Anti-Social Media

The first real social media site I ever used was MySpace, which appealed to me because it was a place to share your likes and interests, with a particular emphasis on music taste. It also appealed because you could edit the HTML and fully customise your profile. When Facebook came along I felt it was a step down in many ways, from the jump it was apparent the site had a "standardised" layout to make collection of data structured. Even when it came to your likes and interests those were structured into pages or groups to make it easier to collate the data.

In hindsight the motivation and the distinction between the two sites is clear, MySpace was a community, Facebook was a commodity, or to be more precise, Facebook was a data collection service and the data itself was the commodity. The community elements of Facebook were a second-thought, they were added over time, and constantly changed, often to the chagrin of the users of the site. The little utility Facebook offered in terms of establishing social connections and meeting people fell away when they opened the site to the general public. The mentality of treating it as an academic network evaporated overnight, I still remember the rush everyone made to delete, detag, and hide everything they didn't want the whole world to see.

In the years that followed, social media evolved to be a place where users were prompted to share their thoughts, their lives, and to comment on everything that was happening in the world and in the news. There was a time when I was a kid and the question of what super power you would want would pop up and my answer would always be telekinesis and telepathy. Social media taught me knowing what everyone thinks all the time is the definition of Hell.

The idea that you have to have an opinion on everything, take a side on everything leads to your inability or refusal to do so interpreted as supporting whoever the opposing side is to the view of the person asking. To actually hold an informed view on all of these things is mentally exhausting and requires a lot of study and effort. Not surprisingly, most people don't put that effort in, instead choosing a side at random, or siding with whoever asked them for their opinion.

I have a few social circles that I exist in, and a group of friends and acquaintances within each. The older I have grown, the less interest I have stepping outside of those circles. People have an opinion on everything and it makes it difficult to know how deeply each of those beliefs are held. Are they trivial, where they hold a view but aren't emotionally invested, or are they substantial where any difference is going to lead to conflict? The more positions you hold, the narrower you make the potential pool of people who will agree with you on everything.

We don't need to agree on everything, but we should agree on the important things, that is, the things that are important to us, because there are many things happening in the world that are important but have no bearing on our actual lives, social media doesn't provide that reality check though because it doesn't want to encourage disengagement. The reason conflict online is so rife and the companies hosting contentious content don't want to do anything about it is because conflict drives up page views and engagement. Rage bait is one extreme but when an algorithm measures the importance of a YouTube video based on how many comments it gets, a thousand comment thread of two people arguing back and forth is quite literally worth its weight in gold.

I don't want to be part of that. I want to like what I like, occasionally share it with people who might be interested in it too, and not have to engage with people who don't like it. If you don't like a video, watch something else. Social media has become increasingly "one-way" for me, where I post about random things that interest me, random thoughts I have, or take part in viral prompts to post 4 movies you like etc, the way I used MySpace. The utility of Social Media as a place to meet new people and connect with them has completely died for me, not because of the functionality or lack thereof on any site, but because I have zero motivation to make the effort to get to know people.

It's quite sad to admit that the slew of arseholes I have encountered online over the years has left me with the impression that most of the world is filled with people I wouldn't want to know. I used to think as a child that I didn't have many friends and that other people were more popular than me, or that other people were more likeable, but looking back and taking stock I had more friends than most, and I think part of the reason for that was because I never "yucked anyone's yum" even as a kid. I've come to realise the genuine connections I made were more than most, and that whilst some people "knew" more people than me, they weren't close at all.

Coming to this realisation I've become a lot more comfortable with the size of the social circles I connect with now, happy with how many people are close to me and how many are at arms length but we interact because we get along and have similar interests. I don't want to be close friends with everyone I meet, and I think that's probably healthier? Probably?

The "social" aspect of social media has somewhat died. There was a time when Twitter was once labelled a "micro-blogging website" - a label that never really fit the site even before it was acquired and descended into the abyss. That moniker however is something that I've been thinking about lately. The main "social" apps I use are Bluesky and Discord, I don't have a presence on any others at this point. Discord feels very focused on community, which I like, I am part of a few servers, each with a few hundred members that have remained fairly consistent in size. That "micro-blogging" label though feels somewhat apt for the way I use Bluesky. My posts on there are essentially tiny blog posts, which isn't a million miles away from how MySpace worked back in the day, the interface is just very different.

I don't know if we should be encouraging people to share their thoughts on everything, even News websites I feel shouldn't have comment sections for articles. Having a comment section for everything online feels antiquated now. The news should be a source of information, not a place for debate. I think the same about "opinion" sections and shows focused on commentary or "debate" which is never actually a debate. All of these are forums for discussion which inevitably present opinion as fact. In decades passed when you watched the news on TV you didn't get a chance to reply to it, the same with newspapers generally save for the few that had a "readers views" section buried somewhere in the paper where people could write in with a comment, but even at that they weren't under each article and were only there if you went looking for them.

I think we need to ask the question "Does this really need a comment section?" more when designing websites, and ask ourselves the question "Do I really care what they think?" more on social media before we engage with people.