Lost on the Old Web

Writing stuff for the about page got me waxing philosophical. I hope it doesn't sound like a cliche if I complain about social media some more.

Is deleting or abandoning old profiles a bug or a feature of the Web? The Internet is a place where everyone sees incomplete versions of each other, and it's possible, common even, for best friends to vanish without a trace. Yet many artists get the same urge to distance themselves from their old work. To start fresh. Teenagers find that the things they said online no longer represent who they are. Fans of imageboards will swear that the anonymous way of doing things is better.

The point of a personal site, in theory, would be to represent myself in a more complete way. How realistic is that really? Anything I post will inherently reflect myself in the present, which means in practice that the site will host a lot of posts about Internet things I dislike, since that's what's been on my mind lately. Not posts about music, retro gaming, world building, or anything else I've been interested in over the years. It's simply not the state of mind I'm in anymore. Bits and pieces of me are lost on the old web.

Does that mean this site is really just another profile, to be abandoned eventually as well?

The world wide web is still a relatively new technology, social media consolidation is a new phenomenon, no one has really settled on an objectively "correct" way of answering these questions yet.

Realizing how different it is now from the Internet of a decade ago sort of caught me off guard one day. Watching the Web shrink down and consolidate has been an alienating experience. My brain truly isn't wired for social media. It's nerve wracking to use platforms where the default mode of communication is to type out mock conversations with no indication that anyone else is listening. I can't stand to use these types of platforms for years on end like others seem to be able to. The Internet is no longer built for people like me.