1. I uninstalled social media
I uninstalled the algorithm driven social media from my phone. Now I only have Snapchat (where my friends share pictures of their kids) and Are.na (which is not really social media).
This isn't the first time that I've deleted social media this year. I went several months without it in the summer and early fall, but usually I only delete it once a year and then again the next year. This is a recognition that I spend too much time and use it to avoid other things. I'm not going to lie, I can find other ways to avoid things but the impacts of many of those other things are quite different than the impacts of social media.
I've already benefited. For example, on Wednesday, instead of spending my entire morning reading social media, usually "Am I the Asshole" screen caps from Reddit on Instagram, or simple mindless scrolling on TikTok simply to have something to catch my attention every second, I discovered the Byline Magazine website and read a whole bunch of articles that made me think about my life online and my digital representation and how that has evolved over my life.
I first got on the computer in 1995 and started making websites before I had the internet, saving them to a floppy disk and then mailing them to other people to look on their computers. Then I got online in 1997, and started exclusively expressing myself through websites and writing. I graduated high school and most of my friends were from the internet. I graduated college and all my art was online. I turned 30 and I thought, why is my whole life centralized on the internet for people to find? Where are my secrets? And now, at 40, I am questioning whether I want to spend the next 40 years doing the same thing that I did the last 40 years, using the anonymous stranger and the anonymous reader as my confidant, rather than people I know and love. (On the flip side, I feel like I can say more if I don't know if who is reading it. I feel I can be more vulnerable, more expressive, much much more weird and playful, than if I were to create something and then share it with one specific person.)
I can't remember the last time social media made me think so much about my life in 5 minutes, because it's too busy taking up my attention in those 5 minutes that I can't have any thoughts.
If you're interested, here are the Byline articles I read that had me thinking so much:
2. Science Daily social media article
How to reduce social media stress by leaning in instead of logging off
THIS IS WHAT I'VE BEEN SAYING ALL ALONG. Except that the platforms themselves now make it difficult for you to control how you use it.
When social media was new it was much easier to validate your input and your output, but now you can't predict what's going to come across your screen. It doesn't make it impossible but it does make it much harder for people like me who fall into addictions very easily. I wasn't addicted to social media until the algorithms were introduced.
I've never had the problem with comparison, or feeling bad about myself because of all the beautiful people and their glamorous lives. That's not how I use social media. I'm not using it to compare myself with artists, I'm using it to find artists so that I can connect with art and become inspired by other people's creations. That's an extremely healthy way to use social media, but it only pans out if you have willpower, which I do not.
You have to constantly battle what the app developers want you to see. For several years now the algorithm-driven social media has shown me a bunch of stuff I don't care about and don't want to see. Once that started, it was really difficult for me to stay in control of my experience.
3. Websites vs social media
When I was a kid we used to find cool websites and then share them with each other. There would be one or two a month, if you were lucky maybe more than that, and you would send it to your friend via email or letter if you knew they didn't have the internet at home and would need to type it in somewhere, like the library, where you couldn't access your email client. Now you get 12 TikToks a day and you spend 30 seconds on each, rather than the 30 minutes you might have spent browsing someone's site in 1999.
I feel like there's something there about the evolution of expression, how we used to spend 12 slow hours building a website to give ourselves digital representation and share our lives with others, but now everything happens in 30-second snippets, and creators actually get upset with you if you don't know their entire context or why they posted something.
4. YouTube is out, owning MP3s is in
YouTube has been steadily trying to force me to stop using YouTube and it's kind of interesting and very annoying.
It's interesting to me how apps try to control user behavior by eliminating features that they used to rely on. For example, I used to be able to start playing a video on YouTube and then turn off my screen and continue to listen to it, or navigate away and continue to listen to it. Now, if I turn off the screen or use YouTube video in the background, the video stops after a few minutes of inactivity. To get it working again, I have to turn the screen back on, reopen the app, and then suddenly it starts playing again. You don't even have to push play, it's already going.
After a few months of this annoying behavior and seeing it was not a "bug" they were prioritizing to fix, I emailed YouTube support and explained the behavior. I explained that this was a good feature and I like to use YouTube 10-hour videos to sleep, but I don't want to keep my screen on and active all night just for a video.
The response was: "Please use the apps as they are intended. The video app no longer supports that but you can use the music app to that end."
I would like you to know, YouTube support, that you don't have the same selection of music on the music app as you do on the video app. I can't listen to my live rainstorm sound that is perfect for sleeping, I have to find a different one with variations of thunder and drop sounds that distract me and wake me up which defeats the whole purpose.
Also, I like the recommendation engine on the video app more than I like the recommendation engine on the music app. The music app seems to have a completely different recommendation engine which I had to start from scratch when I started using the music app instead, which means if I follow their behavior expectations, I lose my entire history of recommendations. That was a blow, but I was willing to do it because I love music!
Well, after I started using the music app, I realized that I couldn't get to any of my subscriptions. I guess they assume that you follow your subscriptions on the video app because of videos, not because of the playlists that they are making. There's another roadblock. So now you're saying I have to manually navigate to my friend's pages in order to listen to the playlists that they make? Fine, I concede. In the name of music, I will do it.
That's when I found out their playlists don't even show up in YouTube music because YouTube music only shows you what they literally uploaded. I'm out.
I've canceled my subscription, I don't care if I get ads because I will no longer be using YouTube as my music source. I'm going to go back to where I was before I started doing that which was not using YouTube at all (exclusively only if someone sends me a link).
It's really a big bummer. People spend years setting up their personal media system, where they have specific apps that they use to specific purposes, and then those apps just up and change! Developers went in a different direction. they didn't ask for feedback, at least not that I saw, and I'm no longer the target audience.
Trying to force user behavior or interest based on the app creators interests is ridiculous. Well, I guess you could say it was a blessing in disguise. I hated giving them money, so now I feel more at peace.
Instead, I'm looking to refresh my entire media library strategy, getting a NAS (I don't know what any of this means but my friend is helping me), and hosting my thousands of albums on a home network instead. I can stream from anywhere and I could even share so others can stream I think? I'll continue buying music on bandcamp because you can download it and keep it.
It sucks that I'll lose some of the algorithm features to get recommendations based on my listens, because frankly YouTube video had the best recommendation engine of any site I've ever used for music, but I'm willing to make that sacrifice. In the past I was simply more engaged on bandcamp to find new music and that was totally fine, I don't need YouTube to show me things. It was just less effort (shrug).