5156. On Social Media

[endymon]

Well. In the spirit of inaugurating a new blog, here is this entry. It... yeah. Feeling pretty good to get back to my roots like this. I'm not sure if this counts as social media? It doesn't feel like it.

I got my start on blogging in 2001. That blog ran til 2005 before I kindof drifted away. When I tuned back in it was all twitter and facebook. Those... didn't work out too well for me. I later shifted to mastodon, which is an improvement over twitter, but that is really not saying much.

Mastodon is not actually a good or healthy place to express my experiences. Social media generally hasn't been. Blogging in general has its problems? But the whole fav/retweet economy is pathological as fuck and I hate it. I am done trying to express anything meaningful in that format.

I recently had the best damn news of this year, posted it, got zero favs, and felt personally rejected. Which... there's so many things wrong with that sentence. I shouldn't be wrapping up my self-worth in how many favs I can get off a topic. And I really need to stop organizing my life in terms of how I can package real, salient, meaningful parts of my life into little bundles of attention-seeking to put in the attention-seeking-machine that I carry everywhere I go.

Yeah. Need to knock that shit the fuck off.

Ahem. Anyway. Hi. Here's me :) I'm not usually quite so ranty. But... social media. Yeah.

Comments

[chalcedony_starlings]

(−) Without Actually Getting Started Ranting… yeah, pretty much. c..c (Beware of having to strike a balance subsequently, though; don't let it knock you off in the other direction on the backswing. This kind of model-disconnect gets swingy if you don't damp it. Talk to us if you're having problems, please?)

(And yeah, feeling rejected because no favstars is just… ugh. Like I said elsewhere, it's still the Twitter model, and it does that to people.)

(+) Ooh! Bird icon! What kind of bird is that? It's got feathers! Eee!

[403]

That's a shrike, though I couldn't tell you which species without finding my copy of Sibley's Guide.

[atomdrache]

Game designers found that the best way to get people to do things which would normally bore them is to 1) convince them that increasing some number is important; 2) provide immediate, tangibly satisfying feedback for increasing that number; and 3) make them afraid to take breaks or stop playing by whatever means necessary. So implementing a system which teaches people that likes and retweets are measures of their personal worth, keeps them glued to their accounts to watch for updates, and holds their personal relationships hostage so they are afraid to leave is a scheme which would've impressed the tobacco executives of old.

IMO circa-2005 Livejournal not only counts as social media, but as its very zenith. It was right before the marketroids took notice and sent everything straight to infinitely-scrolling "like, comment, and subscribe" hell.

In any case, welcome to a place not designed solely to encourage profitably pathological behavior. (I mostly just post recipes.)