Dear social media, it’s you, not me
After seeing the most eye-rolling, terminally online crap hot take this week, I made a decision: Instagram was next up on the list of shit that had to go.
I went ahead and deactivated Instagram and deleted the app from my phone. I discovered I was picking my phone up way too much to be distracted by videos and memes. Social Media has become a content regurgitation factory where so much of the content I am served is gleaned from twitter, threads, reddit and tiktok. I figure about 1/3 of it is also things I’ve already seen. So I am going to try this for a bit (maybe a month?) and see how it works out. Like most people, I use the phone when I am bored and anxious and Insta is my go-to (because I am old and don’t have tiktok).
Like many people, I am also wrestling with how social media fits into my life. I was reading this Spyglass article and this quote really stuck with me:
“People have long joked (and not joked!) that using social media makes them feel worse… Yes, there are funny tweets, but that’s increasingly because the network is a hive of stolen meme content from elsewhere (or other Xitter users). You see the same things that get engagement pop up over and over again just completely ripped off by other users. So even funny things feel bad!”
(The Bloomberg piece it references also is worth reading: The Moral Case for No Longer Engaging With Elon Musk’s X)
I will be honest: as soon as I retired from the working world I deleted both Twitter and LinkedIn. But I am so emmeshed into the Meta properties that I find it difficult to extract myself. My Instagram use is pretty high even though I have seen the same funny videos, the same screenshots of funny tweets, reddit posts and the same hot takes over and over and over again. Because our personal social media account is a microcosm, I find so much content is shared and re-shared by many of my friends. So I may see the same video in different people’s stories 3+ times a day. That’s harmless when it’s a cute cat but how many times do I need to see violent or political content? Probably not that much. I probably don’t even need to see the cute cat that much, if I am honest. I figure since there is so much regurgitation in the things I see, maybe up to 1/3 of my time is spent rewatching things I have seen over-and-over-and-over again. I realized when I was going through my facebook memories that I had seen the same meme make the rounds again in the past week. I don’t even remember posting it the first time! That’s how many there are roaming around and 99% of them have the same qualities: funny but forgettable.
As for Facebook, I would completely divest but Nextdoor hasn’t really taken off in my area so all of my community info is gleaned from Facebook. Also, it still is the best way to organize events and sell things locally. I do however find myself de-coupling as much as possible. I have gone back through my memories and made as many as I can private posts and now I make anything I do post private within 24 hours. But I am posting rarely as facebook is just basically an address book to me now – and it shows. I have seen the reach of my posts plummet over the past few years the less I post. I also find I am not getting notifications like I used to. Sure, facebook used to hold back some notifications so that when you came back later it would show that you had a little red circle in the notification corner (from hours ago) and therefore you’d get more addicted to it. But the less you engage with the platform the less it seems to bother to tell you that you have anything at all. If I am waiting for a reply, it’s best to go to the post in question to see if there is one because facebook rarely tells me about it. It seems to be ghosting me as much as I am ghosting it.
Hilariously, as I was writing this a friend of mine posted this article to facebook (natch!) about the AI spamming happening on Meta’s platforms: Where facebook’s AI slop comes from. So another nail in the enshittification coffin for social media.
So now I have no social media on my phone at all and no Instagram accounts available to even access via browser. It is insidious though: since deleting the app, I find my fingers automatically go right to the place that the button once was. Muscle memory is pretty strong so I figure it may be a while until my brain finds no reward there and stops trying. Until then, I find myself staring down at my phone wondering why I opened the blur tool for photos.