I wasn’t on LiveJournal (though I read the journals of friends there), but this definitely describes the experience of blogging in the years before social media exploded. Writing a blog post was writing, and a lot of bloggers took it very seriously. And your blog post would be read, even if only by other bloggers, and readers would often write thoughtful responses, too.

(This was before WordPress added a social-media-style “Like” button — back when you had to actually respond in words.)

 
2. “My Ex-Boyfriend’s New Girlfriend Is Lady Gaga“

The article is redundant — it’s pretty much all there in the headline — but I did notice this paragraph:

“Social media in 2020 is so ingrained that it’s no longer a supplement or even an addiction. It’s just an accelerated extension of the way humans have always behaved. We live in a culture of constant updates. You want to unsubscribe? Well, you can’t.”

A little buzzer should go off when you’re reading the last sentence, as if you were on a game show and you just gave a wrong answer.

 
3. “Wikipedia Is the Last Best Place on the Internet“

Just shows how people used to think the web was going to lead to positive things, and how, in a very few places, it actually did.

(In that same issue, there’s an article called “The Notebook.” The blurb is: “In the early days of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg kept his plans for world domination in handwritten journals. He destroyed them. But a few revealing pages survived.”)