Not a single day goes by that I don’t think that now is the right time to give up on social media networks like Twitter, Threads, Jaiku, Google, BlueSky and Mastodon.

Too Many People

When social networks were small they were on a human scale. You could be on a forum with 20-40 people and with time you developed deep friendships with people. Now we’re speaking to a crowd speaking to a crowd. I see people with a thousand likes and a hundred replies. The chance that I will get seen, in a crowd of a hundred is small. This leads on to the second issue.

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.

A few weeks ago Strava decided that it would add AI functionality to it’s app. It is for this reason that I decided to restrict which apps talked with Strava. Now Strava is doing the reverse. It has blocked access to its API so that other apps cannot use its own data.

This, in my eyes is short sighted. Strava is not the primary source of data. Garmin, Sunnto, Apple and others are. This means that if Strava makes it more complicated data from their platform, then they encourage people to bypass it entirely. It gives Garmin, Apple and Suunto to name but three device makers the chance to work directly with those that provide data analytics.

All climbers are familiar with this. You’re on a climb or a via ferrata and you look up but you don’t see what to do so you feel stuck. As a result you try one hold, and then another, and then a third and eventually you stop. That’s when you remember to look down.

If you look down you see that there is a foot hold 10 to thirty centimetres higher that will give you the extra reach that will allow you to climb onwards. The same is true with tech.

The Apple Fitness App now has Training Load data. It looks at the workouts you have done over the last 7 days and compares it to the last 28 days. In theory this is interesting but in practice I find it frustrating.

To be specific about what I find frustrating, the Apple watch has more than 1900 workout days to gather data from. Training Today and Gentler Streak both measure HRV and assess whether I am overdoing it, within the zone or slacking off. Given that both of these apps can tell me my training status it makes little sense that apple cannot give me relevant information.

Yesterday I went on a bike ride with a Xiaomi Smart Band 9 and a Fairphone 4. I wanted to see two things. The first was to see if the GPS track would be accurate for the entire ride, as well as how much battery power would be squandered in the process. I was happy with the result. After a two hour bike ride I had depleted about 20 percent of the battery since I unplugged that phone in the morning.

I saw that there is a hike taking place nearby. I would have really liked to join it but I would have been participant eleven with a limit of ten people. I wanted to participate because it would have required walking to Nyon, and taking the train de St Cergue to St Cergue and then walking for a few hours, before taking the train back down and walking home. Both my carbon footprint and my travel time would have been small and the environment would have benefited.

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”.

Recently I have been walking and running into and out of Nyon and in the process I have had to cross busy roads regularly and what has struck me recently, especially when running is that people stop to let me cross the road, even when they don’t need to. I really appreciate this.

When you cycle and walk between villages cars skim you, fast and close, and after several years of it I grew tired of it so I shifted to walking towards Nyon, along pavements, and avoiding busy roads when I could. In the process I often walk across main roads, if possible at crossings without lights, in the hope that cars stop for me.