What the old internet did was keep your interests partitioned. You could be a well respected Pokemon fan while at the same time being a beloved member of a local white supremacist group. Without the partitioning people are more likely to allow themselves to be seen as who they are as a whole. By social media enveloping multiple interests and people not wanting to maintain a separate identity for each interest, you get people who share a great recipe but are known to be a huge misogynist. Call me crazy, but I’d rather know more about the person I’m getting information from. What they do beyond a shared interest informs me as to how trustworthy they are a person and whether I want to support them and be associated with them.

Repartitioning the internet is not a solution. I keep seeing it touted as the rose-colored glasses nostalgia that it is. This example is no different. I feel it all boils down to wanting everyone to sit around their own campfires where they can sing kumbaya together while ignoring the ones who are wanting to strip others of their rights. The history of humanity is our steady stripping away these partitions, not putting them up.