How’d you hear about this project?
I saw your part 2 [Comatose Podcast] interview on a website called Hubski. It’s a small place that reminds me of old reddit, and I feel like a lot of users there are from that time. I really liked your interview, ’cause I guess I had a lot of things on my mind about it.
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I was a shy and introverted kid, and I found that I was able to sit back and comment and submit in a way that was my own voice.
What sort of things in particular?
It was about the consumption of content, rather than stimulating of activity. A lot of online activity does this, particularly on reddit, where people upvote things.
When I first got into reddit in high school, around 8 years ago, it was a way for me to break out of my shell. I was a shy and introverted kid, and I found that I was able to sit back and comment and submit in a way that was my own voice, you know? There was a lot of great content, but there was also a lot more of a desire to feel active in the community. As I’ve gotten older, that feeling has sort of dissipated, in favor of consuming all of the information that I can get my eyes on.
How did you find out about reddit?
During that time, I was in aviation class in high school and had a lot of free time during class. There was a site called Digg that posted news that updated every day, and it was similar to reddit in that it posted daily news and people commented and upvoted on it. I just went to Digg out of habit, and then one day, a post that made fun of Digg made it as the top post on Digg. It was dumb and raunchy in the way that appealed to my high school self, and made me check out reddit. I decided that reddit was much cooler, and I never looked back. It’s dumb, but that’s how online groups work sometimes.
Did you interact there anonymously? Or were a lot of your RL friends hanging out in subreddits with you?
I didn’t actually know any of my other RL friends on reddit, and, at least, I was the only one active at the time. At the time, there was a subreddit for r/alaska with only 50 people in it. After I posted there a bit, and after awhile we had our first meetup.
It wasn’t a bad turnout for the first meetup. I made a lot of cool friends, but over the years, we’ve all drifted away. In fact, I’m pretty sure that only 3 members of the first group of 12 people are in Alaska anymore, and I left for a year and came back.
We were active for about 2-4 years before r/alaska users stopped meeting offline. A lot happened during that time that happens with most groups of friends: drama, cliquishness, arguments, but a lot of good happened as well. I learned Photoshop over the years and propagated a lot of inside jokes; we had a reddit meetup where one of the main admins of reddit came to visit (it turns out, he had family in Alaska), there was a day where the our main moderator broke the CSS for the subreddit (breaking everything). I tried to host a meetup in Juneau (400 miles from Anchorage), and I ended up going to a reddit meetup in Bellingham, WA which was incredible.
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The real distinction for me is in the way that I choose my interactions more carefully online, and have more thinking time before I “say” anything.
In your experience, do you think there’s a difference between relationships formed online and those formed offline?
Well, the real distinction for me is in the way that I choose my interactions more carefully online, and have more thinking time before I “say” anything.
There’s a term called ‘staircase wit’, where you come up with something witty to say after the chance to say it has already gone past. Online, that sort of thing doesn’t happen as often. You get a lot of time to think before you speak.
I’ve spent so long online that it’s carried over to my real life. Someone once told told me that talking is like trying to have a conversation with someone who’s trying to put on an act. It hurt, mostly because I didn’t even realize it.
But I definitely have a history of overthinking interactions with other people. I remember complaining in high school to a close friend that I had to have a daily Facebook status that was clever, or else no one would like me anymore. He was horrified, and asked me “don’t you ever think that people are friends with you because they actually want to be your friend?”
I like doing things because I know someone on the internet will validate them. I wonder when I’ll outgrow this. It’s not like the internet has really helped, because its constantly giving me inspiration for the things I create for validation.
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The analogy that comes to mind is internet addiction, because it isn’t really an addiction, but a compulsion that feeds into a hole that’s missing in oneself.
Interesting that you feel you’re creating for validation. Do you think this is your feeling as an individual, or do you think this need for validation could be broadly applied to internet users generally?
