It is reasonable to call me anti-social media. I believe that time spent interacting with random people on the internet, in an environment that uses metrics to tell you how well you’re playing the game, should be zero or close to it.
These are some rough thoughts on the topic, and I might return to add more points or fill in details in the future. It’s a big topic that is only marginally interesting to me (as is often the case with something you don’t like; it would be strange otherwise). Hopefully someone reading this will be convinced to do an honest assessment of the time they spend on social media to see if it’s the best use of their time.
Social media is not a substitute for real interactions with others. In some ways, it is the opposite of a real interaction. There are rules for social media that are strictly enforced. To play the game, you act the way “they” tell you to act. Diversity of personality or perspective is swiftly punished. I do not mean that in the sense that certain political views are prohibited. Rather, you have to conform to a particular style of expressing yourself. If you use a social media platform in the way that is natural to you, you’ll quickly be told that you’re doing it wrong, and if you want to be part of the group, you have to change the way you act. Maybe a good way to sum this up is that the three most important things on social media are conformity, conformity, and conformity.
Conforming to be part of a group is not a healthy thing. In a real interaction with someone, it would be considered strange to tell someone something and then have a half dozen others jump in to tell you it’s necessary to say “tomahto” rather than “tomayto”. To make the point, they publicly point and laugh at you. Others walking by see what’s going on and they point and laugh to.
Your score doesn’t have any connection to your personal utility. There’s little reason to elaborate much on this point. Others - most of whom you do not know - will give the things you post a score. That could be number of interactions or the lack of interaction. It could be upvotes, downvotes, likes, retweets, follows, or whatever. Those numbers tell the world how well you’re playing the game, but they have nothing to do with the value you’re getting out of playing the game. Much better is to do something like write up your thoughts, post them on a personal website, and then look at your output over a period of time. Asking random internet folk to give you a grade does not make sense.
Social media does not encourage thought. I’ve written about this in another post. Others do not want to have to think about the things you’ve written. They want to read one or two sentences and quickly give it a score. The worst thing you can do is post something on social media that was hard for you to understand or was the outcome of a long process of study. I do not get utility from participating in an environment like that.
Social media does not encourage treating others with respect. You will not get a higher grade because you were nice to someone. In contrast, if you are good at dunking on others (regardless of your correctness) you will be rewarded handsomely. One thing that was so disgusting when I used Twitter was the quote tweeting to show someone was out of touch. Well, maybe they weren’t out of touch, but they didn’t have the opportunity to write 27 single-spaced pages to clarify all the fine points. Much of the time, the dunking didn’t make sense, but I had to see the mean-spiritedness of it.
Social media establishes hierarchies. Those with the best metrics set the rules. It is considered perfectly valid to say “You barely have any followers” in response to being challenged. Maybe the challenge was nonsense, but there score on that social media platform is not the reason it is nonsense.
There are times that I saw users gang up on someone for disagreement with a high-metric user. Users with good metrics are not to be challenged, not even when they say something obviously wrong. Users with bad metrics are not to be taken seriously, even if they say something obviously right. The whole idea of social media in this respect can only be described as stupid. Yet there are those who are willing to accept their place in the hierarchy for reasons that are unclear to me. If you don’t want to accept the hierarchy, which is intentionally part of the design of these platforms, don’t use them.
Social media rewards novelty, not honesty. This is not entirely independent of my previous remark. You get a good grade from posting something others view as novel and welcome. Notably absent from the rubric is “correct”. I don’t care to go into this further. When I used Twitter, one of the great frustrations was the absolute bullshit I’d see coming from certain high-volume, high-follower accounts. And if you correct them, the hierarchy kicks in. They know that misinformation is not punished.
I want to be clear that this seems to be true of US society and the US political system right now. The important thing is what you say, not what you say that’s accurate. I would see this from all sides of the political spectrum. Each had their own special way of posting bullshit that they didn’t feel guilty about, even though they knew it was lies. It was a means to an end, after all, so who cares if it’s not true.
So there you have it. Six reasons I dislike participating in social media. If you liked this post, be sure to like and subscribe. Wait. Screw the like and subscribe. If you liked this post, think about the content and carefully evaluate the optimality of your social media usage.