for the thirty-eight million

They deleted it on a Monday.

Not a war, not a bankruptcy. A line item. Thirty-eight million pages, most of them bad, all of them somebody's, and the sentence that ended them was about storage costs.

There was a page about a man's cat. There was a page that was only a MIDI file and an apology for the MIDI file. There was a shrine to a television programme that had already been cancelled, maintained for nine years after by a woman in Leeds who signed every update still here.

None of it was good. That was never the argument.

What was true about it was that a person had sat down, learned four tags, and put something in the window. Under construction. Best viewed at 800x600. A counter at the bottom, honestly reporting eleven visitors, one of whom was the author checking it worked.

We replaced that with a box that asks what's on your mind, and then keeps it.

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This page is one day old and has fourteen hours left. That is not a complaint. It is closer to how it used to feel.