I'm Done With Sharing Socially
At first, I didn't even notice that I just stopped visiting Twitter and Instagram. After about three weeks, I also realized that I didn't really care about visiting... or sharing anything either!
First, I have to apologize to all my foodie friends! I know you’re fans of my food pictures on Instagram, but I’m over sharing with people I don’t know. So you’re going to have to suck it up and find other ways to get energized about food.
I noticed that I wasn’t engaging anymore when I wrote my last post about things that annoy me and I had to check when I started using Twitter. I found that I had been using it since April, 2007, but I also noticed that I hadn’t actually checked Twitter for more than three weeks at that time. Self noted that, since I think Self was in the habit of checking Twitter one or more times a day for at least 10 years. Hmmm…. Then I noticed that I also hadn’t check Instagram either. Hmmm… Hmmm…
I noticed these things when I was on my way to Montana to go fishing. So I put the thoughts away and fished. But when I got back, I restarted the thinking. And I had a thought that I haven’t seen expressed elsewhere (maybe because I haven’t been checking Twitter!), which is that these social media services have changed SO much since they started that they no longer are appealing to me. Big thought! Maybe these companies have lost touch with what they started doing that in the future it won’t be anymore about their control or influence politically or personally, but about whether their users just lose interest….
This is not about what they or me should be doing, or whether they are culturally damaging or politically corrupting weak (or strong) people. This is about whether they are engaging in an activity that is itself engaging.
I loved using Twitter, in the past
I loved (LOVED!) posting key thoughts on Twitter, starting in 2007 and for the next 13 years. IMHO I think I made some really trenchant observations in less than 140 characters. Since I started doing that, I gathered more than 14,000 followers and a goodly number of them would respond, maybe with 50-100 likes and a dozen retweets.
Over the past, say, two years (I have not checked, but it does seem to be congruent with the pandemic), I still have more than 14,000 followers (Twitter stopped telling me details, like what number user I was and exactly how many followers I have), but my retweets have dropped to one or two on some posts, mainly from one or two users (thank you @cullend and @thedapperdiner!), likes to 5-8 on some posts (but not all!). This is the reverse of the juice I got from tweeting! Now I wonder what happened to other 13,900+ followers? Don’t they like me anymore? Have I lost my touch?
When I looked into the issue, I discovered that a very high percentage of my followers have not posted or engaged in any activity whatsoever — for years. I think of most of my followers as Dead Tweeters. Many created an account and never engaged. Many, as I am now evolving, did engage and then drifted off for one reason or another: maybe because vitriol is unattractive, Twitter keeps changing the service randomly for what appear to be odd reasons, life changes and people move on, whatever. Most important, Twitter is so enslaved to its follower metric that it refuses to give any one user the ability to easily turn off a follower. I’ve tried repeatedly over the past years, but Twitter actually made it hard for a third-party tool to let you do this. I can’kiSo I’ve given up trying to actively manage my followers. And now, since I get no juice from using Twitter, I have stopped using Twitter itself. I am myself a Dead Tweeter. I never thought it would come to this.
I loved using Instagram even more
But Instagram!? Oh, how I love taking photos of the food I am cooking or eating. Loved. Same basic metrics, except on Instagram I was a little more careful about following others and the service allows you to accept or reject/block followers.
Here’s a post from one of my favorite chefs. Note that second comment. The chef has to now carefully curate his food because Facebook is scaling and commercializing Instagram to compete with Snapchat and TikTok. I noticed at one point that more than half of my Instagram feed is now videos and ads, not photos. And I have to be just as careful about how I curate my privacy controls as I am on Facebook. Same company, right? Now worth more than $1T because it is SO good at extracting data out of its users that it makes oodles of money.
Let me be clear, I loved posting photos on Instagram and engaging with my followers, including making sure that they were engaging and blocking the random accounts that posted photos of half-clad women or stupid political points of view. But Instagram isn’t what it used to be when I originally engaged and started using it. I’m not loving it anymore.
Facebook. well, that’s a different story
Facebook? I removed the app from my phone and other devices a couple of years ago, and just use the web site. I was really pissed off when Facebook forced its users to start using Messenger, but still have the app on my iPhone because its the only way to read messages other Facebook users send me, and some of those users don’t know that it’s not texting or iMessage. As well, I removed as many of the people I didn’t actually know and hadn’t met me. I set notifications to tell me when friends and family posted something, so I could click in and see their post.
In other words, I don’t use Facebook anymore the way I originally used it nor the way the company wants me to use it. I hope my friends and family keep using it, since that is a VERY useful service for me. But I don’t care for or want to use it for anything else, nothing that will generate data to help the company make more money. Not to mention, why the heck would you use Facebook to get information about the #COVID virus, making voting decisions, getting news, or anything else that really matters? I have gone into my privacy controls and turned off every method that Facebook uses to gather my personal data that I can find. Most importantly, I’m not doing anything on Facebook (or Instagram, now) that would generate useful data for Facebook to sell.
I do believe that Facebook has a corporate culture that is inherently evil and that the company will never resolve the conflict between profits and its users, no matter how sophisticated Zuck and Sheryl get at managing their public personas. 2.8B users. $1T enterprise value.
What about LinkedIn?
That’s another post, since I don’t really think of LinkedIn as “social media”. The use case is different, more about promoting your business self and a service that provides reference and recruiting data that you want to share. Plus I already wrote my Linked Rant (originally posted on Medium), what?, six yeas ago, on March 15, 2015. I will update that rant, eventually, but admit here that it is now the only service that I still actively engage in voluntarily. I will post this newsletter to LinkedIn!
Does this mean the end of social media?
No. I’m just one user out of, what, 3.8 billion out of 7.7 billion who are actually using smart phones in the world. So far, people like me, who are disengaging with social media, have not become statistically significant. I’m also a 1% er (maybe in the context of the world population a 0.1%er). So what does it matter for anything I do? I kind of hope there are more people like me, bored by social media service and beginning to re-focus our daily activities on all the stuff we used to before these services started.