On Quitting Corporate Social Media
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On Quitting Corporate Social Media

Byrichard

It’s interesting that we can stop using a website that is so integral to our lives for years. During the pandemic I quit facebook because I was flamed and trolled at a time when I needed friendship and support. Facebook has been known to make people depressed. During lockdown I decided to quit Facebook and Instagram.


Quitting FB and IG


I quit them for two reasons. The first is that I no longer got anything positive out of them. I saw plenty of junk, I felt isolated, and they were promoting things that polarised my sense of missing out. It was healthier just to quit both. I wouldn’t be reminded of my pandemic solitude if I wasn’t seeing pictures of people with their families and friends whilst I was keeping safe from COVID.


Quitting Twitter


The first time I quit, and deleted my twitter account was in 2007 or 2008, right before the RTS, at the time TSR, asked to interview me about Twitter. I recreated my account, and then stuck around for the next twelve or more years.


With Twitter I wanted an alternative forever. I disliked that the site was focused on the cult of personality, spam hashtags and people marketing and promoting, rather than conversing. I still argue about hashtags on the Fediverse, and I’m tempted to quit it, if hashtags become more important than conversations.


Morality and Noise


Twitter was usable until Musk changed the timeline to promote junk, rather than chronological tweets. People love to ask, “but how will people see my tweets if I don’t use hashtags?”. The answer is simple. Devote time to the network. If you devote time your tweets, toots, notes and more will appear more often, especially if you have conversations.


The issue with Twitter is that it lost track of the chronological timeline and tried to recommend tweets that were 24hrs old, that were popular, that would guarantee that you were ignored if you responded. This is one of my key reasons for blocking verified years ago. I didn’t want to see tweets that, if I engaged with them, would see me be ignored. That’s just noise, but it’s also emotionally draining.


Social media is not just for married people sitting on a toilet alone, killing a few minutes of solitude. For some people social media is their social life, so the more disengaged the community is, the more worthless the network. That’s why people stay on FB, and hesitate to leave Twitter. They don’t want to be alone.


Twitter swung to the Right. More and more disinformation was spread. I felt the need to be anonymous, and even to hide my tweets from public view, long before came to Twitter, but I left when I saw him doing to twitter, what made me quit Instagram. Taking over the timeline, and making it impossible to converse with the small social circle I was in the habit of talking with.


The Unique Selling Point that kept me on Twitter was lost.


The Lost Habits


Instagram


For 3400 days I posted on Instagram every day, or almost every day. I only changed my habit because the photo sharing app that I used to share images became a signal of solitude and isolation, during lockdown. Instead of feeling closer to people I felt more and more isolated. I was sharing images that were being ignored, unliked. That’s when I decided that I might as well post them to my blog instead. The rational was that if I was going to create content, I might as well be the person to benefit from it.


Facebook


For years Facebook was the network where I chatted with uni friends and colleagues. When friends and colleagues were no longer appearing in my timeline, and I was trolled and flamed by strangers, during lockdown, I quit. The sense of community was destroyed, and the allure of blogging seemed more interesting.


Twitter


I left Twitter for moral reasons. What made my emigration from Twitter to the fediverse a success was the community. The mistake that Twitter made was to drive people away when an alternative solution already existed. For once there was a critical mass of people, fleeing from Twitter, to the fediverse, for the fediverse to grab people’s attention and devotion. Interest might be a better word.


The Alternative


I have now been blogging daily for 247 days. In that time I have often shared a daily photo or more, with the blog posts. I have replaced Facebook and Instagram with blogging. The beauty of blogging is that I’m creating content for my site, practicing my writing skills, and getting used to elaborating on ideas. I have a healthy blogging routine, rather than wasting time on FB and IG.


I have replaced Twitter with the Fediverse and the advantage of the Fediverse is that you have a multitude of communities on a number of servers. This means that if you don’t like one community, you can change from one instance to another. You also have the option of writing long posts on the fediverse. You can treat it as a web forum rather than a microblogging platform. You can elaborate, and you can share essays, if you are so inclined.


