So, while I’m completely off twitter as of some months ago and it’s been very good for me - I’ve got a new account on Threads now to see how it plays out - and to support the continued collapse of Elon. I intend to only post very random thoughts and pictures. I promise no news topics, complaints, or political/philosophical opinions or anything at all relevant to society. I’m also not going to follow anyone, which seems super antisocial (I do care about people), but I really don’t want to re-develop a phone scrolling habit again. Just cool stuff and random pictures/thoughts, that’s it.
My account is “thesamethingwedoeverynight”
I don’t really like the direction of current social media, but I also think society is bad at connecting offline and online alike, and I feel like I sort of want some upload connectivity into the hivemind, still, however pointless that is. Sometimes you see a squirrel and want to feel like the universe has also maybe seen that squirrel. Sometimes you want to think some random person has seen your vacation photo. But I’m very disinterested in the idea of fixed self image, or trying to have a particular identity — and definitely in promoting the idea of some artificial aspect of oneself.
One product management idea — social media clones really ought to add tags, so we can follow facets of someone’s interests, which I think would reduce the reactivity and encourage more engagement, but … hey, we’ve got what we got. Also, maybe consider removing the “like” button so people have to comment and talk to each other? So many people scroll by posts and press like, very few people interact.
I still miss the 1990s internet when it was all decentralized fan pages (roller coasters, ferrets, whatever), animated lava lamp gifs, and a lot less opinions — but that’s a hard one to bring back!
(Note: I see Threads has a LOT of random posts on the home timeline mixed in with anything you might follow, I imagine this will get fixed at some point, but that makes it undesirable right now as it makes you not want to look at it. I’m hoping the user volume should make fixing that fairly important, if not, I’d suspect it fails to retain users. The web interface is the other logical need I think).