@JeremyMallin Yes, it's a mixed blessing for me, though it wasn't always like that. I think a lot of it is how the internet has changed over the years, and how much more overt harassment and abuse there is now. Back in the day, I had a programming joke blog post blow up and it made the front page of reddit and I had over 100,000 views in a day and nobody took it the wrong way or called me a piece of shit or anything. But it was roughly the same time when I responded to a tweet about a programming conference with an off-hand comment about how all the presenters were white men when the conference was billed as showcasing a diverse set of speakers, and a bunch of people got mad at me and I got insults and even a death threat from someone in Australia. That's the kind of crap I dread, inadvertently putting my foot in it and giving hordes of internet haters an excuse to descend on me and be mean and abusive just for kicks.

Mostly, I think social media was a bad idea, or a good idea turned bad by internet scale. Humans evolved to function in relatively small social groups, and our social abilities don't work well at the scale of millions. We don't have what it takes to function under the constant scrutiny of millions of strangers who will judge everything about us and may turn on us at any moment. I don't think anyone can handle that, even the big names with zillions of followers, who all end up as warped caricatures of themselves. So it's basically all the problems with regular celebrity, but almost none of the benefits that come with it.