I don’t really think the internet has really created a need for constant validation, but we definitely have more than enough avenues for receiving validation out there.
I’m trying to figure out how to explain this. The analogy that comes to mind is internet addiction, because it isn’t really an addiction, but a compulsion that feeds into a hole that’s missing in oneself.
If the validation you receive from creating a birthday limerick for someone’s Facebook wall isn’t enough, then you’ll desire more validation. If the validation you receive from telling someone happy birthday in person isn’t enough, then you’ll still desire more validation.
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[Burnout] beats your motivation, ideals, and core philosophies into submission. Then it makes you hate your own ideas, your desire to act on ideas, and your inability to do work that you should be working on… You just want to be distracted, and it’ll be easy to spend 16 hours a day on the internet distracted.
So when it comes to creating things… what kinds of things do you create online?
I’m a web designer by profession, but I dabble in a lot of other things as well. Master of none. I do photography, I’ve posted a handful of jokes as status updates, I’ve photoshopped dumb things, I’ve run my own web comic, I’ve promised a novel to people and built a website to track my progress and lasted 4 days, I have a bunch of domain names for projects I’ve never started on, and wrote a bit of poetry and short fiction in reddit threads that didn’t really ask for creative writing. That pretty much covers me.
But lately, I’ve been trying to get out of a deep period of burnout that has lasted over half a year. I don’t recommend it. It’s easiest to describe it as work related depression, and as someone who relies a lot on a creative process, it’s a mental hell that’s hard to escape from. It beats your motivation, ideals, and core philosophies into submission. Then it makes you hate your own ideas, your desire to act on ideas, and your inability to do work that you should be working on. You don’t want to learn, you don’t want to explore, and you don’t want to get better. You just want to be distracted, and it’ll be easy to spend 16 hours a day on the internet distracted.
When I first contacted you, I guess I really just wanted someone to talk without being a burden on them, because, you know, you were looking for people to interview about their online identity. But since then, I’ve started a personal project that has managed to bring some life back into me.
I learned about this technique called behavioral activation awhile ago, which is an approach to depression that focuses on how people lose their ability to enjoy things they once enjoyed. The idea is that if you can start getting people to do those things again, it will start a spark in getting them to do other things that they’ve been avoiding.
Well, it’s not like I learned about this technique and applied it, but pretty much describes what this this literary journal has been doing for me. I started with creating dumb rhyming poems and jokes and graduated to writing intros and contacting authors on reddit who write incredible things. Then I built a website and started exploring design ideas again. Then I started doing some web design work I was putting off. To be overly dramatic about it, it’s like I’m gradually rediscovering superpowers that I had forgotten about.
But it’s not like I’m suddenly doing great all of a sudden. I’ve just bottomed out and glad about it.
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I’m probably averaging about 12 hours a day online throughout the last 5 years, which isn’t all that great… I’m still trying to figure out what I actually enjoy doing offline.
It seems a bit that the online world has had both negative and positive impacts on you. It’s enabled you to connect/create, but you also see it as this machine you can get lost in. Is that right, do you think?
That’s definitely right. To be honest, I’m probably averaging about 12 hours a day online throughout the last 5 years, which isn’t all that great. Even if it does go with my work, being online for that long hasn’t been great. I’m still trying to figure out what I actually enjoy doing offline.
I asked a question on Metafilter the other day trying to figure out how people spend their days. It’s gotten to that point. I’ve gotten a lot of responses here, and now I have a general idea of what I should be doing, but I do have a long way to go.
Reading through them, dogs, kids – browsing the net… it’s actually really interesting to see how people fill their days – I wonder how I’d respond.
Metafilter is the weirdest community of people online, I think. Everyone seems normal and well adjusted.
What is normal to you?
I’m not really sure. No one else in my cohort seems to know, and I’m still attached to there being some definition of normalcy out there.
