Let us lurk

Lurking is the best thing about the internet. Don't ruin it, Twitter.

A woman peeking at Twitter.
(Image credit: Illustrated | stockce/iStock, Screenshot/Twitter)

As a rule, I am opposed to interacting with other human beings. I barely survived 12 years of first-day-of-school introduction games; I simply refuse to eat dinner if Seamless goes down; the words "audience participation" are my personal hell. So boy, oh boy do I love the internet.

Ever since my first Neopets account (RIP), I have been an expert lurker. I creep through conversations on forums without ever announcing my presence. I made a Tumblr account simply to follow other people's Tumblr accounts. I can spend hours a day on Facebook sifting through high school friends' pages without once commenting on their posts. You can imagine my horror, then, upon learning that Twitter is considering implementing a "presence indicator" to show other users when you're online, while also potentially abolishing the "like" button, the preferred bare-minimum interaction of lurkers everywhere. It appears as if, to the detriment of everything that made the internet great, the age of anonymous creeping is coming to an end.

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Jeva Lange

Jeva Lange was the executive editor at TheWeek.com. She formerly served as The Week's deputy editor and culture critic. She is also a contributor to Screen Slate, and her writing has appeared in The New York Daily News, The Awl, Vice, and Gothamist, among other publications. Jeva lives in New York City. Follow her on Twitter.