Vice my previous musings about sports, one of the things that occurred to me is that sports is made worse by social media. You are connected to your fandom…half of whom are probably reprehensible. You’re connected to all the other fandoms…half of whom are definitely reprehensible. You’re exposed to the effects of social media, which magnify the worst in society and amplify their path to your door. And ultimately the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.
I take no small stick from my wife about not being on Facebook and thus having to hear about distant friends from her. But it’s a conscious decision based on experience. The fact is, I don’t have enough people I’m close enough to in order to make it worthwhile to be there, and I’m willing to accept hearing nothing in exchange. Social media in general – and Facebook properties in particular – slide down the slope from a chronological timeline, to an algorithmic timeline, to dry-snitching things from your friends’ timelines, to ultimately serving you content you never asked for and prioritizing it over that of people you follow. And then, there you are, wading through two hundred feet of horseshit in hopes of maybe finding a pony.
Thus Instagram, which Fuckerberg et al are intent on turning into TikTok For Olds when it’s not being repositioned as the replacement for the electric Nazi ranch he currently operates. I still haven’t reinstalled the app, and while I have one more pic posted than last time, I’m beginning to realize I only ever see content from four or five people I might miss if I bailed out altogether. The real life folks I miss don’t do enough to make it worth digging through the cruft.
The problem is, the only “social media” I’ve managed to make work is a locked Twitter account, mediated via Tweetbot, which means I have no ads and no unsolicited content other than friend retweets and a chronological timeline. It’s not much, but it’s enough to let me pretend I have a bustling group chat of my own without hounding all my pals into Signal. The abortive attempts at an Insta alternative last year proved that sort of thing doesn’t really work for fast casual interaction where people don’t want to be inundated with notifications.
Cocoon hasn’t really worked out. Slack is…fine, for the one group that uses it, but I only have one group that does. I have never yet taken to Snapchat – I’ve downloaded it three times and every time deleted it within a half hour. Nobody checks Flickr any more. Tumblr is kind of flexible and is part of WordPress now, but it’s also a decade old and mostly associated with porn and the squealing side of fandom. I don’t need much, honestly, and at this point, I can make Twitter work…for now. I don’t know how long that will last.
But there’s every possibility that in a globalized world, where the people you care about are scattered across multiple time zones if not continents, this is just the price of keeping in touch. You can either swim in the sewer in hopes of finding the occasional gold nugget, or you can try to do the impossible and try to make some new old friends.