Walking Away Again
I deactivated my Tumblr account last night. I dread to think how many times I have re-joined Tumblr over the last three, four, or five years. Every time I walk away, I miss the people that used to tell stories there, and head back to catch up with their adventures. The circle has been getting smaller for some time now though – it was time.
I’m not going to make any sweeping statements about Tumblr, or the nature of the internet, or blogging, because I’ll almost certainly be wrong. I can talk about me though – and the realisation that Tumblr had become “one more place” – another place to try (and fail) to keep up with. At times in the past I’ve found myself skipping between Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, Google+, Ello, LiveJournal, Wordpress, Instagram, Flickr – the list goes on. It’s ridiculous.
I deleted my Pinterest account earlier too. I don’t use it for anything constructive – I never have. Perhaps the only thing I had of value was a collection of extremely questionable pulp-fiction book covers.
While chatting with somebody online earlier, they questioned why I have “secret internet superhero” in my tagline. I guess the answer to that could be quite easily answered by an SOS call I received on Friday afternoon. A good friend’s website had been hacked, and the webmaster didn’t know how to fix it – the site had been dead in the water for days. They gave me their account details, and fifteen minutes later the site was back up and running again.
While chatting about the above hack/repair/fix (whatever you might call it) on Saturday night with the other half of the website owner, the whole conversation about skills came up – and how I don’t blow my own trumpet enough. I suppose I don’t really. Most of my day-to-day work happens inside the firewalls of huge companies – and I don’t talk about any of it. I have done some public things in the past though – like that time I built an alternative to Tumblr (which was being rubbish at the time), and fifteen thousand people landed on it overnight.
Anyway. I’ve left Tumblr now. I’m no longer in the “build a better Tumblr” game either – mostly because I have no interest in running anything. Building things is the fun bit – running things is a horrific thing that only masochists might possibly enjoy. I know this, because I once ran a rather large website (that I built) for writers. Never, ever again. It’s like dealing with an army of two-faced toddlers armed with unimaginable insults, and infinite amounts of time on their hands. We caught several people with multiple accounts, starting arguments with themselves as “social experiments” to then draw others in. You can’t make it up.
I probably sound really cynical about everything, don’t I. I’m not – honest. Just tired. Tired of everybody else’s drama.