I Cover the Internet for a Living, and These Wild Social Media Posts Still Broke Me

The petty revenge material is genuinely some of the finest writing on the internet, and I don’t say that lightly. Somebody got splashed by a puddle-driving BMW and responded with a curse so precise, wishing warm pillows on both sides and midnight Lego encounters, that Shakespeare would’ve asked for notes. And the handbag saga might be my favorite piece of narrative fiction that isn’t fiction: a driver throws up two rude fingers, and the witness simply declines to mention the purse sitting on the car roof. That’s not revenge. That’s restraint as a weapon, and it’s the most devastating thing a person can do while doing absolutely nothing.

Then there’s the unsolicited opinions department, where confidence and accuracy have never once met. A man posted a nineteenth-century harem painting as evidence of his own dating value, which is the kind of argument you can only make if you’ve never successfully spoken to another person. Someone else gatekept adulthood itself, listing the traumatic experiences required before you’re allowed to be considered an equal, like emotional damage is a rewards program. And the historical revisionism claiming a 1940s Texas small town had no racism is the kind of confident wrongness that makes me want to mail somebody a library card with a note that just says “please.”

But the local emergencies are where community groups earn their reputation as the best free entertainment available. There is a formal community warning, posted in earnest, about a man committing targeted flatulence at a child in a grocery store, four full seconds, with the parting words of a supervillain. And somewhere on a beach, a search is underway for a prosthetic leg lost while surfing, described in the post as a leg with no one attached, which is a phrase I’ve now read fifty times and will think about forever. No algorithm generated this. Real humans typed these sentences, reviewed them, and hit post. That’s the miracle. That’s also the problem.

Here’s the conclusion I keep arriving at after years of this: the internet didn’t make people weird. People were always exactly this weird, and the internet just installed windows in everyone’s houses. The neighborhood always had the puddle curser and the grievance economist and the guy with the paintings. We just used to only meet our local ones. Now we get everyone’s, pooled, searchable, forever, and honestly, as an archive of the human condition, it’s more accurate than anything in a museum.

And I’ll admit the part I’m not proud of: I can’t stop reading them. Every one of these posts made me physically sigh, and I still scrolled to the next one, because underneath the exhaustion there’s real affection. These people are unfiltered in a way I’ll never be. They wish pillow warmth on their enemies out loud. Some part of me, deep down, respects the puddle curse. A larger part of me hopes I’m never in the group chat’s crosshairs. Both parts keep scrolling.

The posts are real. The people are realer. Log off, all of you. After one more.