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The Web is Going to Die

2025-10-06 · letter vlog · Hank · 5:33 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Internet & YouTube (also: History & curiosities) · mode: Personal essay · tags: calendar ritual, recurring series, on location, self promotion

In a Thoughts From Places video from Garnet, a Montana ghost town, Hank argues that ghost towns are rare because people and places bind together, but that the internet is full of them: platforms like Vine, Myspace and Google+ were abandoned, the web itself is becoming a ghost town, and one day even Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and this channel will be too.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Garnet Ghost Town: its preservation, why ghost towns rarely happen, Granite, and towns frozen in time

  • ★★ Hank says Garnet is an exceptionally well-preserved ghost town, largely thanks to federal employees who have shored up buildings, held back the forest and protected it from fire for decades. — 00:00:00
  • ★★ Hank says that without one terrible fire in the 1930s there would be much more to see at Garnet, which is still among the best-preserved ghost towns in the world. — 00:00:32
  • ★★★ Hank is surprised that ghost towns almost never happen: rather than moving on to better places, people stay, and most places that have had people still have them. — 00:00:32
  • ★★ Hank says Granite, another Montana ghost town, boomed in the 1890s to over 3,000 people, more than Garnet's peak of about 1,000; Garnet was abandoned by the 1920s, but people lived in Granite in the 1960s without plumbing or electricity. — 00:01:05 · Montana
  • ★★★ Hank thinks places and people join together in an important way, reinforced by physical realities: buildings, roads and water pipes are valuable, so once built they keep being used. — 00:01:05
  • ★★★ Hank says people are drawn to each other and can work things out together in a place; even when one economic boom ends, the people remain and sometimes invent another reason to be there. — 00:01:05
  • ★★ Hank says that does not work when, as with Garnet, a town is in the middle of nowhere and its only reason for being is a product others can get more cheaply and safely elsewhere. — 00:01:05
  • ★★ Hank says most places build on their old skeletons as needs and economies change, but a ghost town is frozen in time: the buildings remain, while what the town was really made of — children, friendships, rivalries, music, ambition — is gone. — 00:01:53

00:02:22 — Online ghost towns: abandoned platforms, placeless life, billionaire-owned places, network effects, the web becoming a ghost town

  • ★★★ Recalling John's video last week (week of 29 September 2025) on the channel as a placeless place and the short lives of social media platforms, Hank thought of the ghost towns of Vine, Myspace, Neopets, Diaryland, GeoCities, Google+, Digg and Friendster, and how common ghost towns now are. — 00:02:22 · John Green, social media
  • ★★★ Hank says each of these platforms is not one ghost town but thousands: the little places where people lived their lives. — 00:02:22
  • ★★★ Hank contrasts Garnet's residents, who left behind everything too big to carry, with today's easy, portable, placeless life — which he hesitantly calls kind of inhuman, a non-corporeal one. — 00:03:00
  • ★★ Hank asks how many once-thriving YouTube channels are now ghost towns, and how hard the brothers have worked to keep that from happening here. — 00:03:24 · YouTube, Vlogbrothers
  • ★★★ Hank questions what it means that these online places are built not on a city's land with a council and a mayor, but in a place that can be bought by a billionaire and used for his own goals. — 00:03:24 · social media
  • ★★★ Hank says online infrastructure is easy to duplicate, but the pull of a place with a critical mass of people can be enough: as with towns, social media live and die by network effects. — 00:03:24 · social media

  • ★★ Hank says 'network effects' is kind of just a term that means people. — 00:03:54

    “network effects, which is kind of just a term that means people.”

  • ★★★ With content now able to make itself, Hank wonders what keeps the decentralized web alive and says the web is becoming a ghost town, visited to remember how life used to be shaped (Homestar Runner, Delicious, Fark.com). — 00:03:54

    “The web is becoming a ghost town”

  • ★★ Hank says change never stops happening and that someday — which is okay — this place here will be a ghost town. — 00:04:23

  • ★★★ Hank says that someday we will have moved on from Twitter, Facebook and Instagram; he doesn't know to what, but unlike London or Detroit they will not simply evolve. — 00:04:23 · Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, London

00:04:52 — Closing line, sign-off, the final week of Pizzamas, dad jokes in the app and Pizzamas products

  • ★★ Hank says our digital world is already littered with ghost towns, and more are coming. — 00:04:52
  • ★ Hank notes it is the second and final week of Pizzamas. — 00:04:52 · Pizzamas
  • ★ Hank hopes viewers have enjoyed his Pizzamas dad jokes; he thought one might be a little controversial but has heard nothing so far. (playful) — 00:04:52 · Pizzamas
  • ★★ Hank says the old dad jokes can be read inside the Pizzamas app, which viewers can still download. — 00:04:52 · Pizzamas
  • ★★ Hank says less than a week is left to get Pizzamas products, including a puffy coat lunchbox, the first cut-and-sew Pizzamas button-down and a Pizzamas hair claw. — 00:04:52 · Pizzamas

In the description and comments

  • ★ The description calls the video a traditional Thoughts From Places video made during a traditional 2007 schedule, leaning into nostalgia, and points to pizzamas.com. — video description · Thoughts from Places, Pizzamas

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: Garnet, Montana · ghost town · World Wide Web

Also: Projects: Pizzamas

Works: Homestar Runner (web series) · Pizzamas app

Organizations: Delicious · Diaryland · Digg · Facebook · Fark · Friendster · GeoCities · Google+ · Instagram · Myspace · Neopets · Twitter · Vine · Wikipedia · YouTube

Concepts: blog · dad joke · generative artificial intelligence · network effect · social media

Places: Detroit · Granite, Montana · London · Missoula, Montana · Montana · Philipsburg, Montana · United States

Only in the description or credits: Thoughts from Places

Replies to

  • continues · Is It Time to Retire? — “John, last week when you were talking about this placeless place that we are here on this YouTube channel and the short lives of many social media platforms”

Later videos replying to this one

Part of an exchange of 3 videos, 2025-10-03 – 2025-10-07.