An Obituary for Reading the Internet

Farewell Pocket, 2007 - 2015

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Back in the early 2010s, I had a friend who used to spend the first hour or so of every work day poking around the internet. He didn’t read on his phone, and he wasn’t on social media, so his online reading happened almost exclusively in those hours. He’d navigate to a handful of websites he liked, and blogs he read, and then he’d go to Digg, which would show him a homepage of curated articles of various lengths, spanning various disciplines and formats. He was a scientist, but one of the most widely read people I knew, at least when it came to the sort of things you’d find on the internet: think pieces, reported pieces, esoteric but compelling blog posts, interviews, curiosities, news items, new movie trailers, you name it.

‘Welp, I read the internet,’ he’d sometimes tell me around 10 am. “Got anything else for me?”

I always did, because I also read the internet in that way. I used a combination of Google Reader, favorite websites I’d refresh multiple times daily (The Hairpin, The Toast, Grantland, Jezebel, Go Fug Yourself), and followed links from those sites to other stuff the editors thought worth my time. Early Twitter and early 2010s Facebook weren’t yet link suppositories; you spent most of your time actually posting observational shit instead of retweeting. So you found your reading (relatively) on your own.

I’ve come to think of these years as the halcyon days of the post-recession internet, a sort of second golden digital age. It was before so many publications’ fate became inextricable from social media, so even though everyone over at Gawker Media was still being badgered by the traffic leaderboard in their offices, the idea of the homepage still held power. People navigated to your site because they liked your site and knew they found good stuff on your site; then they read stuff there. Not just scrolled, but read.

In hindsight, this period probably reached its apex at some point in 2014 to 2015, when people were arguing over whether there was too much longform journalism on the internet (the actual subject of at least two longform interviews). There were entire sites — two of them! — dedicated to curating the best longform on the internet. And people read these long-ass pieces! And not just me, a person who also wrote these long-ass pieces! Indeed, many of you originally found me by reading one of those pieces.

At some point, I began to realize that there were too many good long pieces for me to read each one, or to keep an open browser window forever. Plus, like a lot of us, I was increasingly using my phone to navigate and read the internet — a significant shift that coincided with my move to New York and the beginning of a 45-minute commute. I didn’t have internet access for most of that time, but I could read things that I’d saved to my phone. And I could do that because of Pocket.

I’d started using Pocket at some point in the late 2000s and have been a power user ever since. It was launched in 2007 as “Read It Later,” with a simple premise: you install the extension on your browser, then press the little icon (eventually, a “Pocket”) anytime you come across something you want saved. It saves that article or website to your account, and when you open up Pocket (in your browser, or, later, as an app on your phone) all of your Pocketed reads will be there.

Over the years I’ve used Pocket for research, to read on the subway, to find that investigative piece I read about olive oil back in the mid-2010s, and, with the newsletter, to put together the weekly list of things I read and loved. Now that we largely access the internet vis-à-vis social sites, I used Pocket to save links to interesting pieces that fly through my various feeds. It was a way of making pieces sticky, of adhering them to me (and, eventually, through this newsletter, to you). Over the last four years, I’ve felt like so many of the places where I used to find “the good stuff” have died unceremonious deaths. Indeed, my Pocket history is a wasteland of broken links and once-cherished websites URLs now addled with bots. But Pocket allowed you to keep reading the internet even when so many other forces were conspiring against it.

And now Pocket is dead. Or, rather, in the next two weeks, it will be. In 2015, Firefox began integrating the Pocket extension into every users toolbar — but Pocket itself remained independent. Two years later, Mozilla (Firefox’s parent company) officially acquired Pocket, and they hired a team to combine the functionality of the app with the curation qualities of sites like Digg (RIP). During these years, getting featured on Pocket could drive hundreds of views. But Pocket also resurfaced older gems, put together collections, and just generally served as a repository of stuff people wanted to save on the internet. Being there felt like slowing down internet time.

I periodically beat myself up about how bad I’ve become at reading the internet — how fragmented my attention has become, how easily I skim and scroll, how much more interested I am at looking at all of the things, even if that’s just the titles of posts in my newsletter feed, than instead of reading them.

I think back on the stuff I used to read in the 2010s and how I couldn’t get enough of it. But it was gloriously finite. The Hairpin stopped publishing at 5 pm Eastern. It went dark on the weekends. The New Yorker only published so many features a week. Whatever site or blog you loved almost certainly operated similarly. It was never an all-you-can-eat-buffet that left you nauseous; it was an excellent, satisfying meal. The architects of this current iteration of the internet identified our hunger, understood they could teach us to consume more. Instead of reading the internet, we see it — but understand what we see less fully.

I’m sure there are many reasons Mozilla chose to kill Pocket. But it’s hard not to see it as one of the last remnants of a different understanding of what the internet is primarily for. When I miss the internet of the 2010s, it’s not just because I miss an internet less magnetized by Trump, although I certainly do miss that. I miss the internet that wanted to be read, not scrolled, and created tools accordingly. ●

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I’ve love to hear your thoughts on how your own experience of reading on the internet has changed over the last fifteen years — and what tools (and mediums) facilitated a different sort of relationship to reading. Yes, we should talk about Google Reader — but other stuff, too!

And I also want to know your solutions on how to save stuff for later; if I have to use browser bookmarks I begrudgingly will but that won’t work for, say, saving something I see on Instagram, or a newsletter I read in the Substack App. And finally: I think the Substack App *wants* us to read the internet, but doesn’t quite reach its goals. What’s *not* working, and how could it change?

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