On Twitter people always said “I don’t want to blog because then people have to click away from Twitter to read my post, and they won’t”. With the fediverse people don’t have to click away. Your blog can be native to the Fediverse. Mine is. If people choose to “read more” they can read the entire post, and comment without signing in.


Blogging in the fediverse is seamless.


And Finally


When I gave up on Facebook, and when I gave up on Twitter I felt that I was isolating myself more than ever, by leaving the two communities, but now, with the growth of the fediverse I feel that the opposite is true. By leaving the networks where I was competing with algorithms to be noticed, I have joined social networks where chronological timelines reward those who converse the most, rather than those that just post once a day, with a hashtag. I see plenty of people posting, sometimes with no links, no images, and no hashtags. It’s pure conversation, and I like that. That’s how social networks should be.

A Little Too Experimental
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A Little Too Experimental

Byrichard

The Fediverse is great because people are experimenting and trying new idea. It’s also great because we can be there through every step of the process. This is also why things could be better.


I am now writing my blog in Hugo first, and then moving the content over to Wordpress at the moment. I could just replace my Wordpress blog with Hugo but I don’t for two reasons. The first reason is that I’m experimenting, and if I change my mind about something, I can, without affecting Quality of Service. The second reason is that I believe that the production server should be in fine working order with as little downtime for users as possible. With one or two projects on the fediverse this isn’t the case. Downtime can be for hours, or even days at a time.


A Reminder of Seesmic and Twitter


For a long time Twitter was suffering because it was using Ruby and Ruby had bottle necks. The result was a lot of downtime. The failwhale became a cultural icon as a result. Seesmic was a fantastic video sharing community. It was about video instant messaging. Watch a video, record an answer, watch other answers, record another video. It would go for a thousand video exchanges for some topics. It was great. At the end of the day we even had Seesmix videos to summarise the best moments. In this case as new features were added we would make sure that they worked well. In the end I think Seesmic was sold or abandonned. It marked a turning point in online communities.


Production Server Level Testing


For a while I have been reading and studying web development and one of the key things I read is that you should have a testing environment that is exactly like your production environment, to make sure that everything works well, in testing before pushing to production. With The Fediverse I see people testing in production whilst looking for more people to join. It is normal to want to move fast, but if a site goes down for several days then there are wekanesses in the workflow.If I was playing and experimenting with a fediverse instance I would make sure that I run tests locally, and when I see they’re stable, migrate across. If things broke then I would revert to another instance as quickly as possible.


Playing With WordPress


Sometimes I play with WordPress, as I try to learn new things. I could experiment directly on my blog, and sometimes I do, but I try not to do this too often. I setup a mamp instance instead, and that’s where I break things, and try to rebuild them. That’s where I can break things, experiment, learn, mess up, give up, and more. The production server can go down for a few minutes here and there, as I experiment, but not for hours at a time. My blog has gone down for extended periods of time (a day or two, due to vulnerabilities on my site being exploited)


The Social Web, Conversations and Exchanges


Social networks should have as little downtime as possible because if they go down then the community that relies on them to stay in touch finds itself tempoarily out of reach. If a social network goes down too regularly when people want to use it, then it makes sense to migrate instances. Finding people willing to use a site is one challenge. The second, bigger challenge is to keep them around. If you experiment on a production server then you are disconnecting the community for the time of that experiment. That’s why you have A/B testing, but also why you have two or more instances. If you make a mistake on one instance to switch to the secondary system, fix the primary, and then switch, and fix the secondary.


