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+++
title = "Why I don't use social media"
date = 2021-12-12T13:41:21Z
+++
Many friends sometimes find it strange that I do not use any social media,
besides instant messaging, if that counts. Very often I find that I keep
answering the same questions over and over again, so I've decided to write up my
thoughts on social media, and the reasons that I don't use such platforms.
<!-- more -->
Even though I don't have or use any social media platforms, I used to be
registered and was a somewhat active user of Facebook and VK[^1]. Active in the
sense that I would login from time to time, and in the case of Facebook, I used
to use it as a sort of backup for my photos, so I would post them there. I never
found it particularly interesting to constantly post whatever I was doing. For
me, those platforms were useful only in the sense that they helped me keep in
touch with friends, family and other acquaintances.
I also used them to read up on some content in such platforms like news or
memes. Eventually, I realized that most of the content in such platforms was
worse than subpar and it was just distracting me from whatever I should be doing
at the moment. Even if I wasn't doing anything at the moment, I realized that I
wouldn't lose anything of value if I lost access to said content. So I stopped
using social media for that, and I would get my content from other sources,
which didn't distract as much as social media and provided much better quality.
After some time, I found that I had less and less use for said platforms. I
unregistered[^2] from Facebook right away, because it was the crappiest of the
platforms, but I kept using VK, because there were still some people that I had
to keep in touch with and was still tolerable, until it was not.
The only use that I had for them was instant messaging. However, most of the
people I actually care about and with whom I constantly keep in touch are using
Telegram[^3]. So I stopped using social media altogether.
Of course, these reasons are mostly superficial. There are other aspects of
social media that when put together made me actually consciously drop their use.
Whereas before I considered social media a necessary evil that was kind of
useless in its own, but necessary because of networking effects and the way our
society works nowadays, now I consider social media not only useless, but
actually malign.
## My problems with social media
### Privacy, or lack thereof
This is probably the biggest problem, yet many people either don't realize
social media has a privacy problem or they don't think it is a problem. For
years, people have been warned about the problem that social media platforms
pose for our privacy, yet only recently[^4] have people begun to realize that
all those warnings weren't paranoia but well founded concerns[^5].
On the other hand, there seems to have been a shift in the value of privacy for
many people. It seems as if big corporations and governments have successfully
convinced people that privacy shouldn't hold any value for them since, after
all, "you shouldn't worry if you have nothing to hide"™. Yet if you talk with
most people, even if they say that they don't care, they won't give away private
information to just anybody, and there's certain that they won't give away even
to their most trusted friends or their spouses. That is, however, a topic for
another post.
In the end, the business models of most of these platforms relies on the
constant violation of your privacy. That's another reason why they will try and
convince you, that this violation of one of your essential rights is beneficial
to you.
### Control and Manipulation
This is an issue that goes very much in hand with the privacy issue. Social
media platforms are run and governed by centralized organizations, i.e
corporations, or governments in some cases. Not only can these organizations
decide what gets censored and what is allowed, but they also have the ability to
manipulate in which way the information is presented.
In the case of Facebook and YouTube, for example, there's an algorithm that
decides what gets more visibility and what gets delegated to obscurity. Nobody
outside of Facebook or Google actually knows how this algorithm operates, yet it
is what decides what the people in said platforms get to see. And these
algorithms have been shown to have greater biases towards certain kinds of
content or information.
There's also the case of filtering content for deeming it to be
"disinformation". It might seem like a noble thing to do, but you cannot trust
these big entities to act on your best interests, and more often than not, the
information that they censor or label as "fake" or "bad" is information that
just goes against their favored narrative. It is the right and duty of each
person to use their mental faculties to decide for themselves what constitutes
factual or desirable information, not some central authority. This is no better
than the government censorship to which many countries are still subject
nowadays and which, ironically, these corporations often decry.
### Bad habits
This one is probably more subjective, but it has been my observation that social
media tends to have more of a negative effect on people, rather than a positive
one.
The reason most people keep using social media, and this is especially true of
women, is that they can satisfy, albeit in an artificial and meaningless way,
some of their emotional needs. It can be just plain vanity or ego, seeing people
react, especially positively, to your posts sure boosts your ego. It's not a
coincidence that most mainstream social media don't have a dislike or equivalent
button.
<figcaption>
An example of social-media-induced degenerate behavior in the wild.
[Source](https://old.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/92tw8e/i_was_stood_taking_a_photo_of_my_girlfriend_in/).
