Social Media and me

I find social media overwhelming. The noise gets to me after even a little bit of browsing, and by noise I don’t mean just the user interface. It’s the sheer diversity and volume of ongoing conversations. It feels like the equivalent of walking into a massive and raucous party, composed of hundreds of tiny groups, all talking at the same time, using the same passive-aggressive ways of communicating. I find it exhausting.

Spaces like this ought to be avoided by people like me, but I don’t really have a choice in the matter.

I think I have an account with each of the large ones, but eventually got bored (Twitter), disgusted (Facebook) or simply tuned out (Instagram). Now, I don’t remember the passwords for any of these, and the recovery process is a PITA. So if I ever need to use them, god-forbid, I’ll have to create new accounts.

Besides these, the Social Media that I actually use are: LinkedIn and Reddit and occasionally – Github’s discussion boards.

With LinkedIn, I have no choice. I have a love/hate relationship with this service. I love the friends I’ve made there, but hate the platform. Besides, if you’re an entrepreneur, there is no way to side step LinkedIn. You need the network, and it’s quite literally, the only player in town a business networking monopoly. I used to write a lot of posts and articles on this platform, but for the last few years I’ve lost interest and do so only in spurts. I don’t scroll through LinkedIn’s timeline for more than a few seconds, and primarily use it for Industry News, Business Networking and Publishing.

Unlike LinkedIn, I actually enjoy browsing Reddit. I think this is because of the message-board design. (unlike LinkedIn’s stream¹ I like that everything is arranged logically by areas of interest, and discussions are easy to search and access. There is also the lack of pretense. The discussions on Reddit feel honest and genuine, while LinkedIn is full of humblebrags and bombast. I use Reddit to follow my areas of interest, such as discussions about Emacs, Bangalore, Fantasy Fiction and so on.

Many people use Social Media for news updates. I prefer RSS feeds. I use Feedly on my Mobile Devices, QuiteRSS on my desktops and Elfeed for when i’m within Emacs. Feedly tends to cap the number of articles it shows from the various feeds I have fed into it. QuiteRSS is nice, but I rarely use it. It’s there as a sort of backup. Elfeed shows you everything. Every feed that has passed through it is accessible, and I find it tremendously useful to skim through dozens of headlines on particular topics such as A.I, Local News, Art & Design and so on.