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Thinking about how I use social media: A sequel of sorts

July 26, 2023May 27, 2023

close up photography of smartphone icons — Really, I just like the Google+ icon. Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

As I do periodically, I had a thought. This one was about social media. There is a lot of analysis out there concerning social media. I’ve posted a bunch about it myself, including just last month. A recent U.S. surgeon general’s report on social media said it’s pretty much bad for kids, but with a few positives, which sounds like a precursor to government action of some sort. But maybe not.

Last year, I wrote about how I use social media. It hasn’t really changed in the past six months, though I do check in on Mastodon a bit more now, and check in on Instagram and Facebook less, especially since I no longer have a regular routine for doing so. I used to check them before bed on my iPad, but the blue light issue turned out to be a real thing, so I stopped with the late night internet socializing.

Now that the routine has been broken, it’s made me take another look at the two main sites I use to visit every day (if however briefly, much of the time) and think, “What am I really getting out of these?” Let’s have a look!

Instagram:

I get to see Nic’s birb photos, which are spiffy and nice. But although IG was created around posting photos, they actually look better on Facebook.
Tim posts sketches he’s started doing recently, including ones from a high school yearbook he found from 1960. These are great, and he only posts them on IG.
A gaming friend in Santa Cruz, Mike, posts occasionally, sometimes about surfing, sometimes local scenery (Santa Cruz is a pretty seaside town), and he has a dry sense of humour. He has his IG posts automagically repost to FB.
A metric ton of ads and reels, which I do not want to see. The reels (short videos) are especially obnoxious. I think I watched one about an airplane that was flying or doing some other airplane-like thing (keep in mind that on IG these videos autoplay as they scroll into view), and now IG is constantly shoving airplane videos into my face, no matter how many times I click on NEVER SHOW ME THIS AGAIN YOU GODLESS MONSTERS.

That’s pretty much it!

Facebook:

Mike’s posts on FB are the same as the ones on IG
Nic’s are also mostly reposts from IG, though he posts memes as well
Tim tends to post more personal stuff on FB, like photos of the family, but also memes and weird/kitschy stuff
A few other friends and relatives post nearly 100% memes or content they’ve seen elsewhere
FB also has reels, but they mercifully do not autoplay (yet). I keep hiding them, they keep showing up.
FB also has a metric ton of ads, and these do autoplay. I hate all of them.

To give you an idea of the ratio of ads to “content”:

On IG, it feels like about 50% ads, 30% content and 20% short videos (I’m not calling them “reels” anymore–take that, Zuckerberg!). It’s pretty awful. The one small mercy is the feed is actually in chronological order, and there’s a link to go to older posts if you missed something.

On FB, it’s about 45% ads, 45% “content” and 10% short videos or “People you may know” which also keeps popping up no matter how often I tell it to go away. Also, FB has this weird thing where it randomly starts shuffling stuff around. Old posts will suddenly come back, even though nothing has changed (no new comments/edits), while new stuff will get buried. I’ve sat back and watched the scroll bar in the browser jerk up and down for 10–15 seconds as it spazzes out. It’s both annoying and weird, but not the good kind of weird.

On balance, the only things I find especially worthwhile are:

Nic’s photos
Tim’s sketches
Mike’s photos

These three things form a tiny slice of what I actually see in the feeds, which are mostly ads and “hilarious” memes being reposted for the ten thousandth time (that day).

Can I go without these things I enjoy? Probably. Am I considering pulling the plug on the sites for a while as an experiment? Definitely.

I’ll probably decide in a few days whether to try it out. If I do, I’ll post my findings when the experiment ends.

Until then, NO I DO NOT WANT TO SEE MORE AIRPLANES THANK YOU.

What is social media?

April 29, 2023

Answer: You got me!

In the olden days, it was connecting with your family, friends and acquaintances and seeing what everyone was up to. Uncle Bob is having a BBQ at the cottage. Grandma is playing with the grandkids. Aunt May is into the bourbon again. Your old high school buddy has gone missing. Stuff like that. And usually on Facebook, because what else was there? mySpace?

Twitter was mainly used to pop off zingers, since you only had 150 characters, or posting memes. Sometimes useful stuff, too, which became a thing for news organizations and the like, which typically got around the character limitation by posting an image that contained 2,000 words of text. And people liked this. I think.

But today? The only people left using Facebook are your Aunt May (still on the bourbon, but also now posting memes you’ve seen three times in your feed already today), bot farms also pushing memes or misinformation/propaganda, and approximately one trillion ads.

Twitter…well. Since it assumed new leadership, it has gone full dumpster fire and people are peeling away from it in search of an alternative. And there are plenty, with more all the time, some doing different things (Artifact), some mostly the same but with key differences (Mastodon) and some shamelessly copying Twitter, including having their ex-CEOs on the board (Bluesky). And people are, of course, arguing about which is better.

But then I ask, why are people even looking? Why not quit Twitter and…do something else? When was the last time anyone read a book? 2007? How about go outside, then come inside and not post about it? Has that happened since 2010? I don’t think so! Instead of posting the perfect riposte to someone you don’t know, will never meet, and has no impact on your life in any meaningful way, why not write a poem about trees and bugs or something? Paint a landscape. Help an old person kick their bourbon habit.

I appreciate the irony of writing this on a computer on my blog (a micro-micro Twitter feed of one, if you will), but I’m taking my own advice. I’m going outside. I’m touching trees. I’m not posting memes.

For at least one day!

How I use social media in 2022

December 30, 2022

Remember when social media was just seeing what your friends were up to? That was about a hundred years ago!

Here’s how I use social media in 2022, which roughly mirrors how I’ll probably use it in 2023, too.

