Case Studies

Internet Resignation Letter

August 2nd, 2025

This is my letter of resignation from the interwebs!

You may have heard that the UK is now forcing users to provide their ACTUAL GOVERNMENT ID or a shoddy face scan to browse sites deemed “adult”. Furthering the dystopian nightmare there, setting a harrowing precedent for everywhere else. Not only that, YouTube and Spotify are going to roll out a system that will track your viewing/listening habits in order to determine if you’re over 18 or not for the rest of the world too. This means they can arbitrarily decide that you’re a minor and restrict certain videos and songs from you unless you provide your ACTUAL FUCKING LEGAL IDENTIFICATION or your credit card information for them to steal. YouTube and Spotify are basically the only major websites I still use alongside Discord, but this is the final straw.

YouTube already gets on my fucking nerves, so really this is a convenient excuse for me to stop using it. I must have the Ben Drowned algorithm or something because no matter how many times I click the “not interested” button and watch completely unrelated videos, I still incessantly get recommended schlocky “video essays” and drama videos.
Here are the types of videos I have consistently viewed for the past year or so:

And yet, half of the videos on my front page are videos talking about some Internet personality I’ve never heard of or something trending on TikTok that month/week/day that makes them mad. Seriously, the only reason I know what a Labubu is is because I keep getting recommended videos talking about how much the person hates the Labubu trend. Dude, if the stuff you see on an app makes you mad, just delete it! It's that simple!!! I guess that it categorizes any video containing someone explaining a specific topic as a “video essay” because I’ll watch a video about cystic fibrosis or the Black Death or something and on the sidebar I’ll get a video about how Chop Socky Chooks is and underrated gem or whatever. I realize that this is a very minor thing to complain about but it still makes me mad. I will now follow my own advice and stop letting YT make me mad.

There’s also like 5,000 other unpleasantries you can complain about in regards to Youtube, but you don’t need me to tell you that there’s really no other alternatives for video sharing websites. This poses a challenge when trying to quit using the platform. I don’t actually watch that much YouTube so I guess I could stop using it outright but I feel like that’d be unfair to the people who still just use YouTube to show off whatever dumbass shit they made for fun (y'know, the same thing people do on Neocities). After all, it’s usually those people who get the short end of the stick from the platform more than anyone else. I found out that you can follow the RSS feeds of individual channels so I’m just gonna do that for everyone I’m subscribed to and just keep myself signed out of the site. Not a complete solution, but the best compromise I could come up with. Besides, I wouldn't truly quit using it either way because I use YouTube to MP3 to download all my music :P

I’ve had this little piece of shit $30 MP3 player since last winter. My system is that I use Spotify around the house, but I use this thing whenever I’m out and about. Guess I’ll have to start using it around the house too. The main reason I still use Spotify is because of how easy it is to find new artists on there through “fans also like” and user-made playlists, but I do find myself getting recommendations from fellow fans of genres talking about artists they like and through tags/shared labels on bandcamp, so I guess I’ll just have to take the scenic route more often. I guess CD's are an option too but I don't like spending money and I consider those more of a collector's item for bands you already like and not really useful for people like me who constantly look for new artists. Plus, I feel like most people who brag about collecting "physical media" care more about it looking good on their Instagram/Tumblr and feeling cool than DRM and ownership...

A little while ago, my partner signed into their discord on my PC to do something and I haven’t bothered signing back into my account since. I only use Discord to talk to 3 people (exact number) and they all have my actual phone number, so I figured what’s the point? Most of my time spent there is looking at memes somebody else sent or going through old chat logs trying to get the gratification of scrolling. Half the time when somebody sends a message in our group chat it doesn’t even get a response. The only thing leaving me pondering at the crossroads of whether to get rid of it is that I use it to share things I made with my friends without having to directly send it to them or have it shared publicly on my site. The thing is, though, whenever I talk to someone I know irl, it usually involves catching up with what we’ve been creating/accomplishing. It gives rise to discussion on the details of our accomplishments and keeps each of us engaged with what the other is doing. So, if I can do this with people irl regardless of how close I am to them, why am I too afraid to directly send some shit I made to someone I’ve been talking to online for years? I always walk away from these irl interactions feeling much happier and proud of what I’ve made than if I had just sent it in Discord and somebody decided to give a quick response after glancing at it. This is just an inherent problem with talking through IM/text, really. In real life, the bare minimum is to at least act as if you care about what your conversation partner has to say. Over text, the bare minimum is just to respond at all. This is still a possible issue if I directly texted something I made to somebody, but it’s an improvement over sending something in a discord server where nobody is obliged to acknowledge it at all.

But what about sharing the things I make on here? There’s a lot of stuff I make that I don’t put on Pussyroach. There’s plenty of drawings, songs, and crafts I’ve created but am too shy to put on here. This stems from my petrifying fear of being made fun of, which I am also too shy to talk about in any more detail. I often get the nagging urge to delete all the pages off my site besides the art one (and even then, delete half of the drawings off of it). Real pussyroachheads may have noticed that I have done this with certain pages, temporarily or permanently. It’s hard to write this off as an unfounded worry when you observe how mean and negative people on the internet get, anonymous or otherwise. Just because nobody is going on my guestbook/profile saying “what the fuck is this faggot doing” doesn’t mean that they aren’t thinking it, and the fact that I don’t know what percentage of people viewing my site are thinking this makes me dwell on it even more. The only solace I get is reminding myself that there's probably only like 10 or 20 people that have paid enough attention to my site to even be able to remember that it exists.

I guess it’s a byproduct of the numbers game that is the modern internet. Even somebody posting on a private account only shared with friends will likely find themselves checking the likes/views of a post trying to deduce if enough of those friends have looked at it. Even if you're not aiming for as many numbers as you can get, you're still acutely aware of the interaction with your content. For people like me who just post shit they did for fun and are a little really self conscious, this awareness makes everything a lot less fun. It’s sad, really. Isn’t the point of the personal web to just have a little space where you can be yourself without worrying about what people think of it? You don’t have to worry about how many people like it, but even better, you don’t have to worry about how many people don’t like it. Why does your opinion matter? This is my house, go somewhere else. In the words of yaoi fanfics everywhere, don’t like, don’t look. I realize I probably couldn’t say something more platitudinous if I tried, but I’m not writing this for you, I’m writing this to reassure myself. Posting this publicly at all is just an effort to finally get this through my head.

So yes, I’m now fully committing myself to the indieweb. I can’t guarantee that Pussyroach will start getting more frequent updates because life is busy and about to get even busier once the semester starts, but I can give myself some peace of mind now that I’m cutting my last ties with the corporate web.

Anyways here's some albums I listened to last month.

Mood:Bricked up
Listening to: Dead Can Dance
Reading: Williamson, P. R., Jarvis, J. N., Panackal, A. A., Fisher, M. C., Molloy, S. F., Loyse, A., & Harrison, T. S. (2016). Cryptococcal meningitis: Epidemiology, immunology, diagnosis and therapy. Nature Reviews Neurology, 13(1), 13–24. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrneurol.2016.167
Watching: Porn
Playing: Dark Souls 1
Eating: Shit
Drinking: Black coffee

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