I’ll give you this candy if you’ll be my friend.

“I follow back.”

Jesus pancake-flipping Christ, how I hate those three little words.

I positively loathe how the internet, something that has brought us such opportunities for communication and expanded knowledge and access to some really cool and random shit, not to mention all the pictures of cute cats our fluttering hearts can handle, has apparently devolved so many of us back into little squabbling children who haven’t yet learned the value of quality over quantity.

In 1995 Alanis Morissette famously sang about “ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife”.

And at the time, everyone was like, “You’re being ridiculous, Alanis, none of this is ironic at all.”

If that song were back in the spotlight today, I kind of feel like the biggest argument against it would be Alanis not appreciating the sheer number of spoons she’d managed to accumulate.

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I almost miss the days when 50% of the comments on YouTube were some variation of “lol faggot u r gay”. At least offensive hate speech is still saying something, after a fashion. I can even kind of understand the motive behind the perpetually tiresome “FIRST!” comment. But what exactly is the current trend of thumbs-up mongering supposed to be bringing to the discussion?

(“Like” this post if you need oxygen to live.)

WHY are people so obsessed with these meaningless numbers? Having a nervous breakdown if they lose one of their 6,000 friends on Facebook, maybe two of whom they’ve actually had a personal conversation with in the past month. Spending years accumulating 20,000 followers on a personal Tumblr which is just reblogs of other people’s work and not any of their own original content. Begging for likes in the comments of a video that someone ten million times more creative and interesting made. What does anybody get out of any of that?

Not a goddamn thing, from where I’m standing. Not anything that matters, anyway.

As far as I’m concerned, “I follow back” is just a concise declaration stating that you have nothing of actual worth to offer the world. That I shouldn’t care if you subscribe to my blog or my Tumblr posts or my tweets because you’re only following out of duty, not interest, and that I’d be a colossal idiot to hope for any kind of real engagement from you on a personal level because according to you, our only value lies in serving as filler material to make each other’s readership look more impressive than it actually is.

Forgive me if I don’t appear to be jumping at that once-in-a-minute opportunity, but I am not a packing peanut. I am a REAL nut.

I mean, why does anyone get suckered in by this shit? It’s like showing up to the Olympics and immediately holding a press conference in which you gush to everyone about your ongoing use of performance-enhancing drugs.

Except, for some inexplicable reason, instead of being followed by a public outcry about how reprehensible doping is, everyone just oohs and aahs over your physique and decides that steroids can’t be that bad after all if they gave you such a killer bod.

Haven’t we learned by now that looks aren’t everything?

(RT if you think food is yummy.)

Quite honestly, I appreciate it when someone unfollows me. From the bottom of my heart. Because at least it means they were paying attention. I’d much rather have someone give up on me because I’m not their cup of tea than have an indifferent +1 hanging on like a benign tumor.

So go sell your soul someplace else, follow-backers, ’cause I’m not buying. I’ve got enough dead weight to lose without your help.