Paul Jarvis saw the future. Or maybe he just had his own reasons. Either way, I think his leaving was prescient. The internet isn't what it was in the good old days. I still have a toe in the water, but I understand more clearly now why someone would go dark.
Going full on analogue is tempting. I could still write, just not publish. My stats are never going to set the world alight - I mostly write this for me anyway. Writing offline wouldn't be a major change.
Some days the cons of being online outweigh the pros. How do we get back to the 1990s style internet, the one that was actually fun and informative?
I'm nominally on Instagram, posting low effort daily photos. But the end is nigh for it. So much drivel, so much Meta marketing and manipulation. A lovely simple app has evolved into a bloated, data-sucking behemoth. I use Facebook for work and loathe it with every fibre of my being.
Everything gets taken over eventually. Commercialised, monetised. I suspect that approach is what kills these platforms in the end, or they'll evolve into business-only tools and the rest of us will leave. Analogue keeps looking more appealing. Life is changing. Perhaps the internet was a blip, never built to be a long term thing.
Related: Paul Jarvis Quit the Internet · Life Without the Internet · The Attention Economy · I Don't Want to Be Subject to an Algorithm · Achieving a Better Balance