Social Media
- Scroll through your Day One timeline and read a previous journal entry or browse some old photos and memories.
- Launch Day One and log how you’ve spent your time so far for the day. Doing this for a few weeks can also be super helpful for getting a perspective of where your time and energy are being spent.
- Write down 3 new ideas. These could be articles you want to write, business ideas, places you want to visit or photograph, topics you want to research, date ideas for you and your spouse, gift ideas for a friend, etc. These ideas never have to to be acted on — the point isn’t to generate a to-do list, but rather to exercise your mind and build your idea muscle. Ideation and creativity are muscles, and the more we exercise them the stronger they get.
- Send a text message to a friend or family member to tell them how awesome they are.
- Don’t get out your phone at all — do some stretches or take a 5-minute walk.
The Age of Average
Cars, coffee shops, book covers, cosmetics — everything embraces the same Instagram aesthetic.
Just Checks
Shawn Blanc with some good ideas:
Here are a few alternatives to what I call the “Just Checks”.Take advantage of those moments of down time in between meetings, calls, or whenever. Allow your mind to rest for a bit or engage it by doing something active and positive.
The Best Time to Own a Domain Was 20 Years Ago; The Second Best Time Is Today
Jim Nielsen on the best time to own a domain.
That is why owning a domain (and publishing your content there) is like planting a tree: it’s value that starts small and grows. The best time to own a domain and publish your content there was 20 years ago. The second best time is today.
While, I don’t do a lot of active promotion here, that can always change. The good thing, I’m right here and not going anywhere.
Is This The End for Third-Party Twitter Clients?
Twitter’s API, the data interface that allows third-party apps and websites to fetch tweets and post new ones, died mysteriously right before I went to bed last night. I refuse to use the actual Twitter app on my phone. Twitter’s official client is hot garbage and it isn’t worth downloading. It is unusable.
This is the quickest way for me to simply not use Twitter.
Last month, I stopped posting to Twitter. My life did not change drastically. I still read my curated list of people I follow, but my proactive use of Twitter basically stopped.
I’ll be honest since Twitter broke third-party apps, I might be done with Twitter for real. TweetDeck still works, so I’m not completely off the platform just yet. However, if I can’t use Tweetbot on my phone, I simply will not be checking Twitter on my phone. End of the story.
As of this writing, all the popular third-party clients like Tweetbot and Twitteriffic are still down. Of course, Twitter hasn’t said anything about this situation. The affected developers of those clients have heard nothing. Is it an unintended outage? Who knows? Twitter barely has any staff. If this were a strategic decision, I’d figure Musk would be telling everybody about it and pushing the actual Twitter app. None of that is happening.
If this is intentional and third-party apps are not coming back, my use of Twitter will plummet. Seriously, Tweetbot not working has been way, way more effective at keeping me focused on what needs to get done than any Screen Time or Self Control apps that I’ve ever used.
Ultimately, that’s probably a good thing.
Bring Back Personal Blogging
Monique Judge has a few interesting ideas about bringing back blogging.
Watching the demise of Twitter under the helm of Elon Musk has made me nostalgic for the personal blogging days. The decline of Twitter with the current erosion of legacy media has left me thinking we need to bring personal blogging back with a vengeance.And:
The biggest reason personal blogs need to make a comeback is a simple one: we should all be in control of our own platforms.And:
Trolls only thrive in an environment where they are allowed to run around unchecked, and that is what most of social media is. There are plenty of tools that allow you to keep those people out of your comments while still allowing those who appreciate your words, thoughts, and content to fellowship with each other in a community of your own design.
I think this is generally a good idea. The circle comes back around and the Musk-y Twitter-verse is accelerating the return to owning your own space.
Also, this seems to have become a bit of a movement. John Scalzi, back at the end of November, was pushing for the same things.
Everyone should start blogging again. Own your own site. Visit all your friends' sites. Bring back the artisan, hand-crafted Web. Sure, it's a little more work, but it's worth it. You don't even need to stop using social media! It's a "yes, and" situation, not a "no, but" one. https://t.co/BzHYh59F36
— John Scalzi (@scalzi) November 24, 2022
Twitter and Me
I was never on MySpace. I barely use Facebook. I was on Tumblr, but deleted before the takeover. My Instagram has eight posts. I am never going to have a TikTok or a Mastodon account. I have curated Twitter to be absolutely perfect for me. If it dies, I will be sad.
