Are You Cut Out for Social Media?

"from my"

the creepy thing about birthdate on FB is I've had friends die and their family members didn't know how to convert their profile into a Tribute page, so casual acquaintances who didn't know they died would write "happy birthday" posts on their wall. I don't mean the "remembering you today, my angel" type posts, but like they actually thought they were saying it to a living person.

it's also creepy to see FB accounts up 10+ years after the person died, and yet...someone my age that I didn't even know died of a heart attack in 2010 (she was a friend of a friend), profile is still there, still not a tribute page, page preserved in amber from 10 years ago.

Twitter is basically my newspaper, I'm on it a lot to know what's going on and be entertained, but I have no drive to cultivate my own online personality or brand.

I understand everyone's ambivalence about social media but I also wonder whether "I don't even have a Facebook account" might become the new "I don't even own a TV."

Personally I think some of it is good dumb fun. Plus a lot of stuff you can safely ignore and scroll past.
And it is all, ultimately, a voluntary leisure activity. It's only in your head to the extent you allow it to be.

I understand everyone's ambivalence about social media but I also wonder whether "I don't even have a Facebook account" might become the new "I don't even own a TV."

I think it already has. See also "i have an account but i don't even use it"

kristin hersh still beams thoughts at me!

i still have a facebook profile because i need it for work, but have stripped it of everything but my name. (xp lol) should probably change my photo now that neil peart has died

started using twitter because of work and have become pretty attached, but if i missed something, it's gone; i'm not a completist. the politics/trump stuff can become draining, but that's my fault for not better pruning my follows/filters

i'm on no others, which, i'm told, is where the real shit happens now. it's fine; i'm pretty old

85% of my relationships started one way or another on FB, usually because I'd start a convo online and then wouldn't feel so awkward talking to the person in public.

xp -- true! if only it was just that (these were the days when tweets were sent as SMS messages to your phone)

(at least in my circles, a lot of people have migrated to Discord, which feels kind of like a happy public vs. private medium)

jill hennessy liked one of my tweets so can't nobody tell me nothin about social media, forever

Yah the kids in my house are all on discord. It seems to be akin to a cross between a forum and a sort of IRC?

don't like the name discord, it sounds alt-right to me

the highlight of my Twitter career was zinging Prodigy of Mobb Deep and having him laugh at it

RIP

we've probably all been retweeted by Lil B at some point?

he linked back to the ILX thread ten years ago!

also Ripper Owens was upset that I dismissively mentioned his blip of a career in Judas Priest in less than illustrious terms

don't like the name discord, it sounds alt-right to me

keep thinking it's a typo for dischord

It took me a couple of tries to come around on the film, but I think one of the best representations of how bewildering social media can be is the "Orinoco Flow" sequence in Eighth Grade--even if, in the context of the film, it simultaneously shows how adept this 14-year-old girl has become at navigating that world.

I dip back in now and again for like half a day and then I remember that social media only makes me depressed and anxious and then I extract myself and towel off and hope I've finally learned my gahdamn lesson already.

xp -- yeah, that is a major issue the platform has (partly because it was originally geared toward gamers), but it's like slack in that it is primarily based around servers/channels, so it is siloed in that regard, obviously I stay far away from anything like that

Last time I tweeted I said Twitter made me feel so left out, I felt like Flagstaff Station on a Sunday.

A friend replied "Actually Flagstaff's been open on Sundays for years how behind are you?"

*kills self*

wow, wait till granny danger hears about this

(speaking of slack, some of my friends have also migrated there, basically group chats except it's slack; an under-remarked-upon trend of the past few years, I think, is the exodus to semi-private spaces)

FB is my lifeline to older, straight friends; Twitter is essential to posting opinions on the arts. I've adapted to them w/out a hitch. Coping with a pandemic would be less salubrious without this virtual proximity.

I admired amateurist's film posts.

The use of a medium depends on who uses it, obv. I don't get worked up enough about events to constantly post on FB or Twitter; that's what ILE is for, and even then I wait for other posters to clear the way.

the answer to the question is ultimately no unless it's a very small and contained space

Twitter is very real-time based and you have to be in a position to jump in quickly if you're going to get anything out of it. That's not viable with my everyday non-lockdown life.

I used to think Instagram was rubbish until I started following better people. Colleagues from ten years ago with babies is nice, but now my timeline is full of musicians and DJs I'm actively interested in.

Facebook is only as good as you curate it. I'm quite generous with the Mute For A Month button. A lot of people I know are articulate and insightful with posts in a way you can't really manage on Twitter (at least in my experience). I like a lot of publications' pages, I try to stay off their comments, and I join groups that match my interests so it feels more like using early forums.

I don't use Snapchat or TikTok because I am 32.