As a 24 year old, and speaking on behalf of the others that I know, we are begging for people your age to let us know how you survived to this point. But the best advice that I learned for when I left the state was this: Older people don’t really like giving advice.
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I feel a lot less creative now, now that I’ve spent so long on reddit, metafilter, hackernews, designernews, hubski, listening to podcasts, reading books, and so on, because it’s like a lot of ideas that I’ve wanted to do have already been done, or will pale in comparison to something else.
You mentioned at the start of this that one of the things found interesting in the interview I did on the podcast was the idea of creation vs consumption…
There’s a quote by Italo Calvino from his book Numbers in the Dark. It’s completely out of context, and probably doesn’t apply to this, but I like the metaphor it is for creation vs. consumption in online life: “This is a distinction I might bring up to give a clearer idea of before and now: before, we swam, and now we are swum.”
The thing about the internet is that the more ideas you intake, the less likely it is that something you come across is going to be an epiphany in your mind.
The thing about creation, for me, is that creating something is like a reiterative process of having epiphanies, e.g., realizing that you want to create this, realizing that there’s a better way to do it, realizing that you want to incorporate this, this or this, or realizing that you’ve taken the wrong turn and need to go back.
I feel a lot less creative now, now that I’ve spent so long on reddit, metafilter, hackernews, designernews, hubski, listening to podcasts, reading books, and so on, because it’s like a lot of ideas that I’ve wanted to do have already been done, or will pale in comparison to something else.
I spend a lot of time trying to chase after epiphanies, thoughts that spark the mind and feel all encompassing in the moment.
But you also mentioned you seek inspiration from these online sources…
Seeking inspiration from online sources can be harmful for creators if they neglect to get back to their work. It’s probably as simple as that. How about this:
- Both creation and consumption can lead to epiphanies
- Consumption can lead to inspiration
- Consumption can deceive someone into feeling the same things as creation
- One can not want to create if one can consume for the same feelings
Ugh, that’s a messy and incomplete thought that I thought was complete in my head the whole time.
Do you think there are ways for us to get back onto a creation trajectory, rather than continuing with consumption the way we are? As a web developer, has this crossed your mind during your own work processes?
I believe it to be a matter of enjoying one’s creative work more so than consuming the work of others. This means doing more of the process that leads to your creative output, for you, it’s interviewing, for me, it’s contacting people who write things.
This is a hell of a task, though. You hear a lot of advice from slightly different angles, like, you should use a pomodoro timer, or you should focus on discipline over motivation, or use a bullet journal, or you should time out your work, or you should take more breaks, or you should meditate, or you should do your work in spurts, or you should work in the morning, so on.
Be careful though, it’s easy to take them all at once and just feel overwhelming guilt all the time.
For myself, I just know that my answer has to go beyond falling in love with your work. Maybe I should throw in a calendar or something.
When you’re online, do you generally interact anonymously, or use offline identifiers like your real name or photos of yourself?
I interact with a username that’s pretty consistent throughout the platforms, and I’m comfortable with using my full name in places where everyone else uses their full name. It’s a privilege I have, I guess, I don’t have to live in fear of very much on the internet.
You’ve never encountered trolls or such?
Well, when I was in middle school, I was on 4chan a lot. Not as a troll, or even someone who posted, but as someone who got desensitized to a lot of things that could happen in the online world. Like, I’ve had people harass me before on reddit and Facebook, and someone posted my picture on 4chan once in a mean way, but it’s never really affected me in the way that I know happens to other people. But I don’t condone trolling, and I definitely wouldn’t encourage anyone to go to 4chan just to get desensitized.
I’ve never been on 4chan – it’s a community that I’m sort of fascinated with from afar, because it seems to be so influential. Both 4chan and reddit seem to have reputation outside of their own community for being…combative, I suppose.
You’re making me realize that I can pretty much split up those that I know online by whether or not they’ve ever been active on 4chan, haha.
And then reddit has its own crappy reputation now as well. It’s been miserable for me, because I don’t really feel the same culture that I grew up with there.