In all likelihood, Twitter will “Fail Whale” soon. Once it goes down, I’ll wait until Automattic, Substack, or someone else decides to take it over. I would rejoin a reconstituted Twitter with better, wiser leadership. I won’t go and “learn” a new social media service.
If Twitter never comes back, I will be sad. However, it’s not like I don’t have other things I should be doing instead.
PS If Twitter kills @TweetDeck and @tweetbot, I will be out. Using anything else is not worth the trouble.
Inside the Twitter Meltdown
Casey Newton and Zoë Schiffer, writing on Platformer:
Musk’s whim-based approach to product development, his rapidly depleting executive ranks, and the very real likelihood of hundreds or even thousands of additional departures at the company in coming weeks threaten to leave Twitter a shadow of its former self. And much of the reason for that is Musk himself: the way he treated his employees and the product they built; the sage advice he ignored; the business fundamentals that he misunderstood.Cue fire emoji.Musk’s takeover of the company had been so brutish and poorly planned that, we’re told, there was not even a proper handover of the company’s social accounts. As a result, having spent $44 billion to acquire Twitter, for his first week-plus of owning the company, Musk and his team were unable even to tweet from the @twitter account.
Tweet, Tweet
I can tell already that Elon Musk owning Twitter and trying to use it to make money is going to be a real thing that people will talk about online for weeks and weeks. Who is leaving? Who might get unbanned? Which companies will keep ads on the platform, and which ones are done? What new iteration of the platform can be monetized? When will Musk sell Twitter and take a loss?
I’d say that most users on the platform will continue to use it the same way they have been forever. I have curated my follow list, stopped retweets from appearing in my timeline, and continued using Tweetdeck instead of going to the official Twitter page to interact with it for more than a couple of years. I probably spend too much time on it, and there’s that feeling of not even needing to be here anymore, but I doubt I change my habit.
As for the alternatives… they are all crap. I mean all of them except Micro.blog (I rather enjoyed Maton Reece’s appeal for Micro.blog usage) and, you know, personal blogging. Mastodon and the rest I can’t be bothered to look up will not make a dent during this. They are a waste of time.
I fully expect within six months to a year, Twitter will be ruined. It will be a hellscape of impersonations and the worst aspects of the far-right with a dash of fascism, bigotry, and political fetishism. It will be an afterthought like Tumblr, which used to be mentioned in the same breath as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Unless Musk sells it to a company that knows how to handle it, like Automattic, for instance.
I pretty much have TweetDeck running in a tab every day. Not having it up is going to be really, really difficult for me. It’s kind of funny, as I recognize that I’m constantly online through Twitter and also that it probably isn’t very good for me.
It will be interesting to see how long I stay on if all the people I follow quit.
Musky Twitter
The CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, who previously criticized Twitter for restricting free speech, outlined his motivations for buying the company in a message addressed to advertisers and posted to the social platform. Stupidly, Musk dropped in on Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco, carrying a white basin and later tweeting, “Entering Twitter HQ—let that sink in!” He fired a bunch of executives and then changed his Twitter profile description to “Chief Twit.”
Sigh.
Just to be clear, I doubt I’ll be leaving Twitter anytime soon. However, if Musk starts making terrible decisions about free speech and whatnot, I might simply delete all my posts, keep my account, and never log on again—kind of like what I do with Facebook and other social media sites I no longer pay much attention to.
I should seriously consider taking Twitter off my phone. Everyone says it will immediately improve my outlook on life, the universe, and everything. Maybe.
I do know for a fact if he sunsets Tweetdeck, I’m totally gone.
Instagram and Facebook remove posts offering abortion pills
Amanda Seitz, writing for the Associated Press, has the scoop on Meta’s haphazard enforcement of it’s policies regarding abortion pills, guns, and illegal drugs.
The AP obtained a screenshot on Friday of one Instagram post from a woman who offered to purchase or forward abortion pills through the mail, minutes after the court ruled to overturn the constitutional right to an abortion.
“DM me if you want to order abortion pills, but want them sent to my address instead of yours,” the post on Instagram read.
Instagram took it down within moments. Vice Media first reported on Monday that Meta, the parent of both Facebook and Instagram, was taking down posts about abortion pills.
On Monday, an AP reporter tested how the company would respond to a similar post on Facebook, writing: “If you send me your address, I will mail you abortion pills.” The post was removed within one minute. The Facebook account was immediately put on a “warning” status for the post, which Facebook said violated its standards on “guns, animals and other regulated goods.”
