Toxic

For many years I went for an after lunch or after work walk. I would easily walk eight to ten kilometres per day. With road works in Nyon that have already lasted for many, many months, and that should last for another year, for several hundred meters of road my walking habit has been made toxic through traffic density and exposure to toxic driving behaviour.

I used to love heading out for an hour or two, to see the fields and crops change with the season. I used to love walking a multitude of routes. With aggressive cars and dogs I shifted to rural walks. This worked for a while, until road works redirected traffic along a critical section of my daily walk, so now I no longer walk at all. I run instead. Even cycling has suffered. I didn’t want to drive during Caribana, because it’s during this event that someone crashed into me driving the petrol scooter for stopping to allow a runner to cross the road and during Paleo in around two weeks because traffic will be much denser.

During the pandemic I deactivated my FB account for years because it felt so toxic as an environment. I reactivated it when Musk bought Twitter. At the time it felt like a “least worst” option, rather than a pleasant site. In the process I used FB extensively, and I found communities but I also found a lot of noise.

Political Bias

Recently I have noticed that when a post is written about something positive, there are a lot of angry smileys, and if something negative is written there are a lot of positive smileys. It feels as if Facebook is a Right Wing site. It has felt that way for a while. Yesterday things reached a peak.

When I look at Facebook, BlueSky and Threads I see a lot of content that should never be. I see sentences and phrasing that provoke hostility, and I see article headlines and more that provoke polarisation. In essence I think that social media is no longer a social network. I believe that social media is about emotions, rather than conversations, especially negative emotions.

I bring this up because I can go for hours, or even days without looking at threads or FB and when I do I am struck with how negative posts are. They’re not friendly, or constructive, or conversational. They’re negative.

I had and have reservations about Bluesky. I worry about the venture capitalists funding the site and I worry about the community on the site. Today I wrote a post that was meant to show empathy but it got me flamed. The flames were just two posts, but that flame is enough for me to deactivate my account, at least until the flamers have given up.

I was flamed like that on Twitter in 2020 or so, and on the Fediverse more than once, which is why I almost gave up on the Fediverse. My blog is still there but I devote very little time to the site.

Today I spotted another clear sign that modern social media are toxic and unhealthy. I see this through the boy sober movement.

A new trend is sweeping TikTok: #boysober. Its rules? No dating apps, no dates, no exes, no hookups. Thousands of women are uploading videos describing why they have gone boy sober and extolling its benefits.

In my opinion this is a clear demonstration of why algorithms are so awful on social media. For me this illustrates that with algorithms social networks become unusable for close personal connections. The reason for this is that when you’re competing for likes, comments and re-shares you’re forgetting about the core purpose of social media, for human beings. The ability to connect with people that do not live in the same village or town that you live in, and to stave off loneliness.