Social Media

Many years ago I liked to get mags. I would look at the choice of mags every time I was in a magazine shop. I would even buy some every so often. Eventually I stopped I stopped, not because my desire to get mags was gone, but because the return on investment imploded.

You would buy a mag, flick through it, read a few articles, and in the process realise that more than half of the mag wa filled with adverts. In effect you’re paying for a magazine but you’re paying for more ads than content. I’d ratheer have a thinner mag, with more actual content than a mag filled with ads.

Recently I have been thinking more about trolling. I have been thinking about why, I, and others, appear so negative or toxic on social media. I believe that one reason for this is that algorithms drive conversations and popularity, rather than time devoted to social media, and conversationalism.

Return on Investment Then and Now

By this I mean that if I spent 20 hours on social media in 2006 or 2007 I would have spent 20 hours watching conversations between friends, and friends of friends. Today if I spend twenty hours on social media I may see three or four posts by friends, and hundreds from groups, and that are chosen by algorithms. The result is that the social circle that I built in 2006-2007 was a tight knit community of friends.

Today I spotted another clear sign that modern social media are toxic and unhealthy. I see this through the boy sober movement.

A new trend is sweeping TikTok: #boysober. Its rules? No dating apps, no dates, no exes, no hookups. Thousands of women are uploading videos describing why they have gone boy sober and extolling its benefits.

In my opinion this is a clear demonstration of why algorithms are so awful on social media. For me this illustrates that with algorithms social networks become unusable for close personal connections. The reason for this is that when you’re competing for likes, comments and re-shares you’re forgetting about the core purpose of social media, for human beings. The ability to connect with people that do not live in the same village or town that you live in, and to stave off loneliness.

Almost every day, whether on Facebook open groups, or Fediverse instances I post something, and someone feels the urge to say “You’re wrong” and if I answer a stream of trolls and flamers will pile in.

Yesterday someone asked “How do I do A on site B” and I gave two links to articles speaking about how to do A on site B. I was then told that it was not helpful, and then when I answered back a flame war started.

A year or two I read about how young people were switching to feature phones from smart phones and I thought it was about nostalgia and fashion. As a person who grew up with “feature phones” as they improved and evolved, and as a person who was either trapped at a laptop or desktop I couldn’t fathom why someone would want to disconnect by using a feature phone, rather than a smart phone.

Two authors wrote books. In these books they speak about whether Jack Dorsey or Elon Musk killed twitter. The answer is neither. If Twitter was alive and healthy it would never have been sold to an individual for four times its value, because its growth potential would have made this absurd.

Twitter died by 2007, with the advent of hashtags. That’s when twitter went from being a community of friends to being a community of strangers trying to get a million followers, and using hashtags to jump into conversations that they were not devoted to. At the first tuttle meetups and tweetups everyone knew everyone else from twitter. No one was a stranger to anyone else.

Recently my Social Media Life has become dormant. I do visit Facebook every so often but I ignore Instagram, barely touch Mastodon or the fediverse, and in general have stopped looking at social media for a social life. It’s not that my life offline has become vibrant. It’s that online is empty of meaningful engagement, especially in winter.

From the nineties right up to around 2018 or so social media was a place to meet and be social. It’s during the pandemic that social media seemed to die. I think that social media relies on meeting people in the physical world to have value. People on the social web use it when they’re on the toilet, or waiting for something else to happen. They’re just filling small gaps in their schedule.

One of the unique things about Twitter in 2006 and 2007, especially during the first tweetups was that it was a network of strangers who became friends without meeting in person. The people I became friends with in 2006-2007 are still friends now, to some degree. I met them every week at tuttle events and tweetups.

At the same time Facebook was a network of friends from university, which then became friends from work, to friends from various activities. These were networks where, in the first case, you met new people, and in the second you consolidated personal friendships in the physical world online.

Today I saw the headline “Content creator camps help kids become online influencers” and to me, this represents a nightmare, rather than a dream. It represents a nightmare rather than a dream because the notion of creating content to sell, to influence, and to market, rather than to amuse, inform, educate and entertain seems wrong.

YouTube and Instagram are awful. They’re awful because people are creating content to get views, likes and subscribers, rather than to produce individual videos of special interest. Social media should first and foremost be about connecting people, having conversations and establishing strong bonds, that, with time, become friendships in the physical world, rather than online. People should create content that is fun and entertaining.

Recently I reverted to Facebook due to the death of Twitter, but also because of the political bias I see on Mastodon instances. That political bias has encouraged me to take a break from that social network until the conflict is over.

Critical Mass

Yesterday I saw that two people on Facebook discussed leaving Facebook just at the time when I am returning. I am returning for two reasons. The first is that with three billion people you’re more likely to find people who think like you do. It’s also about being local. I can spend thousands of hours on Mastodon, looking for conversations, and people, only to learn that they live thousands of kilometres away, and that they don’t want to meet in person anyway. It’s not that I want to meet in person, but that I like for the option to exist.