And Finally


I wanted to experiment with FrontMatter yesterday when playing with my website but found that it has one serious limitation. It requires pages to be markdown, not HTML to work. It is a Visual Studio Code plugin that helps use VS Code as a cms for MD pages for Hugo and other blogging sites. The beauty of this app is that you can see all your tags at a glance. You can sort your pages any way you like. You can create new pages and it will add the appropriate information. What I especially like is that the file name is year-date-day-title and that’s fantastic, for me. I work as a media asset manager and that’s what I wanted to do with my blog, but I didn’t know whether it would then require me to rename every page. With this plugin you choose the website section, the title, and it does the rest. It’s fast and effective, once the DB is populated. The data is kept in a json file.


I will write a more comprehensive blog post about this when I learn more.

Social Media Silos

Social Media Silos

Byrichard

Years ago we heard that Facebook was a silo. What was meant by this term is that FaceBook would pull content into its social network and behave like a portal, without allowing people to leave. It encouraged people to see the World Wide Web as Facebook and nothing else. For a while it worked.


Zynga and The Death of Conversation


When FB was young, and vibrant it was a network of friends having a chat, until Zynga came along. When Zynga came along it went from being a conversational website to a gaming site. It became a waste of time in the eyes of many. It went from being a way of connecting with uni friends and colleagues to being a source of time wasting.


As if that wasn’t enough FB was used to manufacture consent for the Far Right groups. It helped Brexit, it helped Drumpf. It even helped genocide and experimented with making people depressed. It never apologised.


It bought Whatsapp and Instagram so I stopped using both apps.


Twitter Requires a Login


Quite a few of the Right Wing Websites require a login. Some of them are even geoblocked to restrict who can see, and participate in conversations. Although Twitter was text based it was a web portal for many, for a decade and a half. It had become a niche website where people went for a chat, shared news and current affairs, and kept up to date with people and topics that interested them. Musk destroyed that convivial atmosphere, which had already atrophied beforehand, but he made it worse.


Required Login


Another Perspective


The SubRedditor Victory


Last night and this morning I read that Reddit has seen its valuation decline as a result of the protests by subredditors. I see this as a victory. I don’t care about third party apps, or other reasons for the protest. I supported the protest because I’m tired of social media giants and venture capitalists purchasing web communities, and treating them as cash cows, rather than communities.


Twitter, Facebook and Reddit are, or at least were, communities. Communities should not be up for sale. Communities should be alive, healthy and vibrant. They should be about conversations and connecting people.


This morning, and last night I saw that the New York Times has yet another article about how to help teenagers ween themselves off of their social media addiction. For decades I have writtena about social media as a lifestyle, as a modern way of socialising. For decades Venture Capitalist Social Media has told us “Social media is bad”, “social media is addictive”. If it’s either of these things it is because of the social media companies that choose to ignore ethics, morality and corporate social responsability, rather than because the medium is bad. Social media is a blank canvas. We make it healthy, or unhealthy, by how we interact with it. VCSM is toxic. There is no doubt about that, but that’s why it’s good for FB, Twitter and Reddit to silo themselves. Keep the toxicity within.


Valuation Decline


The Early Web and Now


In the early days of the World Wide Web we could pay for a server, and then we could install PHPpb and other web forum software on our sites and we could self host, or contribute to the communities that meant something to us. The same is true in 2023. The tools are better. We have the Twitter/Facebook clone with Mastodon, Calckey and the Fediverse. We have Kbin and Lemmy for the threadiverse, so we can join or start our own instances. Finally we have Peertube and Pixelfed as YouTube and Instagram replacements. The future is open source and crowdfunded. Remember that this is the natural status quo. The Social Media giant age was an aberation on the World Wide Web. It’s nice to see that it has ended.


Attract, Don’t Repulse


There is a paradox in the social media giants pushing users and developers away just at the moment when seducing users, and developers is most important. Remember that Jaiku was like Twitter and Identi.ca was like Twitter. Both failed because Twitter had more gravity, so it attracted people to it, and they never left, until a few weeks ago. Reddit, Instagram and Twitter are easy to clone with the tools that we have available today. Today social media companies should be doing everything they can to keep people from jumping ship. The social media giants are showing apathy towards their users, and their users have somewhere to flee too.


