Are You Making This Common Party Mistake? Here’s How to Leave the Platform Like a Pro!

At first, I hated posting. It was 2006 and I was 12 years old. Too late for AIM, too young for Facebook, and too scared of MySpace (at the time, a cop had given a presentation at school about how the platform would put us in danger from sex traffickers), CarePages.com was my first social network. . The site offered a unique service: through a free and private forum, I could inform friends and family (stakeholders from any ring in my life’s orbit) about my state of health while undergoing treatment for lung disease. which was advancing rapidly. I would post, and my subscribers would fill in the comments below. Like eating my vegetables, it was an obligation that bothered me. But my parents insisted that our followers wanted to hear from me directly, and walking to the hospital computer center provided a rare excuse to leave my room. The site’s tagline, just below a creaky graphic reminiscent of Matisse’s The dance, urged users to “connect, share… care.” The poster’s dream made manifest: I share, you care.

In 2018, while working on a book project about this period of my life, I recovered a PDF of my account from the site’s remaining administrators (after a series of acquisitions, CarePages.com closed in late 2017). Reading that log (514 pages spanning six years), I realized my publishing skills were honed in CarePage challenges. My computer time might be constrained by a treatment schedule or other waiting patients, so I’ve learned to compress active days into a few sentences. The tone of a post, whether the news is good or bad, can be set in the first line. I preferred scenes and stories (a doctor was rude, a nurse woke me up, an IV line blew up) over rote activity lists because they gave the post a sense of necessity. I delegated the longer updates to my mother.

What struck me the most is how the more I posted (a sign, I think, that I was enjoying the task), the more frustrated and volatile my posts became. Looking at the archive is like watching the platform merge with my experience of perpetual illness: my expressions became increasingly irregular as I spent more time with an illness characterized by painful and labored breathing. Eventually though, the site outlived its purpose, as did the websites. My illness stabilized, I got older, and this specific way of publishing lost its appeal. My last entry on CarePages was in 2012 at the age of 18, more than five years before the platform shut down.

In the years since then, my relationship with the publication has been transformed. Like many media geeks and commitment junkies, I now spend much of my computer time on Twitter. The Elon Musk property has sent some users searching for new alternative, drab recreations of the original product. But a new URL won’t solve the many problems of the financialized Internet, nor can it fix the fractured communication habits instilled in us by years of tweeting, subtweeting, dipping, lurking, and bullshit posting. At its inception, CarePages was tied to individual hospital systems and therefore closer to its user base, but a series of acquisitions beginning in 2007 landed it in the hands of digital media and health technology companies that they saw less as a niche service for good and more as a commodity to complete a portfolio. It wasn’t until these acquisitions began that I felt the intrusion of restraint. These sales are supposed to ultimately lead to the end of the site: the value proposition doesn’t quite mesh with the growth demands of a modern conglomerate. The disappearance of a platform is not always a sign of disease in the community; sometimes it’s a cure. Twitter’s anticipatory obituaries abound with partisan metaphors, but the platform’s slow death seems like a good opportunity to practice one of life’s most important social skills: knowing when to walk away.

one of my Favorite posts from the archive begin: “Good afternoon. What’s good about it? It’s a provocation similar to Twitter, taking a position just to have something to refute. As I grew comfortable with CarePages, I eased into uneven teen humor, signing entries with quotes from Dane Cook, Family man, Tenacious D: dirty childhood staples. After a while, the site became my main outlet for tension and grievance. I resented the indignities associated with the hospital, my skin could turn red with the exertion of my condition, and I spent most days in states of partial nudity under my hospital gown. In short, from a very young age I published crazy, red and naked. In the hospital, I felt like I had no control over my life and no privacy. CarePage, with its text box open all day, became a rare site for self-assertion. I commented on my roommates (“a little guy with a big mouth”), my surroundings (“the window blinds are broken and the light is blinding”), and the doctors (“All we’re doing is waiting. Waiting.” into idiots.”) Ventilation became a kind of medicine.

Like many social media platforms today, most notably Twitter, CarePages.com was driven by misery: without disease, the website had no users. Talking about vomit abounds in my posts. Physical pain too. But mentions of “home,” as in “We’re going home,” number in the hundreds. Comments increased markedly on posts that were overtly positive, notably those that talked about leaving the hospital. Many of my less-liked posts, including one that the site censored for “negative content,” received no comments. Not surprisingly, but people didn’t care much for the fight; they cared about success. Despite being a truly private page (readers had to be invited by email), there were limits to the sacred autonomy of the CarePage cartel. The home page of the site’s predecessor advertised it as a place to “exchange messages of support, without intrusion.” Later, it introduced a feature called “Inspiration: Courageous Profiles,” which highlights stories of successful patients. The website cultivated an environmental positivity that extended to its moderation policies and content, as if hoping to steer the outlook and life of each patient it claimed to host in an agnostic way, remaking the disease experience in their image. I was doomed to grind every bit of misery into something shiny and digestible if I wanted to commit. (This was complicated by the fact that the platform was one of my only windows into normal adolescence. If my posts could prompt my friends to comment, they could provide me with updates on the world I was desperate to rejoin.)

When I think about my illness, I remember the pain, the abjection, the pleasure that I felt using the platform to release anger. But my posts reveal that I was led towards candid optimism. Twitter thrives on discord, which is not the same as rewarding a user’s negativity: engagement comes from the opportunity to call someone out for their misunderstandings or their wrong attitude. Often when a poster is criticized for a bad take, I am reminded of the way CarePage allowed others to tell me, either directly or passively, that I was metabolizing my experience the wrong way.