Instagram: I use this solely to post my photography and drawings, and to look at birb photos Nic posts. I follow a few people who don’t post much, so most times I’m on and off in a few minutes. Recent changes to IG make it really wonky on the iPad, which still lacks a native app because who’s ever heard of the iPad, am I right?

Facebook: My IG posts automagically go to FB, so I will see if anyone liked or commented on them there. Friends and family post more on FB, but most of the posts are memes and travel photos of places I’ll never get to, and I’m totally not jealous. FB is also stuffed full of annoying ads.

Twitter: I rarely used Twitter and started logging in more when Elon Musk bought it, and every decision he made regarding Twitter was terrible. But I don’t check anymore and deactivated my account. I don’t have a good analogy, but imagine driving a regular route and seeing this spectacular flaming car wreck one day. Then imagine you see it every day, forever. Eventually, you’re just done with flaming car wrecks.

Tumblr: I have never purposely used Tumblr.

Mastodon: A decentralized Twitter-ish service run by non-profits. A little clunky, but I made an account and pop in to check the few people I follow there. I have only made a few posts, and will probably not make many more.

Post: Another post (ho ho)-Twitter refugee camp. I made an account, will probably never post.

TikTok: I have never used the app nor been to the site. I’ve probably seen more TikTok videos on IG than IG videos.

I think that covers most of them. If I have accounts on anything else, I’ve forgotten about them.

Basically, I don’t use social media much, and I am good with that. I spend more time creating than consuming, which scratches the itches I have better. Although I do watch a fair number of YouTube videos. Do they count as social media? Probably.

Facebook thoughts, 2021 edition

July 13, 2021

It’s time to metaphorically step back and take a look at Facebook again, that lovable scamp of the internet accused of everything from destroying democracy to poisoning all public discourse.

I do not make any effort to post on Facebook at present. In fact, the only posts that appear there are auto-generated from Instagram, and these consist entirely of photographs I take of flowers, birds, scenery and objects I find interesting or weird. I don’t post pictures of food or myself, though the occasional exception is made.

My time actually spent on Facebook consists of a few things:

Looking at the photos posted by a friend
Looking over the posts of other friends and family
Otherwise, getting out as quickly as possible

The friend’s photos I also see on Instagram (which is a surprisingly terrible site for posting photos, given that its origin was for doing exactly that), so it’s more a review of what I’ve seen, and FB does an admittedly better job at displaying them.

The friends and family list consists of a majority of people who never or rarely post, a few who post semi-often and a couple who post pretty much constantly. All of these groups overlap in that they post little original content—photos they’ve taken, thoughts that have popped into their heads, interesting milestones in their lives, funny things they’ve personally witnessed and so on. Most just re-post stuff they’ve found elsewhere or on FB itself. The whole “share and like” thing. Several of them often share the exact same “funny” story or “interesting” quiz.

It’s all basically a bunch of garbage and I ponder ignoring their posts (which is to say changing the settings to stop showing their posts but not actually blocking the people themselves), but there’s always the niggling thought that they might post something genuinely interesting and would I want to risk missing it?

So FB is pretty much now just a waste of time. It’s not a huge waste of time because I’m typically only looking at it for a few minutes, but I toy with the idea of just taking a good, long break from it and seeing what the consequences, if any, are. I wouldn’t flounce off dramatically or make a big deal out of it, I’d just stop checking it for a few months or something. Treat it as a kind of junk social media detox.

Now that I’ve written this out, the idea sounds more appealing. Maybe I’ll try it and see how it goes.

In the meantime, I really wish there was another social media site that was really just about people posting interesting photos, but I suspect there’s no viable market for that or it would exist already. Alas.

A brief post about privilege and the impact of social media

June 2, 2020

Today a lot of media sites are participating in support of an initiative, using the hashtags #TheShowMustBePaused and #BlackLivesMatter (not without some unintended consequences).

Here’s what you’ll see if you access Apple music right now, for example:

This is in response to the killing of George Floyd, a black man, by members of the Minneapolis Police force. Since word of the killing, complete with footage, came out on Monday, protests have formed around the world and particularly across the United States. Most have been peaceful, some have been violent, some have been infiltrated by white interlopers looking to make the peaceful protesters look bad by association with their destructive actions.

These protests against police brutality have been rife with even more police brutality, with people doing nothing at all being attacked, teargassed, and beaten. Journalists are being violently attacked. It is disgusting and lays bare just how perverted the police forces in the U.S. have become, interested more in oppression and violence than actually protecting people, especially when it comes to anyone whose skin color is not white.

I am a white man, about as privileged as can be. I am a member of a minority, but it is an essentially invisible one. Most people won’t know I’m gay unless I specifically mention it, or, I don’t know, wear nothing but Pride-themed clothing. But I am very obviously a white guy. I cannot conceive of the things black people must go through in the U.S.–or even in Canada, which has yet to exorcise its own racist demons. It fills me with anger and despair that people can so thoroughly let themselves be subsumed by hate in service of power and authority, of feeling superior to others.

And in the U.S. they are aided and encouraged by a terrible monster of a man, Donald Trump, who is leading the destruction of the country, lashing out and inciting from the basement of the White House, the windows dark at night as he huddles in safety deep below ground, a fitting place for an unrepentant troll.

The Verge has a story today on how Twitter and Facebook should just ban people like Trump, because their tweets and posts are fomenting hate and division, and getting people killed. I agree. This is just one story of many you can find like it on the web right now, but marvel at how a tech site–a place where you go to read about gadgets and reviews of MacBooks–feels compelled to publish an editorial like this. This is the world we live in now.

Ban them all by T.C. Sottek