And Finally


Now that the Social Media Giants are making mistakes and driving people away I am excited. I am excited by the prospect of being able to join smaller, more niche communities, and bouncing around from instance to instance, rather than being stuck on one of the giant monoliths. Now is a time when we can build and experiment again, on a human scale, a SuperSoaker scale, rather than trying to fill a syringe with a firehose.

Podcasts and Social Media
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Podcasts and Social Media

Byrichard

When you listen to podcasts, and you read articles, and you visit websites you always see Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and Instagram, to name the giants. In every podcast episode you hear the guests say “You can find me under this name on this network, and the same name on that network.”


The Shift to CrowdFunded Media


With the recent shift from Venture Capitalist Social Media to crowdfunded social media I expect to hear about a shift in where people can be found. I expect that we will soon hear “And you can find me on Calckey at this address, on Pixelfeed.eu with this username, and peertube.social. 


I expect that there will be a shift in where people can be found on various websites and I expect that Twitter, Instagram, and other websites will fade away. 


Dormant


I haven’t deleted Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and other accounts, but my eyeballs are no longer there. If something is shared on Twitter, Facebook Instagram or other sites there is a chance that I will never see it. I don’t want to use Venture Capital funded Media anymore. 


VC Funded Media is Declining


Venture Capital Funded Media thinks that users are addicts, rather than valuable users, and this attitude is why they get away with appalling behaviour. Huffman is the most recent one to treat his subredditors and redditors with scorn, rather than respect. Without the user community social media giants are just websites, nothing more. 


A Thought


Decades ago we heard “and you can find this information on Teletext or “and you can find this information on your minitel at 3615…”. Those days are gone, and those mentions are part of a different age. I think that we are going to see the shift away from Twitter, Instagram and other handles, to Fediverse linked accounts. I think we’re about to enter a new era. I look forward to it. 

The Reddit Emigration
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The Reddit Emigration

Byrichard

I know of Reddit and I have an account that I use every so often. I have never felt the need for a site like Digg or Reddit, because I don’t feel the need to look at what people are sharing and reading, and promoting or demoting. For a long time it felt like a website that had users, but had not updated it’s UI for years. 


The Issue


The problem with Reddit, Digg, lemmy, kbin and other alternatives is that they’re large enough for everything to be shared within seconds, and you get trolled if you share something that someone else has already seen. That trolling discourages me from doing anything more than lurking. 


I came across Lemmy, Kbin and one or two other Fediverse alternatives over the last three or four days. It’s interesting that an alternative to reddit is ready, and seeing a growth in users, but at the same time it feels like part of the same problem, in a different networked environment. 


The decentralised centralised environment


On paper the notion that we can have niche servers, and distributed communities that can talk within their ecosystem, as well as externally is great because if one server goes down then there are 20 others to switch too. The issue is that the toxic behaviour that stems from large communities doesn’t end just because people jump from Twitter to Mastodon et al. It doesn’t end because people jump from Reddit to Kbin, Lemmy et al. 


Reddit’s Momentum


Yesterday I searched for something and I got Reddit discussion results. If everyone stopped using Reddit today, or tomorrow, then it would take weeks, or months for Lemmy, Kbin and other alternatives to rise up in the search engine results, to dethrone Reddit. This means that although users could migrate, and leave Reddit to become a ghost network, it still has plenty of content to serve, in theory for decades. 


An Amusing Phrase


On several Fediverse instances I see people say “I need to figure out how I’m going to use this.” To me the answer is simple. “You’re going to use it like you used the site you emigrated from.” For me the real question is “How long will it take for the sites to reach critical mass, for the open source versions to become self-sustaining and compelling to use. Identi.ca and other solutions never took off. 


