Genuinely great things the internet gave us in 2017In a year filled with depressing news alerts and Trump tweetstorms, moments of sheer joy online were hard to come by But amid all this doom and gloom, the internet did offer up a handful of moments of pure unadulterated joy. Forthwith, our definitive list of the things that weren’t terrible on the internet in 2017.
- Thanks to the United States’ unique commitment to not providing universal healthcare for its citizens, our social media feeds are often a heartbreaking stream of online fundraisers for medical costs. This spring, the rapper Nicki Minaj flipped the script, offering up an impromptu student debt jubilee on Twitter. Over the course of an hour, the star pledged upwards of $30,000 to support her fans’ studies. It was a nice reminder that social media doesn’t have to be toxic.
- Amid the constant barrage of Nazi trolls and bad-faith mansplainers, it can be hard to remember that some people actually do make friends on the internet. People like Spencer Sleyon, 22, and Rosalind Guttman, 81, who forged a close relationship after being randomly matched as opponents in Words With Friends, an online Scrabble game.
- In the United States, politicians spend election night hiding out in posh hotel suites until the results are in, at which point they appear at parties full of their most devoted followers. In the United Kingdom, politicians spend election night at village halls in their home constituencies, where they have to stand next to their opponents while the vote counts are read out. It’s a brilliant tradition, and one that forced Theresa May to endure the humiliation of sharing a dais with Lord Buckethead while the rest of the country speculated about her political future amid her party’s colossal failure in the snap election.
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