Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Is the internet exhausting anybody else?

I've just spent a half hour writing up two different rants, only to delete them both.

The first one, because I knew it would be too difficult for me to really get across what I was trying to say, and I saw how it could be interpreted the wrong way and could be considered hurtful. Which not only would hurt people, which I don't want to do, but also could possibly bring down a bunch of angry people that I don't feel like dealing with. I'm too tired.

The second rant was about how tiring it was to deal with angry people, and some ideas about how I try to do things in order to not be an angry internet person. But then I realized that once again, it would take too many words for me to be completely clear about what I wanted to say, and I came across sounding a lot more responsible and clear headed than I think I really am. I'm also too tired to be that responsible.

Needing a subject for this blog post, I think clicked over to Facebook to see what people were saying, if anything sparked my creativity.

-One friend frequently posts things related to animal activism. Which I fully support, and I thought about writing about adopting shelter pets and supporting no-kill shelters, etc. But then I remembered an argument I saw in the comments of a mostly unrelated post on another blog today where it devolved into a pro-shelter person and a pro-breeder person insulting each other and I yawned because the argument is so old and nobody is budging.

-Another friend posted a link about how Facebook seems to be making people "like" companies and pages even when they don't want to. Facebook insists it's all the people accidentally liking things or maybe the company tricking them into liking things. Other people are showing evidence that people who have died are still clicking "like" and that's probably a red flag. I ended up spending a half hour going through my likes to make sure there wasn't anything weird (there wasn't) and that was tiring too.

-Everybody everywhere is posting about Christmas. Which has two effects: 1-Christmas is exhausting and 2-Facebook is grouping posts again and I hate that and wish it would stop, but the only thing I seem to be able to tell it is that it's an "inappropriate grouping" but it isn't, so what then? There's got to be a setting somewhere but I'm tired of trying to find a setting somewhere.

-I went over to tumblr, where I saw a ton of posts that could inspire me to write, but there were also tons and tons of posts all at once from a few people. I still don't understand how people can find the time to post that much, reblog that much, and generally create that much content. Plus, I don't understand why they don't use the queue feature to spread things out a little more evenly. Now I'm once again trying to figure out how much seeing a person post is worth it when 90% of what they post is of no interest to me, but 10% is cool. If it was spread out, I wouldn't care, but scrolling through three pages of boring is...boring.

-I went over to a favorite blog and I keep making the mistake of reading the comments. I like the idea of comments, I frequently want to know what other people think about things. But everybody seems to be jumping to extremes these days, with no room for in between or even discussion about topics. Especially if it involves parenting. And blogs seem to be eager to publish things that get them more angry comments and fights because that actually gets them more pageviews, which means more money. I don't fault them for that, I just wish we had a system that rewarded people for posting good things or something.

-And in the world of "first world problems" there's too much good stuff out there too. I read a couple dozen different webcomics, and that's after I've cut down and several of my favorites ended. Blogs, review sites, financial tips, consumer awareness, there's so much good information out there and I want to know as much as I can. But there's just SO MUCH and while they all often will just repeat each other, you never know which awesome blog will originate the good story next. How does anybody keep up, or do they just give up?

So yeah, the internet is making me tired today. Which is why I just wrote a thousand words about it...because that's what the internet is for, right?