And Finally


I have joined Lemmy instances out of curiousity, and so far I find them not to be about the topics that interest me. It could take a while for them to pick up on those topics. In practice it would be easy to create the topics I want to discuss. For now, like others, I am lurking. I will keep blogging, whilst people move around between the monoliths, and the Fediverse. 

The Diversification Of The Social Media and Microblogging Environment
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The Diversification Of The Social Media and Microblogging Environment

Byrichard

When Elon Musk bought Twitter he signed the start of the Social Media giant’s implosion. A decade earlier Murdoch had done the same thing to MySpace. In the end he sold MySpace for a fraction of what he had bought it for. 


We could cry, and bemoan the loss of Twitter but we could also look around, and see what has happened. For years I said that I wanted to leave Twitter, but no one else did, because despite all of its flaws, it had critical mass. It had the right diversity of people to be a required social network, for anyone using social media. 


Making Social Media Migration Attractive


With the purchase of Twitter by Musk, and the swing by Twitter to the Far Right, it created a legitimate reason for tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands to jump the shark, to join other websites, whether Mastodon, Calckey, Facebook, Instagram and more. It encouraged people to simultaneously look for alternative solutions. It weakened the Twitter brand, but strengthened the use case for similar websites and products. 


When Facebook bought Instagram and WhatsApp we were almost stuck. It provided a reason for people to use Signal, Telegram and Wire, among other apps. When a social media giant buys a website, it encourages people to flee to an open source solution that is free, or at least likely to be taken over by corporate interests. 


Migrate to the Fediverse


It’s easy to keep looking at Twitter, Reddit, Facebook and the giants, but I think it’s more interesting to look at the Fediverse, because the Fediverse is broadening and expanding its use-case. Twitter is not the first social network to be bought, and destroyed by the Right. It’s the most recent. 


This time, though, it feels different, because open source solutions are ready to provide people with an open source, community driven alternative that offers instagram like functionality with Pixelfed, and forum and microblogging with Mastodon, Misskey and spin offs on one side, and BlueSky and its own federation project on the other. 


Your Own Instance


For the cost of Twitter Blue we can set up our own Mastodon instance. For a small monthly contribution we can fund an independent server like calckey, which is part of the fediverse, but built on Misskey, rather than Mastodon. 


Recently I have been frustrated by something specific. Twitter, Facebook and other sites all had scaling issues, which they fixed and ironed out. Now Misskey and Mastodon are growing, and they need to fix those same issues in turn. We’re back to a time where, if we’re using Calckey or other instances they slow down and give error messages due to the server load being too high. We’re back to where we were years ago with the tech giants. It’s frustrating, although if Calckey slows down I jump on to Mastodon Social and vice versa. If one instance is overloaded we can switch to another, until things calm down. 


Fluid Transfers


The beauty of the Fediverse, compared to Twitter, Facebook and Instagram is that if you get tired with one community you can export several CSV files from one instance and pull them into the next. You don’t have to use one server, if the community is not for you. Within a few minutes you can transfer hundreds, if not thousands, of the people you’re following. The instance doesn’t care where you’re following from. It’s only when you get answers or interactions that it matters. 


Towards a Decline of the Centralised Social Network


The Far Right, by controlling Facebook, Instagram, Meta and Twitter has encouraged people to drop their platforms, in favour of Fediverse and BlueSky compatible social networks.  They have shown, for the last time, that centralised ownership of a social network is bad, and that now is the time to move back towards the social web. Now is the time to go back to community driven, open source solutions. Tech giants, and their shareholders have devalued themselves. Rationally no social network should ever sell itself for billions, for two reasons. The first is that they’re breaking the implied contract they have with their user base. The second is that users can migrate within a matter of weeks, days, or even hours. 


When Twitter agreed to be sold to an individual it destroyed the Twitter community’s trust in the board of directors, and by juxtaposition, all social media giants. Twitter was the last giant I was still using. Now that I’m gone, it’s open source, and community funded social networks from now on. 

