I already know that I’m not a fan of social media in general, but after looking at things and spending a bit of time looking at types of posting sites and site hosts that aren’t driven by advertising and recommendation algorithms, it’s gotten clearer to me again that the issues I have aren’t with the core concept, because that sounds fine on paper like a number of societal and government structures could. No, it’s just the inevitable thing that happens to those things in the usual cases where people just want power and money and then cram a bunch of ads or weird-ass laws or scripts or whatever and then everything becomes terrible.
If I really wanted to I could go on a whole thing about my issue with governments, but this post is about social media stuff. Algorithms and ads and mainly those two things. Also that thing where they force people to log in just so they can track their porn habits or whatever it is they’re trying to get dirt on people for. And then just use that data to prevent that sort of thing from being posted because it distracts from the ads and they also have to think about the children as they always say.
Ads are one thing, since there are extensions dedicated to blocking those, which results in a potential arms race where the companies try to circumvent them at any cost to user experience or privacy, and this ends up making the non-ad-blocking user suffer for it because they think the solution is also just to spam more ads all over the site. Then maybe charge a premium to only remove some of the ads because how else are they supposed to make money off people who pay them money.
The algorithm of course is the main problem, and while it is driven by ads because they’re trying to figure out the average human mind works and drive more people to click on ads, the methods that have been chosen are the worst possible kind that prey on the worst possible instincts of the human mind, effectively drawing on their tendency for violence and rage. It’s less discovering things and more a mix of selling things and getting people to complain more through the site just so they use it more. And somehow the sheer brokenness of these platforms drives engagement because it’s one more thing to complain about, but people seem either unaware of alternatives or they don’t want to leave behind anyone else they know who could very well be in at least one of these categories as well.
I like to suggest that people at least consider having their own site and see how that works out, but some people just don’t want to. If that’s not their thing, fine. I just find it a nice thing to do. Somewhere I can just put in whatever I feel about stuff. It also helps make things a bit easier as far as finding out where someone does things, like if someone wants to check out their art or shop or something. There are existing sites dedicated to just putting a bunch of links together for a profile and if that’s all they want to do, sure. I put that up front on my site. But there’s also actual content on my site to whatever degree because that’s what I think sites are for as well. Some people go ahead and make sites that are just a page of links to other profiles on things and that’s also fine. At the very least a personal site is likely more customizable than those Linktrees or Carrds or whatever depending on how it’s been made. And it could be built upon later.
Of course, seeing that people are willing to build and use social media platforms that haven’t gone “totally corporate” is also nice. Cohost has been interesting at least. Whatever goes on in Mastodon instances is probably also some degree of interesting though I haven’t even looked in on that much at all. Tags and keywords seem to be pretty core to discovery, and they can be taken advantage of for algorithms, but I guess I would recommend tagging as much as possible just for the sake of sharing like interests, which also comes with a bonus on supported platforms that allow blocking tags to avoid certain un-interests. Of course I also recommend not excessively tagging to unreadability or irrelevance either. Then hopefully terrible spam scripts don’t pick up on certain words and tags and result in people practically having to invent a new language to discuss things without being spammed or effectively deleted by the algorithm, like whenever artists want to discuss business like exchanging money for various pieces.
However it goes, I still just see things as a matter of time rather than anything definitive due to previous outcomes and my general view on human nature, and suggest being ready to move social presences to any site at any point for any reason. I’d also like to say the same for countries but that’s a lot harder to do since it involves the physical realm and also governments with whatever paperwork and so on.