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On Saturday, the Washington Nationals baseball team held their first spring training game of the season. I had the radio broadcast playing in the background while I went about my day, and I also monitored a community blog called Talk Nats.
The moderators of the site shared an article about the game, and as the play progressed, a group of Nationals fans engaged in discussions in the comment threads.
Much of the conversation centered around specific plays.
“Ferrer was nasty,” a commenter noted shortly after one of the team’s top relief pitchers, Jose Ferrer, struck out two batters.
“Looks like we took the Ferreri [sic] out of the garage,” another user chimed in.
There were also humorous remarks, such as when, early in the game, someone joked: “Anyone who K’s [strikes out] is cut.” Alongside these were broader discussions about the upcoming season.
As I followed the thread, it became apparent that many commenters were familiar with each other, while some were meeting for the first time. Towards the end of the game, a participant mentioned that they were listening from a part of Canada that had recently received three feet of snow. Another commenter reminisced about their own trip to that area: “It was amazing.”
Ultimately, over 540 comments were made during what was otherwise a fairly uneventful early-season exhibition game.
I previously wrote about Talk Nats in a 2023 article for The New Yorker entitled “We Don’t Need Another Twitter.” In that article, I specifically responded to the launch of Meta’s Threads platform but also made a more general point: it may have been a mistake to attempt to centralize the internet around a limited number of enormous, privately-managed platforms used simultaneously by hundreds of millions.
“Forcing millions of people into the same shared conversation is unnatural, requiring aggressive curation that in turn leads to supercharged engagement that tends to leave everyone upset and exhausted,” I stated. “Aggregation as a goal in this context survives…for the simple reason that it’s lucrative.”
In contrast, niche sites like Talk Nats align more closely with the original vision of the internet, one that prioritized connection and discovery; a space where a baseball fan from Canada could enjoy an afternoon discussing a leisurely baseball game in Florida with a few dozen like-minded individuals.
This embodies the internet as a source of joy, standing in stark contrast to the anxiety or numbness experienced on large platforms like X or TikTok.
While following the game on Talk Nats, I reflected on that New Yorker piece, realizing that those ideas resonate even more now than they did when I first shared them.
“I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us,” wrote John Perry Barlow in his groundbreaking 1996 document, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. “You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.”
In the thirty years since, we have permitted this kind of oppressive tyranny to infiltrate cyberspace—an inevitable result of condensing this once diverse and idiosyncratic medium into a handful of enormous platforms.
I truly appreciated my experience on Talk Nats today. I left feeling uplifted rather than angry or depressed. Perhaps it’s time to declare independence once more.
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In other news…
–> For another perspective on this topic, check out River Page’s recent Free Press essay, “The Online Right is Building a Monster,” which effectively addresses the unpleasant dynamics that can emerge on large internet platforms. (His critiques of both the online right and left resonate in this piece.) The remedy for the issues Page highlights? Stop utilizing these services!
–> In the audio arena, my podcast's Episode 341, released earlier today, explores a lesson regarding the significance (and challenges) of combating overload in our digital environment.
–> Additionally, since we’re discussing meaningful online spaces, I encourage you to explore The Growth Equation, where my friends Steve and Brad have shared another one of their well-regarded manifestos: “How to Save Youth Sports.” [ read | subscribe ]
On Saturday, the Washington Nationals baseball team had their initial spring training game of the season. I tuned in to the radio broadcast during the ... Read more