The Paradox of Instagram’s Twitter
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The Paradox of Instagram’s Twitter

Byrichard

Within the last two days I saw a headline that is either amusing or tragic. The headline is that Instagram is creating a twitter clone, or even a Twitter competitor. This is amusing, or tragic, because Twitter and Facebook have always been competitors. You had the network of strangers that became friends, with Twitter, and the network of uni friends that became estranged years after graduating with Facebook. 


Chronological


Both of them had chronological timelines with people conversing with each other. One was about events, pictures and more, and the other was about chatting, between tweetups. 


Facebook and Twitter Are Now the Same


The notion that Instagram would have a twitter clone, today, is ludicrous because Facebook and Twitter are the same thing. Facebook owns Instagram, so the notion that Instagram needs a competitor to Twitter is ironic, since Twitter and Facebook are now the same thing. I could develop the idea further but won’t.


The Rush to Rescue the Shipwrecked


Twitter is having a Titanic moment and nearby ships (social networking solutions) are rushing on to recover all the people in life boats or floating in the water. That rush is paradoxical, since it has expanded social media once again, to become a network of networks, rather than a monolith. 


The Fediverse


I think that the Fediverse offers the best solution because it offers plenty of instances that can focus either on specific niches, or just host accounts, and people can look for like-minded posts across the networks.


Contributions and Instance Specific Adverts


I saw something about people wanting to advertise on the Fediverse and I don’t think they should, especially not in the main feed. To do so would be to destroy what the fediverse is. A network of networks of people conversing. We can contribute financially to the instances we’re using, to help cover costs. For instances that are more popular, and more expensive to run the solution would be to have ads that show up only within that instance. It should be for the community to decide whether they want ads, or donation covered costs. 


Twitter and Facebook Are Clones Already


Seven or eight years ago when you looked at Twitter you would see twenty to thirty tweets with shortened URLs. Over the years individual tweets were given images, and animated gifs, and eventually videos. They even began to take up an entire screen height for just one tweet. Over the last decade and a half Twitter and Facebook became the same thing. The idea that Instagram is cloning Twitter, when Twitter cloned Facebook, and Jaiku, is absurd. 


Meta Chat Options


To illustrate how absurd the “Twitter clone” idea is look at Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and even Facebook. They’re all conversation tools, some for private groups, others for public groups, and others for friends, families, professional circles, hobby circles and more. Instagram Twitter is, yet another conversation tool. 


The Consequences


Twitter stopped having a unique selling point years ago. What made Twitter was the community. By destroying that community feeling Musk encouraged people to spread to other social networks. People are trying to clone Twitter, but most social apps are the same today. A timeline with people sharing videos, photos, articles and more. 


And Finally


Instagram is now part of Meta, and Meta destroyed its reputation without ever apologising for its mistakes. I will not use Instagram’s “twitter” for the simple reason that I do not use any Meta products because I do not trust them not to play social engineering experiments, yet again. Meta takes social networks, and turns them into boring glossy magazines, rather than networks of friends of friends. Facebook was demonstrated to be untrustworthy and never worked to fix its reputation. 

A Short Lived Interest in Substack Notes
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A Short Lived Interest in Substack Notes

Byrichard

When I heard about Substack Notes I felt an interest in the project. I liked the idea of a site where we could write long form posts on one side, and short form posts on the other. I liked the idea of having conversations with people and creating new connections. That’s why I use social media and that’s what makes social media social, rather than a news website or some other form of website. 


The flaw emerged in two manners. The first is when content creators showed their huge growth in subscribers. It went from being a social network to an influencer network. It went from conversations on a human scale to lecture hall, or even stadium monologues. It went from being about individuals listening to each other, to influencers talking at people, but no longer being able to hear and interact. It went to being a broadcast platform. 


The second flaw is the FOMO that is caused by giving people with hundreds of paying subscribers a verified tick. It creates a two class social network. You have normal people, using it as a social network, and the others monologuing. 


