You’re not the only one — No one posts to social media anymore
A rant about modern social media experience
In 2001, I moved from my childhood home near Amsterdam to Berlin. I didn’t even have a cell phone yet, so I didn’t have much contact with friends and family back home. Facebook didn’t exist yet. It was put online in 2004. WhatsApp was founded even later, in 2009, and Instagram in 2010. What a wonderfully quiet time.
A year later, in 2002, I bought a very simple Nokia 3310. Yeah, the one with Snake from that forgotten brand that our prime minister Mark Rutte is still using.
Of course, I talked to my parents with my new phone. And sent emails from time to time to some of my friends. Still, I had no idea what most of my friends were doing, and they had no idea what I was doing. Then I came across a website called cu2 that allowed you to make a profile in HTML. You could post pictures and there were templates with questions about who you were and what you did.
I was very excited about that. It meant that ordinary people could share things regardless the place or time. So either my mother in the Netherlands could see it, or my friends who were traveling in Australia at the time. And people in the future could see what’s going on. My future children could see my student life.
So I tried to convince my classmates and friends to use it. Most of the time, I got the same reaction back: Why the hell would I want to share my private data on the internet? And why would I need to write code? Of course, Mark Zuckerberg did a better job a few years later when he started Facebook. He didn’t have to convince his fellow students. Facebook was cool, easy to use, and it added a new dimension to people’s lives.
Today, Facebook reaches more than 3 billion active users worldwide. India alone has more than 330 million users.
Around one and half of the 3 billion users engage with Facebook every day. Every minute they post a half million comments, upload 140000 thousands photos, and like 4 million posts.
Still, these numbers don’t show how a pile of shit Facebook and many other social media have become. Personally, my enthusiasm faded completely away over the years. This is because the content that is generated and the algorithm that shows the content.
Most of the content I see nowadays in my feed is not from family and friends that I voluntarily follow or the things I am interested in. Last time I checked my feed, I scrolled through 18 ads and random pages I don’t follow before I saw an actual friend’s post.
The most content I actually see is from:
- Random people I don’t follow.
- People's with fake lives, full of happiness and success stories in an alternative universe to make you feel down and sad.
- Influencers that are using deceptive tactics to attract more users for money and fame with annoying and cringy ideas.
- Content generated by bots and AI.
- Marketing, advertisements, and yes lots of more advertisements.
Because of this, there is a bit of pre-Covid-19 and post Covid-19 social media experience. Since 2020, my usage has decreased tremendously. I practically just use a bit of Reddit and YouTube. Removed Facebook a long time ago, never cared for Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter.
Our posts got buried underneath the horde of influencers, showing us the same content in different paraphrasing. In the rush to monetize and profit, these companies’ once revolutionary products have become increasingly revolting piles of garbage. So I stopped posting, and I know you did as well.