Yet, when the AP reporter made the same exact post but swapped out the words “abortion pills” for “a gun,” the post remained untouched. A post with the same exact offer to mail “weed” was also left up and not considered a violation.
Just another reason Meta is a shit company and everyone should leave Facebook and Instagram (me included).
Taking a Break from Social Media is Good for You
Results of a study that asked participants to take a week-long break from social media find positive effects on well-being depression, and anxiety. This should come as no surprise to anyone on social media.
A team of researchers from the University of Bath (UK) evaluated the mental health impacts of a week-long social media hiatus. For some research participants, this meant freeing up roughly nine hours of their week that would otherwise have been spent browsing through Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok.
Their results — published on Friday, May 6th, 2022 in the US journal Cyberpsychology, Behaviour and Social Networking — suggest that just one week off social media improved individuals’ overall level of well-being, as well as reduced symptoms of depression and anxiety.
A full week was awesome, but fully removing oneself from social media was better. Digital Minimalism and Deep Work author Cal Newport, pointed out the “full abstention” benefit.
The researchers further found that they could obtain smaller, but still significant improvements in depression and anxiety by having users simply reduce the time they spend on Twitter and TikTok. The biggest effects, however, came from full abstention.
I’m pretty minimally engaged with social media these days. I still have Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, but I don’t really post all that much, especially to Facebook and Instagram. I do have a pretty bad habit of scrolling through Instagram Reels, and that most likely needs to be curtailed.
Honestly, I should just stop and do practically anything else.
Elon Musk to Acquire Twitter
As it turns out, I was wrong. Elon Musk did, in fact, buy Twitter. I’m still not sure why.
Per a press release from Twitter, Elon Musk is in the final stages of acquiring Twitter.
Twitter, Inc. today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by an entity wholly owned by Elon Musk, for $54.20 per share in cash in a transaction valued at approximately $44 billion. Upon completion of the transaction, Twitter will become a privately held company.
I’m not sure I care. I will likely stay on the platform, but I routinely delete old tweets and have zero qualms about it. In my view, tweets have always been ephemeral and never something to be kept for posterity. Sometimes they can even come back to bite you. Of course, anything you ever put up on the internet can likely be found, and my old tweets could be located, I’m sure. I don’t really have anything to hide.
As long as Musk does not get rid of Tweetdeck, I will stay. If he institutes a monthly cost to participate, I’ll be gone along with the millions who will absolutely not pay for this kind of “service.” Overall, I’m just not using social media that much these days, although my wife will attest I’m definitely watchinig Instagram Reels far too much.
The real question is what Musk is planning for the platform. I’m with M.G. Siegler here. What is he going to do? Who knows?
I’m not going to lie, there’s some real trepidation here as a user with this change. Mostly because it’s such a wildcard. They’re handing the reigns to their most influential user. Think about that for a second. It’s wild. The fact that he happens to be a Memelord and self-styled Goblin King elevates that to insanity. It’s like a jester who becomes king — if that jester also happens to be the richest person in the kingdom and its most iconic businessman on the side. It’s as if his entire goal in this world is to actually make us believe we are living in a simulation. But one gone awry so we can tell something is off.
So what now? Who the hell knows! I’m still not convinced even Elon Musk does! An edit button? Yes! But that was already in progress. More user verification? I guess? Less advertising? Yes please! Open sourcing algorithms? Sure, but that sounds infinitely harder than it seems on the surface. Will Twitter decentralize? Lol.
Kevin Drum also can’t quite figure out what Musk is going to do with Twitter.
Musk has made noises about making Twitter genuinely free of moderation. Anyone will be allowed to say anything they want! But he’s going to find out this is harder than it sounds. A true free-for-all will (a) lose users, who just don’t want the hassle of being trolled constantly, and (b) lose advertisers, who don’t want to be associated with a toxic cesspool. One way or another, Musk, like every other social media owner, is going to have to figure out some compromise between free speech and profitability.
I believe things could be rocky for Twitter, and this acquisition could be the beginning of the end. Just ask Google +, MySpace, Friendster, Ello, Mastodon, and Tumblr (which I would guess might be making a huge comeback now…).
If I had $264 billion, like Musk, I would not have bought Twitter.
However, I would spend $25 billion on Fox News, fire all of the current on-air “talent,” and remake the format so that it presented news instead of propaganda.
I’d spend $30 billion on eradicating world hunger and $90 billion on free education.
I would then spend $10 billion on DC Comics and all of its IP. I’d likely sell it to Disney or Apple for the same price.
I would then drop $2.5 billion and buy the St. Louis Cardinals, just for fun.
