Modifying social media

You know how every change to Facebook has made it worse? That recently happened with Twitter.

I guess I should specify what I mean by "worse". Obviously the platforms have their own opinion.

I use social media to keep track of people I care about and am interested in. My favorite defunct Facebook feature was a Friends feed where I could scroll down and see the most recent post from every friend. That was great. It's been gone for years.

The change on Twitter seemed like an ordinary feed adjustment, but it limits how many tweets you see and makes scrolling much more difficult, where you are likely to lose what you want to see. Also, most of what you do see is promoted ads, because those are much bigger and they take up most of the screen.

In addition, Twitter has started putting tweets in my feed from people followed by people I follow. Retweets are one thing, and I was irritated when I saw tweets there that had merely been liked by people I follow, but just because a few people I follow follow this person you think I care about their tweets that my tweeps have not even engaged with? I do not.

I do care that it does not load new tweets at the same rate, seriously diluting it's real-time flow. I get that adding tweets I did not ask for is a way of trying to get me to engage more, but ironically it means that I see the content that I want to see less.

I get that the platform providers want to make money, and ads are a way of doing that. Despite all the panicked rumors of Facebook starting to charge, that has never happened, and it wouldn't even make sense for it to happen. They make too much money already from selling ads and providing data. Sure, greed means they will always want more, but they would lose more in their ability to sell us than they would gain from charging us.

This is a separate question from whether I want to support the various social media companies at all. I have concerns about it, but I don't have any good alternatives so I continue to use them even knowing that these are not good people and that they tend to support more white supremacy and misogyny and harassment not as a bug, but as a feature.

No, this is about - since I remain - how do I make it serve my purposes?

Some of that is personal adjustment. I try and make more of a point of noticing who posted the things that interest me. That way if I lose them on the scroll I can find my way back to them. I also try and pay attention to whom I am seeing and who has been missing. Individual look-ups may be the key.

I am also thinking about checking Instagram more regularly. The first time I tried it, I did see things from people I don't normally see posts from. The second time I checked, it looked like it was all the same content, but I think some of it was actually new content that looked a lot like the old content. I haven't quite decided if Instagram is helpful or not.

The other thing, though, is I am really pushing back on the monetization.

On Facebook I have stopped liking suggested pages from friends. Yes, your business is a part of your life, but it's not the same. I have unliked a few previously liked pages, and may do more but here's a fun fact: I have over 400 liked pages, with almost no effort. It will take a while to get rid of all of those, and I am not sure how much it will help. Scrolling does still mostly work on Facebook, so I am trying to scroll down more and engage more with actual people.

On Twitter I am muting every promoted tweet. I am also not sure how much this helps. I clearly haven't muted enough to keep new ones from coming up. I occasionally mute people they seem to want me to follow, but that is not the person's fault so I focus more on promoted tweets.

I can't even say that Twitter doesn't value my time; they do, but not in the way I value it. They provide a service that has been very enriching, and they seem to be doing everything they can to devalue it for me. We'll see how that goes.

My point for now is that what I value is people. Ironically, in the last week I cast off two. What was I thinking?

More on that next time.