Social media and my distaste for it

 I know, this is also essentially a social media platform but given that I have no followers, no ads and no ‘helpful suggestions’ from the platform provider, I can cope with this one. 

I ditched Facebook a while back and have not looked back but part of me still craves some sort of interaction.  A situation I am sure that is made worse by the pandemic, and the nine months that me and the wife have spent in quarantine.

So what have I tried, what am I on right now and what will I do next?

Twitter

I tried Twitter for a while but the short text microblogging just doesn’t suite me.  Sometimes I like to add pics and limiting my text is really not something I want to do. I guess sometimes I have a lot to say, other days not so much.

Facebook

So many ads, so fucking toxic. No thanks, not anymore. 

Instagram

While I can do pics and text, I am constantly annoyed by the ads and people suggestions. I have no idea who most of those fuckers are. Why on earth would I want to follow them. And the worse part is, there is no way to turn it off.

WhatsApp

I don’t know why this is considered social media. It’s IM software, but maybe it goes shit I don’t know about. At least it doesn’t (yet) show me ads or suggest other people I might be friends with.

Slack

I love Slack. It is invitation only, no ads and no helpful suggestions. It is configurable, controllable and useful. 

Wordpress

We (worlds best wife and I) host a Wordpress blog. It’s an occasional thing for us, that one of these days we will do more with but at the moment it is a sort of placeholder.  It covers our retirement plans, and how we are working towards retirement.

Reddit

I gave up on Reddit a while back. While it was fun, it was also a big time sink and I don’t need that.

Imgur

Same as reddit really.  I still have an imgur account but I am seriously considering getting rid of it. I spend too much time looking at memes.

So where does this leave me?  With Slack, Imgur and IG at the moment and I am considering dumping IG just because it is really annoying.  I guess it is also worth differentiating between social media and communications as the line seems to be blurred these days. For instance, WhatsApp seems to be classed as social media but to my mind it is just a communications application.

Communications Applications

In terms of communications applications, I do use several and have talked about them before:

• Phone / Text / FaceTime
• WhatsApp / Telegram / Signal
• Zoom 
• Slack

I am certain that there will be others as apps come and go, but what to do with social media still baffles me. I want to engage with people, but I fear most of my engagements will be contentious as I hold some extreme views - and by extreme, I mean I believe in equality and freedom; something most people say they believe in but actually don’t and get really pissed when you point that out to them.

Not sure where I am going with this but I do know that I am going to eliminate my IG and Imgur accounts.