Getting nothing but static, getting nothing but static
Static filling my attic from Channel Z
– The B-52’s
I joined LinkedIn first. A friend recommended it to me at the time and I signed up on February 11, 2004. Member number 224,376. I made my first attempt at a blog in 2005 and scuttled it after a couple of months. I started this version in late 2006. I joined Twitter in January, 2008 and Facebook in December, 2008. Instagram came sometime much later. I never joined TikTok, Pinterest, or a host of others that popped up. I have had an on-and-off relationship with Mastodon and I joined BlueSky and Threads when the geospatial community from Twitter began to leave that platform.
Like many, my core social media platforms were Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn for a long time. The technology industry moves pretty fast and Twitter and LinkedIn were great ways to stay on top of it. Facebook was essentially for family and high school people. Also, Facebook has become the de facto web page for many local organizations so it has some value in staying on top of what’s happening where I live.
Along the way, I met a lot of people whom I consider friends – especially via Twitter. Those friendships have transitioned into real life. I’ve learned a lot from thought leaders through the core platforms. I’ve gotten a job via social media contacts. Social media has generally worked for me. At least until the last three years…
Over that time, the algorithm took over – mainly inspired by the success of TikTok. The “For You” feed now inserts content and providers you haven’t explicitly followed into your feed based on similarity or adjacency to other content you’ve watched or interacted with. Needless to say – and this has been true since humans have been painting on cave walls – not all content is created equally. Every social media platform seems to have embraced this concept, with some making it easier to to avoid than others. On Twitter, it’s still easy to default to the chronological “following” feed. On Facebook, Threads, and Instagram, it’s nearly impossible to do so. LinkedIn makes it possible to turn off the “for you” feed, but you have to hunt for the setting. BlueSky defaults to the “following” feed and Mastodon doesn’t seem to have a feature analogous to the “for you” feed.
The primary result is that it’s really hard to avoid content in which I am simply not interested. The secondary result lies in the word “content.” We no longer get information, we get content – stuff to fill up the “for you” feed, volume and quantity over quality, increasingly AI-generated and designed to elicit an emotional response rather to inform or enlighten. The vast majority of social media is designed to keep our eyes glued to the screen.
At this point, I will say that many platforms have features like muted words to help filter out content you just don’t want to see. I use this heavily, but they work via exact-match, so it’s easy for content creators to get around those and still pollute your feed.
I know this post is getting long, so I guess what I’m coming around to is that I’m finding all of this increasingly not worth it. Look at the previous few paragraphs and see the sheer number of platforms mentioned and all of the work you need to do to curate them to see what you’re interested in seeing. The community that I grew to value has scattered and fragmented, the signal-to-noise ratio is out of balance, quality information is increasingly ephemeral, and I don’t really even make strong personal connections with people via social media anymore.
So it’s time to regroup. As social media platforms become at least unfriendly and, in some cases, harmful, it’s time for me to take a step back. I actually still find LinkedIn fairly useful. My previous attempts at curating Twitter still seem to work, but continuing to use it comes with an increasing existential price tag. After a promising start, Threads is a dumpster fire. Facebook is borderline useless. Mastodon is serviceable but slightly sterile. BlueSky is still finding its feet. I am also on Substack, but I’m getting a little weary of being preached to by the platform about how to write.
The first step in that regroup is to remove all of the social media native mobile apps from my devices. I originally thought simply disabling notifications was enough, but it’s not. The platforms exert more control over their apps so curation/filtering is harder to apply there. Also, mobile apps make them too ubiquitous. As a result, I’ll suffer through whatever usability hurdles the web interfaces have (they are designed to drive you to the mobile apps) and access the platforms via a desktop (laptop) browser when I want to. This will give me more control over when I access them, deprive them of the oxygen of my presence, and also eliminate the location tracking built into their mobile apps.
Secondly, is to ensure that my muted words from Twitter are ported to all of the platforms that support them. This is to get out ahead of the inevitable arrival of bad content on newer platforms.
Thirdly is the development of browser extension to add a muted words feature to the platforms that don’t support it (Hi, Facebook). There are plenty of such extensions out there and I no longer trust any of them to not do nefarious things with my data. So, I’ll write my own (because I can) and open-source it when I’m happy with it.
Fourth will be to build connections with my friends in other ways such as SMS or some other direct messaging app like Signal that doesn’t leave me dependent on social media apps to maintain those connections. My new goal is to transfer meaningful connections away from social media as quickly as possible.
And, finally, just stop. Use my computer for work. Obviously, there are personal applications as well, but mostly just use it for work. Otherwise, get outside, do interesting (or even mundane) things with friends and family, and revel in the fact that I don’t need to share any of it with the world on social media.
