Technology

It just feels dirty. The odds of someone coming across an old thread vs them posting + me seeing are very disproportionate. I've seen a lot of sites turn to shit and it hurts to actively contribute to that. I'm a tiny fraction of it, but part of it nonetheless. I feel like Roy Batty in his rainy monologue in Blade Runner as I reminisce among what I've seen. I've seen Facebook become the #1 social site and allow beautiful groups to flourish, only to collapse under it's own weight and greed and become an unsearchable stream of consciousness. I've seen photobucket gain titan status among image hosting, only to allow greed to permanently destroy decade-old archives among forums. I was there when forums changed formats that would break 15 years worth of inter-thread link formats, shredding the web-like connections between dormant discussions. I remember the adorable, embarrassing exchanges posted to MySpace bulletin boards as an embedded video played over an audio stream with clashing text colors before that was eclipsed by the clean, mature format of Facebook. And now, we're in another wave of Reddit degradation as so many users wipe their data in spite of the poor executive decisions. We thought the internet was forever, that anything posted was eternal. We feared sharing anything sensitive due to the viral nature of the web. But, as it turns out, it's not so permanent. Those critical viral moments spread like fire on flash paper and were forgotten just as fast. Corporate greed and poor management has proven again and again this is all temporary. All of those moments, those posts, lost in time like tears in rain.