People like to say “You can use the social network as you like” but this isn’t true. This isn’t possible. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube are aol about the influencers, rather than about individuals. It becomes impossible to find organic conversations because you’re always thrown into a big crowd rather than a small gathering. The result is trolling, but also solitude and loneliness. Social media should neutralise loneliness, not exacerbate it. 


That’s why I like Wordpress.com, and wordpress.org. With both aspects of the same project you have a community, without it being a competition. Social networks should be about conviviality, not a faceless mass. 


Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube force us to see what the mass audience people are doing, at the cost of making ordinary people and creators invisible. It encourages introverts to withdraw, rather than participate. 


Years ago I realised that if you’re an introvert, and you go out to socialise, you’re just there to flatter the ego of the extrovert that everyone is listening to. If you’re an introvert and quiet, or not as well spoken as others you are invisible. You will gain as much, by staying home, as going out. Social media has become the same. 


Back in 2007 I asked “But what about the ROI of Twitter and Facebook users?” In 2023 not only has this question not been heard, but the mistake is spreading. I’d rather work on projects than waste time on networks where I am invisible. 


Conclusion


By showing graphs of how readership exploded for some users on Substack, and by adding “this person has hundreds of paying subscribers Substack created a class system on their social network that I left Twitter to avoid. If Mastodon, Substack and other alternatives all have the same flaws as Twitter, then why do we leave Twitter? Why waste thousands of hours rebuilding a social network? That’s why I am blogging again, because this is an investment of my time, rather than a waste of it. It is an amusing paradox that the pandemic, rather than help social networks thrive, has destroyed them. 

Happiness and Social Media
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Happiness and Social Media

Byrichard

It is the turn of the Washington Post to discuss whether people are happier after leaving social media. As with every other article I have skimmed on the topic it discusses addiction and more without discussing the reason for which social media might be bad for one’s mental health. 


Remember that social networks, discussion groups, and collaborating with people in different rooms, countries, timezones is normal, and has been for decades. What makes social media different from other social networks is that social media is algorithm and profit driven, rather than community centric. 


As I skim through this article I see discussions about self-perception, bullying behaviour and more. What I see is not a commentary about social media, but rather a commentary on the cruelty of normal people on the social web. As I like to say, the problem with social media is that the bullies we used to spend time on the web to avoid, have made their way onto the web. The web is now as unpleasant as meat space, as some called it. 


The article discusses body image and instagram but there’s something that people forget, or never experienced. Instagram was a photo sharing app, between friends and friends of friends. We didn’t share images of ourselves, or if we did it was because we were at events together. Seesmeetups and tweetups were events where we would have photos of ourselves, with others. If we posted images to instagram they were of landscapes, travel and more, not individuals. Body image didn’t even come into it for us. 


I left Myspace because the community left, I left Jaiku because it shut down. I left Google+ because it shut down. I left Facebook because it became filled with adverts and reminded me of the life I wanted but didn’t have. I left Instagram for almost the same reason, but also because I was seeing adverts, without feeling human connections with humans, anymore. 


I left Twitter for political reasons. I don’t like what Musk stands for, but I also hate what he is doing to the platform. 


People love to speak about social media as if it was addictive, and as if it was bad for mental health. They are missing the point. The point is not whether social media is healthy or unhealthy, because at the end of the day it’s just people socialising. If they were in a bar or pub we’d think nothing of it. If they were on a balcony or in a garden we’d see them as just socialising. People have lost sight that social media is a group of friends socialising. 


They think that social media is about likes, views, about re-shares and more. It isn’t. It shouldn’t be. Social media is a network of friends of friends, and to leave the network is to leave behind that network of networks. 


Twitter, Facebook and Instagram destroyed that network of networks, and now they’re trying to fix what they broke, whilst blaming what they broke on personal weaknesses, like addiction. Being social, as I have said for decades, online, is not addiction. It’s normal socialising via a different medium. 

