On Saturday I went for a ride with Bike Club Switzerland from Geneva. The ride itself was planned on an 80km loop that went from Geneva via Vich up to Begnings and then towards one or two more places before heading back towards la Rippe, across the top, and eventually down to Grilly and Geneva.
The Planned hike was meant to be moderate, at around 22km/h and 82km in distance. To get to the meeting point I had to cycle 22km just to start the group ride, and then 82km with the ride, and then 22km or more to get home.
Tomorrow there are at least three hikes and three bike rides that I know of. The hikes are via GoSocial and the bike rides are via Meetup. On Sunday I know of at least two to three GoSocial hikes and one Meetup hike. I have plenty of choice for what to do on weekends. In fact the choice is broader than that.
Over a week ago I signed up for a hike but over the last two weeks I have seen people say “I want to participate” without ever being told “sorry, we’re full”.
I find that GoSocial and Meetup are great social networks. It’s an easy way of finding people to do things with, every single weekend. It means that rather than sitting in bars, listening to people talk, hoping for a fun activity, that is not drinking, to be mentioned, you can find a group to do things with.
The flipside to this is that you meet 12-25 people per activity. Sometimes you will meet the same people again, more than once, but more often than not you meet a new group each time.
This weekend I didn’t blog because I went on two hikes. The first hike was with the History hiking meetup group, and the second was with a GoSocial group. Both hikes were around 10km in different landscapes. The first one went from Bière to Allaman and the second one went from Haut-De-Caux to the Dent De Jaman and back.
From Bière to the Arboretum The first hike was with a larger group than usual for this meetup group.
This morning I went for a run. During this run I listened to Systems Crash and the discussion about AI, about the US attitude, and the European/International attitude and it convinced me that I much prefer to use EU/International projects rather than American ones for a simple reason. Corporate Social Responsibility.
The US wants to move fast and break things, including the law, by hoovering data it has no moral rights to.
In the golden age of social media I went from tweeting with a pseudonym to tweeting with my own name. This was as true on Twitter as on Facebook. There was a sense of community that meant that we were safe to use our own names, rather than nicknames.
That age ended in 2020 when normal people, isolated by lockdowns, became familiar with Twitter and other social networks. In 2020 I was flamed more than once on Twitter, and eventually became private, after using a pseudonym.
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.
Threads, in theory is a social network but in practice it is a popularity contest driven by algorithms. Normal people are competing against influencers to be seen. You are more likely to find a troll than someone interested in what you have to write, or what you think.
More often than not you will see posts with 21,000 followers, a thousand comments, and several thousand likes. When a post does get 5000 views you will get very little conversation.
I understand Meetup, GoSocial, Facebook Events and other event based social networks. The one that I don’t understand is GoSocial. It’s a social event network that has visibility on Facebook but you can’t comment, and chat rooms for Geneva, Lausanne and other places.
Instead of creating an event where everything is visible with ease, as with Glocals, Meetup.com, Facebook events and other social networks it is a pig’s breakfast of one chatroom per event, and a list that is manually updated for participation that is only visible when you’re already included within the chat when it’s updated.
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.