I have been an avid social media user (mostly consuming content) since Facebook started to gain traction – and I still like the idea of it – but as the title suggests, something is not working for me.
Well, quite a few things are not working for me.
At least in my use case, in the early days Facebook was a solid alternative for blogs that were focused on sharing pictures and very short-form text, additionally it enabled users to build a circle of friends to share stuff with, without having to faff with setting up a blog. Similar story with Instagram, and to some extent, twitter (now X – really Elon?).
With time the scope, features, and typical usage [1] of social media has changed a lot. Intrusive advertisement, aggressive data collection, “perfect” feeds, a focus on “infinite” content (i.e. doom scrolling) have killed the fun bit of it for me.
While I enjoy a funny cat video as much as the next guy, I don’t need an infinite feed of them pushing the time I go to sleep, pictures of my friends’ cats are enough.
Loki (also knows as Loki2 as he shares a name with my cat)
Another example of this is posting pictures: I enjoy photography even though I am not great at it, but posting pictures on Instagram is not meta (pun intended – but also my big brain partner which has a PhD points out that this is not the correct usage of the word meta and that I should explain that I am using it as the ubiquitous acronym that stands for *most effective tactic available*) anymore, even though Instagram was born to post pictures.
I feel like part of the above is due to making platforms profitable, TikTok is making money, so now all platforms look like TikTok, even YouTube had to bend to this by adding Shorts to the platform.
There is a lot more wrong with social media but it either doesn’t affect me or I can’t be bothered with writing about it here (for the curious [2], [3], [4]).
At the end of the day, I would like social media to be a tool to keep in touch with friends and post stuff, without weird unspoken rules. I don’t think any platform provides that anymore so I’ve decided to call it quits. I am mostly writing this as an explanation of my sudden departure from it and as a call to action to anyone feeling the same way. While I don’t think you should leave social media too (well, I do, but I won’t say it out loud), do get in touch to chat, organize something or to send that picture that you want to share but it’s “not good enough” for your feed.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/social-media-dead-instagram-tiktok-bereal-replaced-group-chats-messaging-2023-8?r=US&IR=T
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/us/politics/cambridge-analytica-scandal-fallout.html
[3] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-46590890
[4] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/jan/01/social-media-triggers-children-to-dislike-their-own-bodies-says-study
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