So, after concluding after my last journal that the site has, indeed, been retoactively re-compressing all JPEG-formatted images for God knows what reason, I decided to look for ways to get in touch with the staff about it.

There aren't any.

Their entire help desk/support system has been completely wiped, and replaced with some third party garbage that directs all complaints to a "contact us" link that, when clicked, just crashes the tab. I know this site has been going downhill with its support for years now, but the Wix buyout seems to be the point where they just fired everyone and put up a brick wall between the users and the few humans still in charge of things.

So, I'm not sure what to do at this point. I don't want to shut down my account in protest, because I've always been committed to keeping my content available somewhere, but it's not even my content anymore; it's been run through an ugly compression system and spat out looking like garbage.

The internet as I know it is dead. Most people I know just post exclusively on Twitter, an even worse site for maintaining an art gallery than this one. Forums for having friendly discussions have been replaced with social media sites that turn everything into a contest to see who can be the biggest jerk. Human staffers have been replaced with algorithms, and even the users are being replaced with Russian bots. Nazis are trying to take over all the governments and the only people who care enough to stop them are busy having arguments on the aforementioned social media sites or beating up random people on the street. Everything sucks forever. The jobs are all gone and the hobbies are no longer fun. Why even live.