Living Life Offline
Why I'm leaving social media (again).
Intro#
I used to love being on the internet in the early 2000s.
Yahoo, MySpace, MSN, Newgrounds, early YouTube, all that jazz.
It felt free. Customisable. Ours. You could control what you saw, how you showed up, how you used it.
Over time that changed.
Most of the internet, like the real world, got taken over. Bought out, merged, controlled by a handful of billionaires chasing growth at all costs. It's now theirs.
Newgrounds is still holding it down. Shoutout to Tom Fulp for never getting compromised and keeping it alive. Unfortunately almost everything else has turned into the same thing.
Yahoo#
I used to love Yahoo Answers, email, the whole ecosystem. Then they added instant messaging, then news feeds, then ads, then more ads. Each feature was supposed to make it better. Each one made it a little more theirs and a little less ours. Eventually it just kind of collapsed under the weight of it all.
YouTube#
Started out genuinely fun, then genuinely useful for learning anything. You could rate videos, message creators directly, customise your experience. Then Google bought it. Ads arrived. Community features got stripped out one by one. Messaging went. The dislike count went. Shorts arrived. Now it's a slot machine with a search bar.
MSN Messenger#
Was real fun for talking to people online. Then Skype showed up, which was fine but unnecessary, didn't really do anything new. Both slowly died, Microsoft kept half-heartedly replacing one with another, and now we have Teams, which is somehow worse than all of them and mandatory at a lot of workplaces since Covid.
MySpace#
Customising your page, picking your top eight, embedding your favourite song so it plays when someone visits. Creative and personal. Then Facebook took over and everyone migrated. Facebook's been ran by Mark Zuckerberg from the start from the start which says enough... gross. Only gotten uglier over time.
Twitter#
I genuinely loved it for a long time. I remember following Obama's account during his administration and thinking it was kind of incredible that you could just... see what the president was thinking in real time. That felt new and human. Then over the years the harassment got normalised, the algorithm started feeding you rage, the good chronological feed got buried. Then Elon bought it. The "free speech" rebrand meant literal Hitler propaganda and real-time footage of war crimes while politicians take selfies with influencers, this is all sitting in the same feed as your friends' posts... Why? That was too much. I'm not doing that.
LinkedIn#
This one I actually defended for a long time. I understood what it was, used it genuinely, recommended it to others even after Microsoft bought it. I thought of it as the one platform that had a legitimate reason to exist. Then I read about BrowserGate, final nail in the coffin for me.
Closing Notes#
Just like the real world, too many amazing ideas and spaces are taken over by disgusting people who were never even invited.
I grew up on the internet and watched it get colonised in real time.
Colonisation is a cancer and the internet's been rotting for too long. I don't want to be part of it anymore.
So I'm out. Taking everything back to my own space. My data, my posts, my style. No algorithms. No hidden tracking. No weird stuff running behind the scenes. If you come to bennyrenya.com, you'll get Benny Renya.
I'm writing this as a reminder to myself, and putting it out there in hope that it inspires anyone else feeling the same.
Where to find me instead#
Old handles#
- Instagram: @bennyr.exe
- LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/bennyrenya
- Bluesky: @bennyrenya.com