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I used to really identify with all the positives with reddit, and now they’re all kind of gone and forgotten and laughed at. It’s kind of like going back to your home town and finding all the cool strip malls and restaurants gone, and replaced with big box stores and chain restaurants that you’ve never really liked.
How has it changed over the years?
I have this bookmarked. Here’s reddit on the day that I joined it. It’s not like reddit is really all that different, but the most noticeable thing is how everyone on the website during the time pretty much identified as left-leaning. I have this theory that the left was a lot more unified during the Bush era and the beginning of Obama’s presidency, just because it seemed so easy for all of us to to disagree with George W. Bush.
For my evolution though. It’s been kind of a mess. I used to really identify with all the positives with reddit, and now they’re all kind of gone and forgotten and laughed at. It’s kind of like going back to your home town and finding all the cool strip malls and restaurants gone, and replaced with big box stores and chain restaurants that you’ve never really liked.
On the specifics, comments used to be really good. Like, the top comment of most reddit thread was often a nice, logical disagreement with the main article, instead of a comment that attacked the author or the publication, or a comment that agreed with the main article in slightly different way.
People would recognize certain commenters a lot more (probably because of the smaller size of the userbase), and it was kind of nice to have all these people who’s argumentative or writing ability you respect show up in new threads.
Of course, I was in high school at the time. I was pretty impressionable. Every day blew my mind back then, haha.
Oh man, I want to get into OkCupid now, and how the culture there used to be a lot better and a lot less toxic.
Go on.
I was on OkCupid when I was 18, and I was immediately hooked. I was more active then because I was still breaking out of my awkwardness shell, and OkCupid was a lot more oriented for pen-pal relationships.
There were these testimonials that you could put on other people’s profiles, and if I remember correctly, they were trophies like “Made me laugh” and “Great smile” that would accumulate for each person. Imagine the testimonials on Couchsurfing, but less forced. Those trophies were insights made by other people that told you what to expect when you messaged them, pretty much, and you could easily figure out which people were in for conversation and which were in for casual sex. Even better, there was a way to suggest edits on other people’s profile, which the person could either approve or deny. Both of these were available avenues for initiating a conversation, and I found it really easy to have a bunch of pen pals to look forward to receiving messages from and writing back.
If anything, I think the worst thing to happen to the internet is that its become very mono-functional for each website.
OkCupid is now trying to compete with Tinder (and they removed both the trophy and edit features, and the ability to list yourself as seeking a penpal). Reddit is seperated into a bunch of other subreddits, by interest. Facebook is using its algorithms to make it so you only see the things that you usually want to see. And Tumblr makes your feed dependent on who those in your groups share.
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Each website is a city, and there are a lot of different things to do in a city; a lot of reasons why people are there.
“Mono-functional” is a great term. You mean in terms of how each of these social/sharing/community platforms only serve one purpose?
They’re all serving one purpose, for each individual, I mean. And in that way, each website’s community is based around the way its approval mechanisms are designed.
I will admit though – there is this nagging feeling that my opinions on each website’s evolution aren’t actually very legitimate.
Each website is a city, and there are a lot of different things to do in a city; a lot of reasons why people are there. If you’re the guy who complains about it, you’re creating a problem in the city, and you’re projecting things for people who are just in the city for the first time, who are in the middle of exploring it, or are falling in love with it as this very second.
The people who are enjoying a website at any given time will usually outnumber you. And there’s no good in ruining it for them.
Sorry if this whole thing has been half rambly, half incomplete. The big thing that I have trouble with when analyzing the internet, is that there are so many routes I want to take. I’ve lived in this city for awhile.
View Jaron’s latest creative online project, a literary magazine that keeps each issue within a single, scrollable page at a reading length under half an hour: Lit.cat
Photos by Jaron Saturnino. View more on his photoblog here: jarophoto.tumblr.com
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