I've never done social media very well, but I'm almost certain Twitter wasn't a screeching technicolor firehose of seething panic and spittle-flecked rage when I first joined in 2006.
That's bad enough, but here is the cumulative effect: the feeling that social media insists on telling me what to think, what to think about, and how often to think about it. Which is constantly. And often by people who are wholly unqualified to do so.
Maybe I'm just not built for it. I'm an introspective guy. I like to have long thinks about stuff. Social media insists that I shorten my thinks. Social media would rather I not have any thinks at all. It would prefer that I just react. And keep coming back.
And keep coming back. Social media is optimized for addiction and positioned as utterly indispensable.
I've been off most social media for the last few months. To me, leaving social media feels like escaping a cult. A cult strives to impair your ability to think independently. A cult gaslights you, makes you doubt your own judgment. It requires you to defer your thinking to the cult and to believe you can't thrive outside it.
Lies. Turns out you can still think rationally about things that are happening in the world when not encapsulated in a tornado made of wet garbage and fire. Who knew?
It doesn't necessarily help you get a job and provides job-seekers the illusion of control, according to said article. While that might be true of some industries, positioning yourself as an expert or specialist can definitely get you noticed (it's happened to me).
Nota bene: it can be extremely difficult to maintain that hard-won personal brand while inside the impersonal workplace machine.
First, I get irritated we've become so dependent on JS libraries that a tutorial covering WC3 DOM and Selector APIs is a revelation. Then I remember that I've never had to allocate memory for a string.
(In music we might call this "demo-itis," a condition whereby you so fall in love with the sound of your demo, you dislike any attempt to record a "final" version. Or, maybe you just want to save a few bucks.)
You don’t have to spend more than 10 minutes talking to a purveyor of content on the web to realize that the question keeping them up at night is how to improve the performance of their stories against some engagement metric. And it’s easy enough to see the logical consequence of this incentive: At the bottom of article pages on nearly every major content site is an “Around the Web” widget powered either by Outbrain or Taboola. These widgets are aggressively optimized for clicks. (People do, in fact, click on that stuff. I click on that stuff.) And you can see that it’s mostly sexy, sexist, and sensationalist garbage. The more you let engagement metrics drive editorial, the more your site will look like a Taboola widget. That’s the drain it all circles toward.