On Theory of Knowledge, History and Media Studies
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On Theory of Knowledge, History and Media Studies

Byrichard

The Goal of the BBC is to Inform, educate and entertain. The aim of Public Service Broadcasters is to provide people with reliable, accurate information that is not biased, that is neutral, in so far as is possible. Recently with the Far Right getting into positions of power, to control the Radio Television Suisse, the BBC and many other broadcasters and media outlets the need for theory of knowledge, history and Media Studies has become essential. 


I would like to throw philosophy into the mix, along with ethics but I think that the three topics in the title will suffice. In theory of knowledge you learn to know what you know, but also to understand what you do not know. You learn about the limits of what you have learned in order to better handle the information that you do understand. It has been years since I studied Theory of Knowledge so I’ll jump on to the next topic. History. 


In history you question information. You ask “Who wrote it”, “When did they write it”, “why did they write it?”, “how did they gain from this information”, “Who had to gain from this information” and more. The point is that history is not just the study of the past. It is the study of veracity. It is learning to contextualise the information we get, within the context of that information. To put it plainly, did the loser, or the winner, write this information. In the age of “Social Media” and endless streams of information every point if view has an outlet. Information doesn’t have to be demonstrable for people to believe it, as long as it lines up with their agenda. 


The idea that we don’t need to, or shouldn’t study history is wrong for the simple reason that we learn historical facts but we also learn how to identify reliable information from opinion. We also learn to see three or four points of view, before digesting the information and coming to our own conclusions. 


The final topic is media studies. When I studied this topic it was a subject that was relevant to media professionals because at the time if you worked in radio, publishing, television of others you need a good grasp of the social context and history of the media, to work effectively. 


Today we are in an age where everyone is an author, a publisher, a presenter, and more. We are in an age where everyone has the same reach as everyone else. The gatekeepers are emotion, algorithms, sensationalism and more. 


Remember, when people read from newspapers headlines gave the who, what, where. how, why, and when answers in the headline, and people would read the article if it was relevant. Remember that back then we bought the entire paper, daily, or simply picked it up in a pub and read. Clickbait headlines don’t give us any information, and yet future generations are growing up with clickbait titles, rather than informative ones. 


Last week Twitter spoke of “legacy” verified accounts, as if they were something to be scorned and avoided. Verified accounts were to ensure that people knew who was authoritative and who was an amateur. Remember Andrew Keen wrote about how the World Wide Web would change our lives, before social media even came on the scene. Musk is an amateur. He thinks he is a media professional but he is just a wealthy amateur with funds. That’s why he’s targeting the memosphere, rather than the broader World Wide Web. 


As Instagram went from being a photo sharing app between friends, to a glossy magazine for influencers, as facebook went from being a discussion forum for uni friends, to a place to play zynga games, and when twitter went from being a glorified chatroom to a Right Wing amalgamator so the age of Social Media ended. 


Twitter, Facebook and Instagram have become tools to spread disinformation and opinions, rather than social networks. Twitter and Facebook were once tight knit communities of friends talking with friends of friends. 


I was triggered to write this blog post because of this article: https://archive.is/hEwOj. 


But their concerns were largely drowned out by Twitter and Substack accounts with collective followings in the millions, who cheered the finding. With a better understanding of the Manufacturing of Consent such articles and such groups would have less of a voice on social media. When Andrew Keen wrote his book he worried about bloggers, but as today proves, the problem is not with opinionated individuals, but opinionated corporations and people with the funds to buy websites like Myspace when Keen was writing, and Twitter, as I write this blog post. The danger isn’t individuals. The danger is wealthy corporations and wealthy individuals with specific agendas. 


By studying Theory of Knowledge, History and Media Studies people would be equipped with the tools to use social media safely. They see the smoke and mirrors. They are less vulnerable to manipulation.