On Dreamwidth and small internet

I used to have a Live Journal back in the early 2000s.
It, AIM, and MSN messenger made the internet a very different (weird and wonderful) place for me to be on. If you're familiar with any of those, you probably know what I'm talking about.
Though elements of those exist in our current internet experience, the streamline/efficiency surrounding it has made it less social in my mind.

The type of discourse is punctuated by heated arguments rather than punctuation marks. You find more tirades in your responses than finding insightful arguments. It isn't a fault of the users that the current state is how it is though. So much of what we're shown is deliberate. The algorithms do not care if your comments are insightful or reasoned arguments. They focus primarily on the engagements that it can drive. They want things that can hijack a user's emotions (if only momentarily) and for them to fire off an emotionally loaded comment. They want to rile us up, divide us , and pit us against each other.

The current pop-internet has no place for well reasoned arguments or contextual understanding.

I have found that a few folks in hackernews circles refer to blogs/websites existing outside of the purview of the "big tech" folks as the small internet. Something resembling the niche communities and pseudo-anonymity that we enjoyed there. Perhaps this side of the internet has always existed. Tumblr might have been the last bastion of this type of internet. But I think dreamwidth signifies the weird roots of the old/small internet better than anything else out there right now (short of setting up and running your own blog/site). Although that may be leave you wanting on certain social aspects we've come to enjoy.

Why I write

For a long time I have thought that writing is all about the finished product. Something that prepare for. I think most of my experiences with writing has been for someone else. This might be a common occurrence. We are told to write as a way of proving our competence. We are told to write to convey our understanding of a text or an argument. In fact, this was the same all the way up into my graduate studies. We are not compelled to write interesting or creative works (obvious exception being creative writing). Even with creative writings, we are not truly trying to capture the eyes of readers. In fact, we’re never really pushed to write things that grasp the attention of readers. No stylistic pauses. Breaks. Or varying sentences to spice your writing. Not at all. For the most part, we’re locked into writing in boring conventions because it makes the teacher’s life easier. We’re only taught to write to captive audiences. These teachers aren’t reading your writing because it’s good. I’d wager to say that my 8th grade teacher would have never read my paper on lord of the flies on her own, even though by her standards it was deserving of an A+. What I mean by that is, even an A+ paper is only that because you’re feeding it to a captive audience that has no choice but to read it. And for a long time, that is the only type of writing that I did. It was tiring. It was a chore; not enjoyable.

As an adult, no longer circumscribed by school rules, I felt free to write what I wanted to. Yet, without the captive audience that I’d always unwittingly enjoyed, I lacked the confidence to write to an audience that may or may not exist. Nothing could be larger than the shame of having written something, exposing it to the world at large, and not having it read. Or so I felt.

But as I have written (although unpublished) I have noticed that writing is not just a means of expressing thoughts but it is also a means of developing thoughts. It is a way of thinking. However, unlike our thoughts, which make arbitrary and abstract connections on a whim, the written thoughts and connections must be discrete. This limitation forces one to think in clearer terms about these connections that have so easily been made in the mind-space.