I really don't enjoy the unfollowing/unfriending element. I'll be the first to admit I have a thin skin for perceived rejection, even though it is always people I've met a few times at parties who I have legitimately nothing in common with etc. A lot of the dynamic is binary and much as we all laughed I think Google+ was on to something with the idea of circles of closeness.

Yes. But then again I only use twitter and it's just like ilx, really.

When blogs began (mid 90s?) I came at them as a reader with the same mindset I'd had as a consumer of print journalism and posted a few snarky comments. One particular music blogger responded saying essentially, Hey I'm not charging for this, these are only my thoughts, if you don't like it don't read it, or start your own. Whether or not he was right I took it as an IMPORTANT LIFE LESSON for the new millennium and I've kept a distance in my online interraction ever since.

ilx is different than twitter. people here engage with what others are saying... sort of. twitter is a bunch of people preening for attention.

no that's more like a description of some of your terrible threads tbf!

That's total bullshit. Most accounts are just quietly posting, they find other people and form micro-groups that exchange info on things that interest them.

Yes there is plenty of noise and grifting but with carefully curated following that's what you can get.

xp

calzino, what did i do to you? i am confused.

just carry on in peace, no beef to maintain here, nothing to see!

I answered yes but really I am just talking about fb. I like hearing from old friends. I've moved around a lot and otherwise I'd lose track of them, and I don't want that. I don't have a big extended family so I don't have nutters posting alt.right minion memes or live laugh love or whatever.

Twitter is very real-time based and you have to be in a position to jump in quickly if you're going to get anything out of it. That's not viable with my everyday non-lockdown life.

This is true for me also. I keep up with a few people about my neighborhood, but I don't understand how it functions as a place to discuss. If I blurt something out, it's not "to" anyone in particular, so why would someone else engage with it? I don't engage with others' blurts. If they asked me directly then maybe I would. I don't see how there's any community there, unless it's transposed from irl community. And that's what I like about social media: a way to continue discussions of irl things from people I know irl about irl things (including art, maths etc)

Book Twitter is very complimentary to ILB, actually. Although some of the people that come in from blogging annoy me a bit.

the worst thing about ig is friends liking other friends' posts but not yours. don't get me started on commenting without liking. know these issues are mine, not the platform's, so this is why I patched it

Haha it’s a good thing I’m not on ig then cause I have very poor liking etiquette - fb sometimes gives me these stupid videos that say “you liked 4 posts this month!”

Personally I think some of it is good dumb fun. Plus a lot of stuff you can safely ignore and scroll past. And it is all, ultimately, a voluntary leisure activity. It's only in your head to the extent you allow it to be.

Coping with a pandemic would be less salubrious without this virtual proximity.

I agree with both of these statements. (Assuming salubrious is a good thing.) I dwell on what bothers me in my original post, and I voted no, but--in keeping with my gray-area mindset--of course the only honest answer is somewhere in between. Obviously I wouldn't still be here or on Facebook after 10-15 years if I weren't getting positive things in return.

I don't see how there's any community there, unless it's transposed from irl community

it's the same way as everything else, you keep showing each other attention and eventually you change the status of that person from a loser nobody to someone you track through changes and become interested and concerned about to some non-negligible degree, PHILOSOPHER WHOM I HAVE BEEN COMMUNICATING WITH WITH NO SUPPORTING IRL COMMUNITY FOR YEARS NOW

see, like that. eventually you buy them beers and they donate to your gofundme when your kid gets face cancer

but how do you get to the point when you're showing attention to people on twitter that you don't know, and they're reciprocating? it just seems scattered to me. on fb I have been friended by people relevant to my work life that I've never met irl, and we can talk there; but there's an act of friending that makes "official" that we now attend to each other's blurts.

you'd be right to again point to ILX and say: look, you just started blurting on here, a long time ago as it were, and then you build, from nothing, communality with people here.

I suppose it's that I've looked at twitter enough to not be able to understand what counts as *discussion* on there, something transcending mere mutual blurting, but rather response, development, rethinking.

I mean, I've never really gotten SMS either as opposed to email, of course I send lots of SMS to say "yeah I'll pick up some bread" or "here's this story I was telling you about" but the compression doesn't lead to dialogue.

Disagree with this last.

1/ mutual follows

2/ replies lead to replies

3/ repeat interactions intensify over time (just like facebork can predict when two people are about to commence an 'official' romantic relationship)

ilx is different than twitter. people here engage with what others are saying... sort of. twitter is a bunch of people preening for attention.

I wish there were an option of "yes but I'm embarrassed that the answer is yes"

twitter is a bunch of people preening for attention.

An analysis as perceptive and fact-based as "Twitter? Who needs that? Nobody wants to read what you're having for lunch!"

Anyway, the answer is 'no'. I've never had a Facebook or Twitter account fwiw.

