MK

Flat is in essence a process of homogenization. Today it doesn’t matter where an influencer lives, because she dresses like she’s from the internet, and that’s all that counts.

Twitter was for talking to everyone —which is perhaps one of the reasons journalists have flocked to it.

Compulsion had always plagued computer-facilitated social networking—it was the original sin. Rounding up friends or business contacts into a pen in your online profile for possible future use was never a healthy way to understand social relationships. It was just as common to obsess over having 500-plus connections on LinkedIn in 2003 as it is to

It’s become something of a sport to unearth these sorts of replies, the ones where strangers make willfully decontextualized moral judgments on other people’s lives. We give these people and these kinds of conversations names: “chronically online” or “terminally online,” implying that too much exposure to too many people’s weird ideas makes us all

When I first got access to the internet as a kid, the very first thing I did was to find people who liked the same things I liked — science fiction novels and TV shows, Dungeons and Dragons, and so on. In the early days, that was what you did when you got online — you found your people , whether on Usenet or IRC or Web forums or MUSHes and MUDs.

Community moderation works . This was the overwhelming lesson of the early internet. It works because it mirrors the social interaction of real life, where social groups exclude people who don’t fit in. And it works because it distributes the task of policing the internet to a vast number of volunteers, who provide the free labor of keeping forums