Social Media

Yesterday I finally took the step of deactivating my account, and then reactivating it, and then this morning deactivating it again. Normally when I lose interest in a social network I just forget about it and I’m done. In this situation I didn’t forget about it though. I went a step further.

Three factors pushed me towards this decision. The first is that Musk wants to use our tweets to feed AI and I don’t want my tweets to be used that way. Logically they can’t be used, because my account is private.

Recently I have noticed that I like to play Solitaire for many games in a row. It has replaced my social media habit. I know that solitaire is a solitary game but at the moment I enjoy it. I tried several versions on iOS and android but my current favourite is the Netflix version of Solitaire.

I find that I can spend hours playing Solitaire as I watch TV and films. It seems to give more pleasure than social media. Social media no longer brings as much pleasure as it used to because the communities that I have been part of have migrated to other platforms, or given up on social media. The result is that I can spend hours scrolling, or I can play Solitaire.

I have spent the last day or two playing with Bluesky and I believe that it has potential, At it’s base it’s like Mastodon, but with less anarchic user base, and fewer trolls. This could be because I haven’t spent weeks using it yet.

Threads has a good community and good community tools but it’s part of the Facebook empire and within a few weeks adverts will appear and that will drastically feel the look and feel of the social network.

I really miss the age of social networks. In the age of social networks our sphere of influence was limited to our friends, and our friends of friends. The result is that social media was a friendly conversation rather than a popularity contest.

Over the last two days I have been looking at Threads and BlueSky and to a lesser extent Facebook and I am struck by how many thousands of posts and likes threads and posts get. In such an ecosystem we are in a popularity contest where some people get more attention than they can handle and deserve, whilst most normal people are ignored and solitary.

For some people the mass X-odus from Twitter to Bluesky is fantastic because it means that the community is growing and that by growing it means that more likeminded people will arrive. The flipside of this is that with a million new users per week, and growing, that’s a huge influx. That influx is bad news because for every decent person there are changes that the amount of trolling will increase.

Last night I listened to Yuval Harari and Ari Meiber speak about Nexus, the new book and related topics and the concept that I found really stood out is about freedom of speech and volume. Yuval Harari believes that we should be able to share information and lies, but that social networks are responsible for how it is promoted and amplified, how loud the volume of certain ideas is.

“Freedom of speech is very different to control of volume” source because freedom of speech is the ability to discuss without fearing imprionsment but control of volume is how visible, or amplified a post becomes, and whether by encouraging engagement a post is spreading hate or negative messages. They spoke about how Facebook, “by turning up the volume of hate speech encouraged violent attacks”.

This morning I woke up to people insulting me for not being an Apple fan boy on Threads. Before that I was trolled for several other reasons and the consequence is that I have now deactivated my Threads account.

For me the web is a place where, if you agree, or if you want to offer support, but if you disagree, or don’t respect a view, you say so in a separate thread, without trolling people. On threads if I post something positive I will get dozens of likes but very few comments. If I write something people don’t agree with, they will troll, without any context.

If I was new to anti-social media I would see it as a complete and utter waste of time. On one side you have influencers and like culture where value is measured in likes and followers rather than meaningful conversations. On the other side you have anonymous accounts that look for arguments constantly. The result is a social media landscape with no Return on Investment for users like me. No ROI.

Threads, for the very beginning was an awful idea. Facebook already has Facebook, Instant Messenger, Whatsapp, Instagram and more. It was greedy so it created Threads but Threads has one fatal flaw. It’s a web chat driven by algorithms rather than chronological conversations.

The reason for which this matters is that it pushes content that has been seen and interacted by thousands of people, rather than half a dozen. We’re seeing posts that had a thousand comments and five thousand comments. This is not positive for community building because it enforces the cult of personality, rather than a network of friends of friends.

Recently I was added into a Whatsapp group where people discuss things to do in Geneva as well as more interesting activities a drive from Geneva. I was given admin privilieges on Whatsapp to organise events. In connection to this I shared activity ideas, interesting videos and more related to the topic. Yesterday someone objected to how much I posted so I started a private chat to converse, and when that was done I deleted the post that had triggered him.