Oh, and I’d buy Mark Zuckerberg’s secret Hawaiian compound for a cool billion.
The Real Benefits Of Staying Off Social Media
Ivaylo Durmonsky has a very well-written article exploring social media's deeper aspects.
Yes, quitting social media or doing a social media detox will calm your senses and increase your well-being. Plus, you keep your personal data for a little longer. But there is something else. Something I don’t see others acknowledging.
The main benefit of taking a break from social media is that you stop living in a fictional world and finally start dealing with your own reality.
This is something I’m beginning to think seriously about. Lately, I’ve been spending a lot of time on Instagram (mostly Reels), and my wife has noticed. I’m not feeling particularly good about a lot of things in my life personally and the world generally, and I’m wondering if I’m subconsciously wanting to escape into my digital world.
Durmonsky points this out in his piece:
People will do anything than consider their dreadful reality.
The greatest source of suffering for the modern man is the most banal: Boredom.
We can’t survive even a minute without doing something.
That’s why social media websites are so popular and so hard to quit.
When was the last time you were bored? For me, I always turn to the old chestnut of “only boring people are bored,” but maybe I’m wrong about this. Maybe I’m turning to social media to avoid reality. That seems unhealthy.
Facebook Papers: ‘History Will Not Judge Us Kindly’
Here it is. Facebook is bad. You already knew this, but whatever.
Over the weekend, we learned even more about what Facebook has known about its platform all along. Seventeen news outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Politico, and released dozens of stories based on thousands of pages of leaked internal documents from Facebook.
The cross-outlet project is called The Facebook Papers and Protocol has made a great guide for sorting through all of it. I’m also rather partial to The Atlantic’s reporting by Adrienne LaFrance. Also, Tom McCay at Gizmodo has a good breakdown.
The leaks have confirmed a lot of things that many reporters and researchers have been claiming for years. Facebook knowingly promotes right-wing content and conspiracy theories over non-politicized content. They played a central role in organizing the January 6 insurrection. The only nice thing to come out of this is that apparently, there aren’t any young people on the site anymore.
I probably need to leave too.
Anti-Social Media
Nabil “Nadreck” Maynard recently had a post about going on a social media diet. This concept fascinates me. In his post, he links to videos by John Green and Derek Muller.
Muller’s Anti-Social Media video is really insightful. His background in filmmaking lets him see the meta nature of a lot of social media, and in turn, he feels how fake the whole thing is. Just take seven minutes out of your life and watch it.
The thing that really drives me nuts, as you saw in this rant of a video is thinking about the reasons people post to social media. Of course we’re drawn to the dopamine spikes we get when our posts get likes and comments, this leads us to post more and more engaging content. This is just what the platforms want us to do but I argue it’s disadvantageous to our social lives and to our lives period. If you always have that process running in the background searching out the perfect photo or the right moment, how do you ever live in the moment?
A General Theory of Facebook
M. G. Siegler has a general theory of Facebook and it isn’t pretty. Basically, he believes it won’t be a mass exodus that kills Facebook, but the next generation not even using it at all.
I think he’s right. From my limited experience with the younger generation, they aren’t using it and never will.
I’m still debating on deleting myself from Facebook. I might just do it.
The End of Tumblr
There was a time when Tumblr was mentioned in the same sentence as Facebook and Twitter. That day has long since passed. Tumblr announced the end of adult content on the platform. Their new guidelines are making the most buzz on the interwebz. I love it when big corporations define adult content:
Adult content primarily includes photos, videos, or GIFs that show real-life human genitals or female-presenting nipples, and any content—including photos, videos, GIFs and illustrations—that depicts sex acts.“Female-Presenting Nipples” is the name of my next band.
As you might have read in other places, this whole exercise is an attempt to get back into the good graces of Apple and the app store which recently kicked the app out because Tumblr was apparently distributing child porn. Child pornography is something that can be defined and removed. “Female-presenting nipples” isn’t really child porn, but your mileage may vary.
April Glaser writing for Slate thinks Tumblr should welcome more porn.
…individual Tumblrs that feature adult content generally feel like appreciation pages, because that’s what they are. Go to a Tumblr dedicated to sexy images of women in lingerie, drawings of naked people, queer people making out, or real and different-size women reaching sexual climax and it feels like you’ve found a community of people who like what you like—not one where you have to identify yourself, or be exposed to eye-popping ads about penis size that may also be peddling some nasty malware. It’s no wonder that Tumblr has become a place for people who are curious about their sexuality to explore imagery that they find appealing. Porn is experienced on Tumblr the way a lot of things are experienced on Tumblr, from memes to artworks to history to puns. And that impacted how one might view porn there. Finding pages with dedicated collections of sexual imagery among all the other fan pages made the perfectly normal and healthy activity of enjoying sex and things that make one think about sex feel perfectly normal.Warren Ellis thinks it might be a tad too early to sign the death certificate for Tumblr.
