There was a time when Facebook was fun. You and your friends posted things, you had conversations. Then slowly it became worse, became a place for showing off—you logged on and envied your friends travelling and exploring nice places and chilling on the beach and getting engaged and getting married and having babies, etc. But even that was better than now—I mostly use Facebook for work and for posting photos—now I only see posts from about 15 friends out of the 116 on my friend list—my feed is mostly filled with adverts for things (and beauty procedures) I don’t need and stupid memes I don’t find funny and AI-generated images I don’t find impressive and clickbait from media outlets I don’t read and TikTok-style videos from pages I don’t follow and Reddit stories I don’t know whether are true. The short-form content creators are the worst: occasionally you find something amusing, but most of the time you see people doing stupid couple videos or doing stupid pranks or asking passers-by stupid questions, and you can see when people steal ideas as the algorithm shows you different content creators creating the same content.
What is the point of all this?
Twitter also used to be better. I don’t mean it used to be a cosy, heartwarming little place like people often pretend it was before Musk—it has always been a divisive place, full of hate, amplifying stupid opinions and making mainstream issues that should only be on the fringe—you try to create your own circle and curate your own feed and can have interesting conversations with interesting people. But I think in some ways it has become worse: the clickbait and ragebait are worse; with monetisation, you see more sensational stuff and see Twitter threads broken up by bots and unrelated videos; with Grok and other AI, you see more fake stuff and also see people talking to Grok instead of each other.
On the one hand, it may be hard to leave Twitter permanently—I’m currently taking a break—because that’s where I have friends with whom to discuss classic literature and cinema; that’s also where I can see news unreported and aspects unmentioned and perspectives unconsidered by the mainstream media. On the other hand, I would also see depressing news and hateful tweets and stupid opinions, and none of us are equipped to hear one stupid opinion after another, every day.
The Twitter copycats don’t sound better either—Bluesky for instance looks insufferable.
I don’t even need to be on TikTok to know it’s much worse than other social media platforms.
The fun is mostly gone. Social media is now largely ragebait and brainrot and bots. The Dead Internet Theory appears increasingly true.
When I scroll through Substack's social media app it feels like LinkedIn for writers: everyone's writing about writing and writers writing about writing and writers, good lord. If you think Twitter's bad you should check out Substack
ReplyDeleteOh.
DeleteI thought Substack was more like blog?
It is true, the only social media I seem to use these days is Cara and instagram since I mostly use the internet to look up artwork (and perhaps youtube, but even so, I feel I use it more as a way to listen to music than any social interaction)
ReplyDeleteStrangely, most of my time on the internet seems to just be on google and looking up paintings. I swear I type the name Fechin and Serov and Repin and Sargent half a dozen times into the search bar. (I have 500 tabs open and about ¾ of them are just google search of these guys)
The internet seem to be getting worse, at least we still have our books u,-u,
-John who commented precisely a year ago today on this website
P.s.: On a side note, I am currently reading Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time, and search up if you have a review of it. Though it was from 10 years ago ( http://thelittlewhiteattic.blogspot.com/2014/12/a-hero-of-our-time.html ) I agree (so far) that this is very good. Can't put the book down, Very addicting.
DeleteHi John,
DeleteWrite more comments!
I think everything becomes worse, including Google. Search results are worse, there are more ads, it's harder to find things, and very often the images that show up are AI-generated.
But yeah, I enjoyed Lermontov's novel a lot.
Hello, Di
DeleteI'll try! But I have no promises!
Hmm that's true, I didn't even think about the generative AI and ads (Perhaps it is because my iPad is so old but somehow Ads do not pop up when I google search, perhaps it's because ads only pop up on the latest search engine (I.e. a 2013 version of Safari/Chrome have less ads than a 2024/2025 version of this apps?)- or maybe that's because I have adblock installed?), are most generative images uploaded on websites that are too advanced for my ipad so they don't show up? (I confess, image files in the form of webp can't even load in this old thing) can it be that since most ai are downloaded in this format that I am shielded by it? (How lucky I am!- or maybe I am just blissfully unaware of all the ads bombarding me u-u)
Would it not be sad that in the future we have to revert back to early 2000’s technology to use the internet without any corporation to steal our data and selling us ads ? Will the only way to find anything trustworthy is to use a machine that's too ancient to even understand this new technology? (Maybe, but it would be quite depressing that all innovation from this point would have to be abandoned in case such a thing could happen!)
Also P.s: finished A Hero of Our time, very abrupt ending! Almost reminds me of The Tale of Genji ending where both just kinda leave you with "Huh? That's it!?" and yet somehow it fits with the overall story
Also reading Orwell's 1984, got to the part where Winston created comrade Olgivy, feel like if this is written now, Winston would just use generative ai to make comrade Olgivy (You don't even need to write about Comrade Ogilvy, you can just make the computer create videos of him!) Very depressing, feel appropriate reading this now. Would like to know if you have any opinion on this since you have read Orwell >_<