Twist Satisfying
The unexpectedly moving story of an internet commenter who, after three years of posting, realized nobody could see him:
It never really made sense why over the course of three years I never got one comment or upvote/downvote for all of my posts. Reddit is an absolutely huge site, but after a couple years you begin to have your doubts. I decided to check to see if I could see my posts in an incognito browser and saw that none of my posts existed. What the fuck?! It was at that moment I realized that from my first post I was shadow banned and all of my contributions over three years never was viewed by a soul. I can’t fucking believe I never caught onto it sooner. I’ve had my hand raised for three years and no one could ever see me and I never questioned it.
A useful thought experiment: What if the last three years of your online posts, wherever you put them, were revealed to have been private and totally unseen? What if those sparse assurances of your content’s existence turned out to be the results of either automation or hallucination? Then: Are you sure this isn’t the case? Can you prove it?
Then, finally: Wouldn’t it be, on some level, a huge relief?
Photo by Fernando Rodríguez