Investigative journalism can be really gripping tbf, hits the same pleasure centres as good crime fiction. But yeah depending on the subject things can get pretty dry.

my point has to do with WHY we read the news in the first place. it a way it's analogous to money in politics. it's not that i can't stomach reading a detailed outline of a candidate's policy positions, but it often feels like putting the cart before the horse

my point has to do with WHY we read the news in the first place. it a way it's analogous to money in politics. it's not that i can't stomach reading a detailed outline of a candidate's policy positions, but it often feels like putting the cart before the horse

― Cattedrale metropolitana di Santa Maria de Episcopio, Friday, June 19, 2026 3:20 PM (four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

meh. imo technology has changed to make takes cheaper (free), more abundant (more than you can ever hope to read), and more addictive. there are positive aspects to the change, but i think many of the posts itt in defence of social media are ex post rationalizations of our habits rather than a principled stance

Not really. Personally internet/social media has made me more informed than otherwise, and I think teens who have started experimenting in many areas of their lives should access it.

And they should definitely not be banned from accessing it by the government.

If posh parents want to be authoritarian that's between them and their therapists and their unfortunate kids that have to suffer them. But governments need to get back to funding public services, healthcare and the welfare state before doing authoritarian shit on kids (just so they can expand it onto adults as well).

Yeah, let the kids smoke!

Wait sorry, wrong thread

ex post rationalizations of our habits rather than a principled stance

new board description

I don't think the position of anyone w/r/t social media is defensive as much as it's descriptive. Addictive algorithms can be bad for us and the government still shouldn't hold the responsibility for censoring information from young people if they're not going to do shit about the AI CSAM generators or...y'know...anything.

i think many of the posts itt in defence of social media are ex post rationalizations of our habits rather than a principled stance

Not really. Personally internet/social media has made me more informed than otherwise, and I think teens who have started experimenting in many areas of their lives should access it

this exchange gives me flashbacks to people with habits of consuming too much... lets call it "social media", and would bristle at the suggestion they were addicted, saying things like "people dont understand that [social media] gives me great ideas & makes me more productive, when i stay up all night doing [social media] its good for me, maybe if they did more [social media] themselves they would get it!"

Not exactly looking for good things that make me more productive out of social media.

And my cat is the bigger enemy when it comes to sleep!

cant argue with the fact that social media has increased my exposure to & enjoyment of cats exponentially

It does raise the question of whether being better informed is worth the cost. I think all of us would agree that there is a social value in being generally informed about the world. At the same time, do I really need to know half of the stuff I come across on social media, especially when a lot of it amounts to little more than outrage bait?

I used to use an app called Nuzzl that would aggregate links posted by people you follow on social media. So you could read the articles people were talking about without the commentary and other noise. That seemed like a good way to stay informed without the brain rot of scrolling a feed. (The app doesn't exist anymore, though I think there are others like it.) The downside, of course, is it still prioritizes the kind of hot-button articles that get traction on social media, though you could probably adjust that based on who you follow.

social media for me is good in the way captains of industry and certain celebrities can directly show the masses how stupid/insane/bigoted they are. It’s also bad that the same captains of industry and celebrities can also cultivate personality cults online. in conclusion, social media is a land of contrasts.

I don't read commentary as just noise or pollution. Some is, some isn't.

And again (as Daniel was saying up above) there's a lot more bait content in news papers.

In the end the situation today as compared to then -- as someone who grew up reading newspapers daily, as well as magazines like Time, New Stasteman, Economist for quite a while, before the internet -- is vastly better. Faults and all.

by far the worst thing that social media has done is remove the possibility for boredom. so it's not so much that facebook ruined the internet as much as it is that facebook and other social media have facilitated the internet ruining all of our lives. it needs to go back in its box

We probably need to end smartphones more than social media.

Once boredom is back we will have great music again.

Like punk rock.

Cross posting from the UK Pol thread. A lot of terrible writing on Starmer's resignation today

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/ng-interactive/2026/jun/22/the-rise-and-fall-of-keir-starmer-where-did-it-all-go-wrong

From a skim of this piece there is a lot of excuses mixed with acknowledgement of failings.

Towards the end social media gets part of the blame too.

Perhaps there was a time when voters would have given a newly elected PM a few years to turn things around, but those days are long gone. The electorate is impatient now, demanding almost instant results. That process has been intensified and accelerated by social media, which does not merely put the worst possible gloss on the actions and motives of those in its sights, but distorts public figures out of all recognition. Labour canvassers for the May elections were shocked to find voters who were not just disappointed in Starmer but harboured a visceral loathing for him – who saw him in almost demonic terms. They were reacting to an invention untethered to reality, but one pushed and promoted by Elon Musk and his X platform especially.

It's really funny how the public (most of which aren't on X) seem to be (on the account of the above) manipulated into anger at the government, when the failings in communication and policy have been extensively documented.