I miss old social media (and maybe you do too)
I don’t think I’m alone when I say I’m tired of social media, or rather, I long for the older version of it before everything became so algorithmic. I did a purge of all of it a few years ago after reading the book Digital Minimalism. For a while, I was able to get a grip on my online activity, but now I’ve found myself in a new job with a lot of downtime at the office. This has caused me to develop a strong addiction to X.com. My plan is to give it up for Lent this year.
The most frustrating thing about the current state of the internet is the value placed on engagement. I believe this has the unintended consequence of valuing what I call “engagement bait” over authenticity. On X specifically, this leads to a lot of posts designed to stir controversy for monetary gain, and I don’t really see this creating value for the internet community as a whole.
Now, fixing this is easier said than done. Can we all just go back to having our inner circles and allowing viral trends to flow naturally? I think the algorithms have really sped up media consumption; trend cycles are faster than ever. Can we go back, or would we all just be bored? Perhaps if these social companies curated the experience behind the scenes, things might improve—but we already saw what happened with that in the Twitter Files, with certain political views favored to the point that three-letter government agencies got involved. At what point does curation become censorship? I have no idea.
Maybe we do need to go back. Lately, I’ve been spending my afternoons after work sitting in a small room watching movies from my college years on a CRT TV setup with a modded Wii. It feels like I’ve created a throwback atmosphere to a simpler time in my life. I think that’s why I wanted to start this blog. In my teen years, I got a lot of satisfaction from writing daily posts on my Xanga page. Hopefully, I’ll find some satisfaction here too.
