Unsocial Media

I miss the early days of social media. Twitter was so quirky and it felt like (and maybe this is just anecdotal) people were bringing their original thoughts to the table. Facebook was kind of a mess from the beginning, it generated more arguments than anything else. It took me a few years too many, but at some point I completely disconnected. It was harder and harder to create meaningful connections and it was a continuous spreading of misinformation.

I came back to X a year ago, with all good intentions to meet new people that shared my interests. What I found was another big mess. Superficial posts, copy pasted ideas, AI generated content, fake engagements. Individuals I looked up to (and I'm not even talking celebrities with millions of followers) were practically unreachable. The more I looked around the more I would find people trying to game "the algorithm", get in people's face often and build an audience.

It has become, to me, increasingly hard to find people who are more interested in creating a community than anything else. So in all the confusion and volume of noise flooding every platform, true gems are hard to find. But I also want to be realistic. I don't have the time I used to to go dig where like-minded people are hiding. In the process, I'm missing out on the best part of social media that, right now, I can't get a grasp on. Bluesky has been a bit refreshing, people seem to engage more, even those with an incredibly high number of followers. Similarly I noticed that on Substack (and I'm still trying to get the hang of it).

Thoughts

All the noise in the current world of social media makes it harder, for people who thrived in the 2000s, to build meaningful connections. Lacking the time to explore the right platform plays a big role in this, and I'm the first to admin this is something I have to change (if I care enough about it). I don't want to bathe in the distorted perception I had, when I was a teenager, of reality and how the internet was. People can be awful now and people could be awful back then, now social platforms are much more easily accessible.

We're missing the right formula that works today (or maybe it's just me). And I'm afraid to say that we might never get to it. At some point any platform that gets big enough will be infested with shallow conversations and average content. I have a feeling I just haven't looked hard enough and I really hope to be right.