The Antisocial Network: How the 90s Internet Died Like Diaryland
Before Tumblr, before Wordpress, and around the time LiveJournal was just a twinkle in an emo teen's eye, there was Diaryland, a blog site overseen by a cartoon cat named 'Constable Whiskers.'
Andrew Smales, a self-taught programmer from Canada, built Diaryland in 1999 for people to accomplish a paradox: write their diaries in public. The site gained attention fast. With 2.2 million users at its height, it was poised to draw a massive sum of venture capital. But its founder seemed to lack the cutthroat gene that would go on to make so many other social media tycoons rich.
In response to a Salon profile published in 1999, which called the site "ingenious", Smales said, "I just like making little things." After that, Smales never became a Zuckerberg and Diaryland faded into total obscurity.
At age 16, I was one of the first users to sign up for Diaryland. I used it to catalogue crushes, name-drop serious writers ("my trembling collection of Ibsen plays"), ruminate on body jewelry ("I have been thinking long and hard about this, and…I am going to get my toungue [sic] pierced."), and most achingly, my own terrible poetry ("you fold your napkin on your head/and recite the Kuma Sutra").