</figcaption>
Now there are a lot of people that seem to be living their lives through a proxy
called social media. Or rather, it would seem as if their life has become social
media. They can't just enjoy a night out at a restaurant with friends, they must
photograph every dish and every little detail of their table so that they can
prove to other people on the internet that they have an "interesting" life. Then
they spend their time buried in their phones waiting for people to react to
whatever they posted.
There's also the gossip aspect of social media. Now it is not enough to go about
gossiping in real life. People attached to social media seem to have an
unhealthy need to "know what's going on". It's as if not knowing what Alice or
Bob did means the end of the world.
Of course, there is also the blind following of "influencers". This is not a
problem exclusive of social media, but it certainly has been exacerbated by it.
The voice or opinion of certain people or group of people is made more important
not by what they have to say or the actual merit of their actions or words, but
by how big of a following they have.
### It's just useless
If somehow all forms of electronic correspondence, such as email and instant
messaging were to suddenly disappear, a lot of people would suddenly find
themselves in a problematic situation. Nothing that couldn't be managed, but it
would certainly be troublesome. If, on the other hand, the same were to happen
to all social media, e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.; nothing of value
would be lost.
There are of course some arguments that could be made in favor of social media,
but I believe that all of these supposed benefits can be had without social
media:
* **It helps me keep in touch**: we've already had email and instant messaging
for quite a while, actually before social media, not to mention both mobile
and landline phones. All of those are much better alternatives in many
different ways.
* **How would I keep people up to date on some information**: if you actually have
something worth sharing, the best option is to keep a blog. If you are not
technically savvy there are always free blogging options that don't require any
special knowledge to use. Of course, if you have the skills, or the time to
learn the skills, the best option would be to host your own website[^6].
* **How do I keep up to date with what people have to say**: Analogous to the
previous point, if somebody has something worth reading or watching, they
should post it to their own blog or website. Furthermore, there's a great
technology that has been forgotten by most people that works in a fashion
similar to social media feeds, RSS[^7], except you don't actually need an
account and you control the information that you get.
* **I want my friends to know what I'm doing**: touch some grass, 'nuff said.
But seriously, just get together with your friends and, tell them what's been
going on with your life. Or if you can't, give them a call or text them.
* **I run a business and to promote it**: Of all the pros of social media that I
have heard or could come up with, this is the only one that has some merit. In
this case I would suggest promoting your business locally first, and keeping a
website for your business through which people can follow any new information
about new products/services or special promotions. In the end, word of mouth
is the best tool businesses have to promote themselves.
## In conclusion
Most of what I wrote here have been my opinions and observations that have led
me to decide to don't use social media at all. I never had any real use for it
and kept it mostly as something that was expected of me for a while. In the end
I just decided that there's no reason I should actually have a social media
account.
With all of the above said, I know most people will continue to use social media
just because it's what all their friends are using and it provides a
superficially pleasant service. These are just my reasons why I refuse to use
said services. If this text convinced you to stop using social media, great; if
not, fair enough, but just keep in mind that you can't expect everybody to use
those platforms.
[^1]: If you don't count instant messengers as social media.
[^2]: Boy do they want your data really bad. Deleting my Facebook account has
been one of the worst and most tedious experiences I've ever had in my life.
[^3]: I don't consider Telegram to be the best option for IM communication out
there, it's just he lesser evil option that I could choose for the time being,
certainly much better than WhatsApp, Viber or VK. Almost nobody that I know
uses Signal, and it's centralized anyway; Matrix seems like a nice option, but
their problems with metadata leakage put me off; XMPP seems like the best
option for decentralized, E2EE, truly private IM, but I'm not sure if my
"normie" friends would be willing to switch. This footnote is already long
enough, but I will definitely switch to a decentralized, E2EE IM in the
future, and might write about it here.
[^4]: As usual, Stallman was right. To paraphrase him: “Facebook doesn't have
users, it has "useds"”. <https://www.stallman.org/facebook.html>
[^5]: See the somewhat recent scandal surrounding Facebook and Cambridge
Analytica for some examples.
<https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/17/facebook-cambridge-analytica-kogan-data-algorithm>
[^6]: I might write an article on some the ways you can easily set up your own
website and/or server. In the meantime, you can checkout this great resource:
<https://landchad.net/>
[^7]: Technically Atom is the superior format, but most people (myself included)
refer to both of them as RSS, and basically all modern RSS readers support
both equally. Maybe I'll write about (I keep saying that too much) RSS/Atom in
the future.
|
