I’ve always been an offline kind of person. Moving to the States when I was 16-yo, I was slammed by Snapchat, Instagram, Tumblr, Twitter, Pokemon go…. all at once, I was quickly burnt out and decided a lightly-maintained Instagram was all I needed to let others know that I have a life.
Sure, everyone has a phase where they're obsessed with something online, then suddenly they're not. I was that kid. My love affair with the internet began when I was 9; but it wasn’t with video games; it was with online encyclopedias. I got hooked on Baike.Baidu.com, China’s Wikipedia. I dove into rabbit holes, becoming verified contributors to niche topics. I found the process of research to be amusing and addictive. It became a daily ritual: after school, I’d sit at my computer, scouring the web to answer questions. It felt empowering that nobody knew I was just this 9-year-old kid and they are reading the shit I helped draft, regarding them as information authority.
That’s when I developed an unhealthy relationship with the internet and online attention. Being a perfectionist, I spent endless hours crafting the perfect answer, refining my writing. As I got older, my standards grew higher. When identity verification became a thing, requiring real names on profiles, I became even more paranoid about messing up my reputation. So, I tried even harder with my posts.
“Make Instagram casual again,” “just thread it”—these mottos are easier said than done. Until Web3 gave me another push. As a general audience to casual posts from unknown users, I found a more accepting version of myself: diversification of entertainment by boundless online personalities make me want to spend no time on judging anybody, but to focus on finding people whose content I enjoy. This mindset has also enabled me to write and post more casually myself.
Im back at square one with curating my feed and my online personality. I first downloaded Warpcast thinking that it is going to be a crypto natives playground with huge learning curve to each consumable content. It has proven me wrong in many ways:
For learning: Warpcast offers a great entry point than Twitter, where noises are more filtered out, less visible bots; following the right channels and the right people basically offers me a 1-stop-shop to learning what’s happening in the web3 innovation world.
For fun: The right mix of url and irl activities promoted on Warpcast create an easy-going atmosphere for people to engage with one another and to make friends. The smaller, more intimate social graph on there makes everybody more reachable, content more surfaceble.
Builders, creators, people who found home on Warpcast are trying their best to keep the algorithm new user-friendly; this sense of obligation that come with being a successful early-user of a platform is entrepreneurial, ownership-oriented, and I have so much hope for what it could become under the hands of the right participants. I don’t mind spending more time online if it means contributing to an experimental community that’s onto something big.
Reconciling my relationship with the internet is already rewarding me with something exciting. I only hope is that there won’t be a day when I become “too online.” Hope I will always be the girl with a paper journal in hand, too busy enjoying the real world to open another phone screen just to share my thoughts with more than one group chat.
Maybe there is a way to stay onchain but not too online…?