Dear Fucking Manchild,

I'm sorry I am no longer 16. I have in fact grown up, my testicles have dropped, and while I do spend a great deal of time on the internet - in fact, my job is building and repairing web applications - probably ones you might have used, I do grow weary of the internet's bullshit.

I'm glad that you've found 4chan and Reddit, but did you know, there's approximately 180 million websites, give or take? Most of them do things like sell clothes and provide news, or blog about their cat. Or porn. There's a lot of porn. You'd be surprised that desu memes, n****r jokes, and MRA brosites are a really fucking small portion of the internet. Not 0.1 percent. Not even close.

So when you talk to me about the "real internet" - I build the real internet. I run network cables, rack servers, parse out bad namespace errors, fix 500s, rebuild RAID arrays, and do the shit that makes the real fucking internet - where people behave just like they do in real life.

Your anonymity doesn't make you strong. It makes you fucking weak. You've decided your baser instincts belong on the internet instead of your humanity, and you allow people like Ellen Pao and Anita Sarkeesian to take the fall for you. You don't fear the loss of free speech - you fear the requirement to be an actual fucking person on the internet. To have to listen to your opposition, treat them with basic human decency and compassion and possibly change your fucking mind.

You fear accountability. I own every word I've ever said here, even words I've regretted deeply. I'm easy to reach and my real name has been disclosed several times. I'm friends with several users here. My Twitter and Google+ both disclose my real name, and most people here know where I work. If you want, I'll gladly share.

You, who would unironically use a term like hugbox, are busy raging at the loss of your own. You need the chans, because you couldn't stand with me man-to-man. You have to post "Lol U Mad, Bro" memes, because you're not mature enough to take constructive criticism in a stern voice.

The rest of the internet is growing the fuck up. Twitter and Facebook are spreading news and helping freedom fighters seek democracy. They were also a medium to allow hate to spread, but they're working to fix that.

Honestly, I have a new relationship, a new apartment that still needs some touch up, a full time job, and a variety of recreational activities and family commitments. Internet bullshit time is not in that list. My phone notifications are an integral part of my existence - I can't choose to turn them off for three hours. Getting brigaded doesn't make me cry, or damage my self-worth one fucking iota. It's a waste of my fucking time however, and oddly, when you get older, you start to treat it more like the precious resource it is, and mourn the time when you were younger that was wasted on things like internet bullshit.

No adult worth their salt will ever say - "I wish I repressed more homosexuals and women and fatties on /b/ when I was younger."

I also am getting to the point where I might want to have a child, and if she is a daughter, I want her to be able to live her life free of scorn based solely on the fact that she has a pair of tits and you're capable of avoiding my parental retribution. I do worry about what sort of internet we're leaving behind, but more importantly, what sort of people we're leaving behind. I do not want my daughter surrounded by pathetic people like yourself - people who can't handle the least bit of consternation without building a wall of anonymity and snarking or slandering in the dark. I don't fear your attitude, I fear your pervasive cowardice, and the pseudo-intellectual veneer you assholes put over it - with bullshit like the Men's Rights Agenda, and Redpilling and Egalitarianism and anti-SJW and these obsessive fucking Gates. There might be real people with good ideas in each of those groups, but you're sure as fuck not one of them.

So now, you get to look at the real internet - full of commentary and commerce, discourse and information, accountability and responsibility. You can come the fuck along, or you can run back to your hugbox, but don't blame me when the world changes around you.

Sincerely, Justin Scott, Adult.