It’s probably too early right now to wave goodbye to this weird site that started out as a way to monetise the tumblelog style started by other people, something that was maybe a tiiiiny bit skeevy but hey not everyone’s a coder. I remember looking at tumblelogs with envy, and, frankly, no Tumblr theme ever really looked as good as the original tumblelogs.I’m not so sure about any of that. I used to use the service as a type of commonplace book. It was easy to add pictures, quotes, videos and the like to a Tumblr blog, but ultimately it was a time suck and interfering with my own creative output. I closed it down and really never looked back.But, for those who still watch what the internet does, this is probably the flag for Tumblr’s last lap.
All of this reminded me of a post C. J. Chilvers wrote a couple of years ago when Verizon bought Tumblr.
This week Tumblr was bought out by Verizon in their deal for Yahoo!. The ink wasn’t dry on the deal when Tumblr posted an announcement that your Tumblr blog will now have ads. You can opt out - for now. 99% won’t, because 99% don’t care.I wish I cared as much as the internet. Seriously, it’s way better to own your own little corner of the internet. It doesn’t have to cost much. It honestly shouldn’t. Spend less than $50 or $100 bucks and you’ll have your own space and not just your space in someone else’s pond that can be taken away at any time for no reason.This is how it works. When you don’t pay for the product, you are the product. Sometimes, even when you pay for the product, you can still be the product, but you may have better options available.
It’s hard not to be the product.
Most creators don’t care, which is maybe why most readers don’t care about most creators. How long can you sustain a business where most of your users don’t care?
Good luck.
The Miseducation of Sheryl Sandberg
Reading this incredible story about Facebook’s COO, Sheryl Sandberg by Duff McDonald in Vanity Fair makes me want to delete my Facebook account.
It will probably make you want to do it, too.
Getting Out of the Social Media Mess
Manton Reece, founder of Micro.blog, has some smart thoughts about social media and owning your own digital presence.
Having your own domain name for blog posts and photos isn’t just about personal independence from the control of massive social networks. Owning our content is key to the way out of the current social network mess.I’m seriously thinking of dropping out of the “social network mess.” I like Twitter for the immediacy of it, but I don’t need it. I don’t really post on Instagram or Facebook anymore. I can remove myself from those services and not miss out on a single thing.
Well, I’d probably miss Twitter.
Fine Tuning
Warren Ellis talking about fine tuning his social media:
On Saturday at 1201am I turned off my social media. I have a private IG account for looking at nice pictures, and Twitter lists for news, but I’m not posting on or participating in the public internet for the next several months. I tell people on my newsletter, all the time, to tune their internet connections until they are useful and fun. The public internet stopped being fun for me some years ago, and I disconnect from it for half of each year at least. I like newsletters, blogs and RSS, podcasts, email, messaging apps and complete thoughts. The public network turned into something I don’t really enjoy or get anything out of.For me, I’ve found the only way social media is useful for me is by fine-tuning and curating them as well as limiting my time.
My Twitter feed removes all RTs, which is the only way to experience the platform. I’ve also curated my feed to only see posts from people I like or admire. I have a news channel and that’s it. I use Tweetdeck in a browser and Tweetbot on iOS.
With Facebook, I can easily fall down a rabbit hole, but I’m increasingly not doing it because ultimately I don’t really care as much as I used to. Facebook isn’t all that fun for me anymore. The same goes for Instagram. I’m old so I never used Snapchat. I keep a LinkedIn page, but it gets visited only a few times a year. I was never on Myspace. I cancelled my Tumblr. I still like Pinterest, but I can live without it too and I don’t really view it as a social media site anyway. I was on Google+ for like half a second and went nope and deleted the account (I think… may need to check that one).
Like Mr. Ellis, I like newsletters, blogs and RSS, podcasts, and complete thoughts. In fact, one of my best tricks is following Instagram accounts via RSS in Feedly.
My simple recommendation is to take control of your social media and make it work for you. That may mean simply turning off RTs on Twitter for the people you follow. It may mean deleting Facebook entirely. It may mean doing nothing at all.