Searching for a teen girl who was once internet famous for her coding skills, a former fan uncovers a story of harassment.
It wasn’t the graphics, or the jokes, or the N*Sync lyrics people had a problem with. It was that view counter, at the bottom of her home page. That view counter was into the hundreds of thousands, and that made some people very, very angry.
It’s an interesting reminder of how small the internet was in the late 90s. That this middle school girl could reach so many people by simply understanding how to make a website look good is remarkable. Her website truly didn’t have anything spectacular or unique or even that interesting on offer. Her popularity was based almost solely on her design abilities, and that is damn impressive. She was at the forefront of a revolution none of us were even aware was happening, and she was internet famousbecause of it. “I started it a long time ago, when the Internet was like slowly becoming popular, and webpages were like…whoa,” she wrote on her FAQ page. “Heheh so I think my page was like ‘extraordinary’ then, and it got people kinda hooked on it…now its just like any other webpage, but people come to it anyways.”
People came, in droves, and they signed her guestbook, and in their messages they berated Sara for her popularity. She wrote in her diary about the people who were harassing her about her extraordinarily high page views. She lamented (half-heartedly) that she wished she’d never added a view counter. She defended her popularity, and then down-played it, and then defended it again. She angrily, reluctantly, offered advice to other webmasters on getting views for their own pages: sign other people’s guestbooks, update often.
And then, the next entry, the mea culpa. The apologies for getting angry, for writing “all that stuff.”
If the internet is an archive of the things we make then it’s also an archive of the abuse we endure there, and our apologies for feeling outraged.
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