Social Media 📍

A look at social media and the issues surrounding this technology.

📽️ Videos

More on Continuing to Pull Back from Social Media

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I continue to pull back from social media, deleting old posts and removing automatic posting from my blog to social media sites. Why?

1) Social media sites are very constraining on layout and design. With paid hosting that I use, I have almost complete freedom in content and design.

2) Social media sites have become swamps of nasty comments and dens of angry people. The nature of easy commenting, makes it easy for people to “flame” and tell you why you are wrong or your ideas lack merit.

3) Facebook is becoming an increasingly closed and proprietary platform. Not only are they very aggressive with censorship, they have all but eliminated the largest developers from using their API. They want users to create “custom content” exclusively for their platform, and not be sharing it from other sites.

4) Facebook not only requires extensive vetting to use their application programming interface, they constantly break their API, requiring countless hours and updates to make your software keep working for them. My Twitter and Instagram code haven’t been updated in years, and they keep plugging along, but Facebook keeps breaking.

Simply said, I like doing my own thing. I don’t want to spend countless hours updating a Facebook page or being limited by a design set out by major corporation. I may lose followers, but I’d rather work on my own blog.

Ice Covered Lake

Social media and news addiction

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I find it much too easy to spend endless hours flipping through social media and news articles like on NY TImes, when I should be reading. The quick dopamine hit is so appealing when I don’t have the time or desire to sit down and do a deep dive into topic, learning important new skills and ideas only taught in a book. Color, pictures, artwork, or even the political controversy of the day are so appealing as a distraction for a tired mind, when there is so much out there I should be learning about.

NPR

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‘Filterworld’ explores how social media algorithms ‘flatten’ our culture : NPR

In his new book, Filterworld, Chayka examines the algorithmic recommendations that dictate everything from the music, news and movies we consume, to the foods we eat and the places we go. He argues that all of this machine-guided curation has made us docile consumers and flattened our likes and tastes.

"For us consumers, they are making us more passive just by feeding us so much stuff, by constantly recommending things that we are unlikely to click away from, that we're going to tolerate [but] not find too surprising or challenging," Chayka says.

What's more, Chayka says, the algorithms pressure artists and other content creators to shape their work in ways that fit the feeds. For musicians working through Spotify or TikTok, this might mean recording catchy hooks that occur right at the beginning of a song — when a user is most likely to hear it.

Facebook Jail 👮🏻

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Hah, I got threatened with Facebook jail and my comment deleted on my post regarding regulation of AI for showing an image of the rainbow flag containing the forbidden number for decrypting DVDs.

Does anybody actually use DVDs anymore? The forbidden number is hardly a secret these days, I downloaded the image from Wikipedia but apparently sharing it on Facebook violates their sharing of cyber security information policy.

Which totally makes my point. The government and their social media platforms can try to suppress information – or for that matter artificial intelligence – but if the people find it useful or interesting it’s going to be used regardless of what the government says.

Musk Says That, as of April 15th, Only Tweets from Twitter Blue Subscribers Will be Recommended in the Main Feed | Social Media Today

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Musk Says That, as of April 15th, Only Tweets from Twitter Blue Subscribers Will be Recommended in the Main Feed | Social Media Today

With Twitter Blue take-up failing to reach expectations, Elon Musk is taking drastic action to drive more adoption, announcing today that, as of April 15th, the only tweets that will be displayed in the ‘For You’ tab – i.e. the main tab of the app – will be from paying, Twitter Blue verified accounts.