to 2016 or 2017. They don't want an online imprint. It's bonkers to me: if you write an article or create a video, don't you want people to read/watch your content? I've eased up. The ones who want to go into the biz will create the work-related handles.

FB has like 300+million users in India alone, and in lots of countries like that the internet is kind of synonymous with FB. So it's less like not being on FB in the US and more like not having an email address (hmm, that might be a dated comparison tbh)

For a few years before Facebook took over the social network of choice was a thing called hi5, and the userbase seemed to be very much from the global South. The internet's not as global as people might think, Facebook did come closest to holding all out hegemony at one point afaict.

Social network of choice in Portugal I meant.

My gf is looking at the new phones like Wisephone for her soon-to-be 14 year old... he currently has some kind of watch that he can text her with. Wisephone has maps, music, texting, camera etc, maybe some proprietary apps as well, but basically no browser as I understand it

xxxp i still think facebook normalizing bringing your real name and personal details online rather than using a 'screen name' was ruinous for internet safety/privacy. if kids are pushing back against that now that's nice to hear even if it's in places where it makes less sense

When FB started there wasn't sophisticated generative AI that could summarize your whole existence, high and low.

Asked Google AI to summarize my existence and it eerily got everything right except thinking I'm married to my brother's wife.

It's also fucked the things people use with social media too. A decade ago my ex had to beg people not to tag her when she was out with us because her ex had spies keeping tabs for ammo he could use against her in a custody battle.

Every now and then I post nonsense so AI will think I'm Gary Busey

Mark Clattenburg sounds like he's AI

Every now and then I post nonsense so AI will think I'm Gary Busey

― If your ass is a Bible, 213 will regulate (Neanderthal),

I loved you in Point Break!

I had a weird work thing a month or so ago where I googled an underwater drone manufacturer (on my laptop, don't ask) and now youtube is convinced I really need an underwater drone and shows me ads all the time... on my phone!

xpost to alfred: I imagine it's an understandable hesitation for anyone who's come of age at a time when seeing people (including journalists) routinely harassed/fired/threatened for things posted on social media - dragged for decade old tweets - and are warned to potential employers surveilling their online history. I suppose that's an occupational hazard any aspiring journalist would have to accept, but I empathize with the reluctance.

But having to use social media for a job is a potential dealbreaker for me, and would rather organize my own life in ways that avoid having it as a de-facto necessity.

Agreed.

I won't even list where I work.

ya I still remember the early days of Facebook, when you had to be in college to sign up...I was stunned everyone was using their real name, felt like rule #1 of the internet was to not to that. so I used an alias, but that made me feel like a crank so I eventually gave in.

I guess that was the moment when the internet did in fact become real life. tbh I didn't see this as a huge deal when Facebook was kind of silo'd off from everything else, you could just friend everyone, even people you didn't really know all that well, now you're seeing horny comments they're making on meme pages and the insane shit they're writing to their Senators...having an inside track to people's craziest thoughts definitely feels like it's been a very bad thing for our social fabric. I've got co-workers I used to like who turned out to be lunatics, especially after Charlie Kirk....some of these guys are 'friends' with like half the company too. and yeah. people talk!

When I was a teenager everyone in my circle of schoolfriends had a Faceparty account. It was our earliest social media profile page, not counting MSN which we thought of more as a chat facility than a profile. It was a dating website that a lot of young teenagers were on. It was awful in that girls would regularly have predators message them. Those messages were treated as a joke and we'd use certain lines from messages as punchlines, but looking back it was grim. But it was also easy enough to block and report these messages.

As a gay teenager it was very different for me. I grew up in a small town where everybody knew everybody's business. I've always been flamboyant so my sexuality was never truly a secret. But for many folk I know, it took leaving the town and moving far away before it felt safe for them to come out. I used the internet to find people more like me. I would upload a photo on the Monday to Faceparty, swap email addresses with someone through the week, and by Saturday I'd have swapped phone numbers with someone who would be at the underage disco in the city centre ten miles down the road, where I'd get an awkward kiss and maybe the invitation to hold hands on the back of a bus or train home. It wasn't just about exploring the sex side of my sexuality though - it was about meeting people and finding out how they survived. Their coming out stories to family. How it was at their school. The places they could go to be safe. If there had been an LGBT+ club at my high school and you'd been seen walking into it you'd have probably just had to change school. But the internet allowed me to meet and speak to people in a way I'd never have experienced in my dismal small hometown.

The alternative would have been cruising. I remember when I was 18 a boy got burned to death in a town not far from mine, lured into the woods by a homophobic gang on the promise of sex and thrills. I'm not saying that gay people online are all good, or that cruising inevitably leads to murder. But it would easily have been safer for me to go to the underage disco and meet people I'd spoken to online with pictures, than to go alone into the woods at night.

I'm in my late 30s and any LGBT+ person I've spoken to about this agrees that the internet of the early 00s, for all its problems, was a lifesaver, because it allowed them to communicate and bond with people like themselves.

Now the UK Government, so determined to deny the existence of trans youths, wants to insist on proof of identity from people who are still figuring out their identity. This will not benefit young queer people, at all. They'll go underground, they'll lack the support and structures we found in online communities, they'll become adults with such little knowledge and sense of self.

I was 17 when my stepdad found out I was gay and threw me out (albeit, only for two nights). A few years early and my life would probably have turned out very differently. At 17 I knew he was a dick and I wanted to get away from him, and that his opinion did not matter to me other than the logistics of my living arrangements. At 14 I'd have probably had all kinds of problems with acceptance, identity, and respect. If he'd been computer-literate he might have found out then. But if he'd been a better parent I'd have told him. If your child is hiding their online activity from you, the problem is not the internet.

Great post.

I remember when I was 18 a boy got burned to death in a town not far from mine, lured into the woods by a homophobic gang on the promise of sex and thrills.

oh good lord!

Looks like Friendster relaunched in April! vintage social media might be the next big thing

one of the questions for everyone in our high school yearbook was "what will you be doing when Friends Reunited contacts you?" which feels so anachronistic to think of now

"When FB started there wasn't sophisticated generative AI that could summarize your whole existence, high and low."

Like a lot of Ilxor people I got on the internet in the late 1990s, and although modern-day AI was a pipe dream at the time the idea that the US government was snooping on our every word was very much current. Not so much businesses, but only because the only businesses likely to have the capability to spy on the internet in real time (IBM, most obviously) were already hand-in-glove with the US government. The idea that an advertising network / glorified calendar / video blogging site might adulterate the human soul still felt like science fiction.

We are different people now, in a different world. I remember the controversy over the Clipper chip:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip

It was a chipset intended to add security to mobile phones, in such a way that the US government was able to decrypt the data. It was a big flop, but it does raise the question of whether the same idea was subsequently reused in a less ham-fisted way. Furthermore an awful lot of the internet back then was plaintext, which is easy to process. With the rise of video actively monitoring the entire internet on a daily basis is presumably much harder. But if Youtube can upload and transcode roughly five petabytes of data per day, presumably one of those TOPS500 supercomputers than the US government uses can do the same thing in reverse.

And of course there was ECHELON, which went from being a weird underground internet rumour to "of course we've been spying on you" almost overnight:
https://web.archive.org/web/20170709151210/https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB95326824311657269

As such I remember thinking long and hard about my online presence in the 1990s, which is one of the reasons I tend to use my real name. Partially because a pseudonym is futile, also because I worked as a professional writer and had a "brand", furthermore because it's such an unlikely name it comes across as fake. As such I like to think I've been relatively mellow on the internet, although I do still cringe at the memory of describing Thin Lizzy as a British blues-rock band.

I had to leave Ilxor for eighteen months because the shame was too great. In the end I paid the site owners, or at least some people who claimed to be the site owners, £53,567 to erase that post. I remember that number because coincidentally it was my Google password at the time. And it still is! It's a good password. Because it's a number, not a word. Thank God Ilxor is no longer publicly available. Thank God.

As for social media, I generally don't participate, because a lack of participation gives the impression I have a much more active social life than I actually have. When people read my blog they probably think that I'm doing pretty good. But the fact is that in between motorcycling trips to Scotland and jetting off to Seoul I spend most of my time slumped over the keyboard surrounded by bottles of whiskey. But you don't see that. It happens off the page. A thing doesn't happen unless it's written about on the internet, and conversely a thing can be made to not happen by not writing about it.

Which reminds me of this piece in The Guardian today. It's a review of a documentary about OnlyFans. It mentions and event were influencers could have their photographs taken standing next to a sports car, so that they could pretend they owned the car:
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2026/jun/15/onlyfans-inside-the-machine-review-monumentally-grim-and-unsexy-tv

The key thing is to take lots of photos with different cars, using different outfits, and then spread them throughout the year to give the impression that it's all happening in real time. Of all the things in that article, the thing that struck me most was "the site makes a billion pounds annually", and not for the sum of money, but for the fact it's in pounds. The modern world has trained me to associate "billion" with "dollars". Never pounds. You never hear about billionaire British rap stars or fashion moguls, or at least you never heard about etc who remain in Britain and continue to use pounds.

yeah people's distrust of putting themselves out there online was at one point strong enough that facebook needed the "it's okay, it's just a private network for connecting with people at your college" framing to crack through it. things moved really quickly after that though, it felt like

Looks like Friendster relaunched in April! vintage social media might be the next big thing

there was an attempt to relaunch a myspace clone called myplace in the past couple of years to but it seemed to die almost immediately.

In the end I paid the site owners, or at least some people who claimed to be the site owners, £53,567 to erase that post

Would you do us a deal on deleting the rest?