On Blogs and Social Media

It's no surprise to you, but social media sucks. My relationship with it, like most people, is complex. This post will talk about my experience with social media and, tangentially, the purpose of this blog.

The Decade-Long Party¶

I came upon the social media scene within the mid to late 2000s. That period of time was kind of a golden age for the internet. Many new internet companies were forming and focused primarily on building a good product. The incentives back then were to drive user growth by creating a product people actually enjoyed using. Financial motivations were somewhat secondary because most of these companies were startups and hadn't yet become completely beholden to the whims of Wall St. This is also a period of time when advertisements weren't so invasive, specific, and targeted, so there was less of a sense that you were under constant surveillance by the all-mighty unseen eye of The Algorithm^TM.

The internet was fun back then. It was a real cultural moment where social media, things like Myspace, The YouTube, The Facebook, felt like places to go for authentic connection with your friends. They were cool and fun and, more importantly, they created a sort of cultural epicenter that young folks used as a way to relate to one another. The internet was most certainly the wild west in some respects, but it didn't feel entirely dangerous or that there was a nefarious agenda behind it. Teenagers still went out with their friends, we still had physical spaces, we weren't glued to our phones (mostly because phones just sucked to use back then), and there wasn't a sense that internet addiction was a thing. And internet addiction kind of wasn't a thing because social media companies hadn't yet figured out how to weaponize Big Data to monetize everything their users did.

Forums¶

Another big aspect of internet at that time was the proliferation of forums. Forums at the time did not really consist of one monolithic meta-forum like Reddit. They were disparate, individual, distinct, independent websites that existed solely to facilitate conversation (and notably NOT to make any real money). One in particular that I took a liking to was the bungie.net forum where Halo gamers like myself would congregate to talk about Halo mostly, but also really about anything in life. It felt like a real community: I saw the same people, I knew the different personalities, I knew people's life stories, and I played with them in the game. There was a real attachment because the community felt real and genuine.

The off-topic part of the forum was affectionately called The Flood, named after a race of parasites in Halo that endangered all life in the galaxy, and of which served as the primary antagonist in the game's story. The purpose of the "sub-forum" was to "Surf a Flood of random discussion." I don't know why I gravitated towards this forum in particular. Perhaps it was relevant enough to my love of Halo, but I think it was more about the fact that there was a vibrant community of like-minded folks that I felt a connection to.

Change¶

The internet began to change around the mid 2010's. It was this period where social media companies became better at harvesting user data to mine specific details about their users. Using Big Data^TM technologies (one of the buzz-words at the time that is now considered to just be a standard concept that all software engineers are expected to be familiar with), companies created profiles for users that included information like:

Your race
Where you were born
Where you live
Your hobbies
Your work
Who you're married to
Who your exes are
People you were in close proximity to
Your likes
Your dislikes
Your shopping preferences
Your fears
Your hopes

By itself, these kinds of parameters can be used to create effective advertisement campaigns. People who have shown propensities to buy designer shoes will be shown more ads for designer shoes. This means that companies with larger, more specific user data can charge more for showing ads on their platforms because the ads will be more effective at generating new customers.

On the surface this might sound like a good thing: you'll only see ads for things that might actually interest you. The more sinister effect of this is that it creates an incentive for social media companies to uncover even more information about you, to learn things about you that maybe you weren't even aware of, and to even predict what you might want in the future! How do companies predict what you might want? Well, because they have this large dataset on all of their users, they can run algorithms that can study networking effects. Meaning, your closest friends have shown interest in this thing, so maybe you'll want to see ads about it as well?

This has led to some really creepy effects. I have memories in college where I was talking in-person with someone about a really specific, esoteric topic. I didn't know this person, I had no direct affiliations with them, I had never searched for this topic before (and I didn't search about it after), but the morning after I was talking with this person about this thing, I started receiving tons of ads for that specific thing. It's almost as if the internet was listening to us. It was creepy because it felt like I was being surveilled.

The model for how this worked likely had less to do with my phone listening to us talk, but more along the lines that this person probably searched Google for this topic after we chatted, the internet knew we were in the same place at the same time, and it also probably knew that we had some mutual friends in common. This is enough information for The Algorithm^TM to predict that this is something I might care about, and thus to make recommendations to me about that thing.

Drumming Up Hate¶

Now that the all-seeing internet companies have learned how to make tons of money, they want to drive even more engagement to their platform to make even more money. How do you do that? Well, by making your platform addictive, of course. Behavioral analysts at places like Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, Snapchat etc. learned that the strongest emotions in humans is anger and hate. When people feel angry, they feel motivated to act. If people feel motivated to act, you can direct that motivation to translate to more time on your particular app. So, unsurprisingly, this is exactly what social media companies started doing. They tuned their algorithms to optimize for user engagement, and whether on purpose or not, the ideas and posts and videos that elicited anger also elicited the most engagement. And remember what more engagement means? More money from advertisers.

Social media companies turned into anger machines. The more incensed, outraged, angry, antagonized people felt, the more money these platforms received. This began to wind its way into the political sphere. Both liberals and conservatives alike fell prey to these schemes and they became outraged at every little thing, whether it's gender-neutral bathrooms, someone on a college campus acting like a fool, immigrants coming across the border to steal your jobs... all of society's problems became amplified and made to seem like larger issues than they actually were. Not only this, but social media platforms would promote outright lies that made people EVEN ANGRIER because these lies drummed up more engagement.

It so happens that spreading lies to drum up hate is not unique to social media. Many authoritarian regimes have done exactly the same thing in order to mobilize a society for whatever cause they want. It's no surprise that political opportunists in the US saw the confused and mad-as-hell population as a way to gain more power. If you can fan the flames of this social angst, you can convince people to give you power if you proclaim to hold the One True Answer to all of life's woes.

The Political Opportunist¶

I don't like publicly getting into politics because it's a real minefield, but it's relevant to this story (and I assure you it has a purpose). The real turning point for me in my views on social media came during the Trump era. What I saw was this politician who had a real loose relationship with the truth, and he would say basically anything he could to reflect and amplify the hate and anger that people were already feeling. He consistently, brutally, effectively, and pathologically spread complete falsities with the sole purpose of making people feel like he related to their frustrations. The truth did not matter to him. What mattered to him was gaining power, and an effective way to do that, like with any ruler in history, is to fan the flames of anxiety while simultaneously proclaiming to be the singular proprietor of the solution.

Whatever your views on Trump, it's hard to deny when you step back and really examine many of the claims he makes, that his remarks rarely have anything to do with truth. It mostly has to do with gut feelings and vibes. He's effective at touching on the many legitimate anxieties people have (things like worsening economic inequalities, worse opportunities, worse affordability of essential things like housing and food), which makes his constituents feel like he actually cares about their struggles. And that feeling translates into votes.

What I saw leading up to the 2020 election was that many of my close friends and family, many of whom had never shown a propensity or interest in politics, began performing what I can only describe as unmitigated worship of Trump. One friend in particular even had a whole shrine dedicated to him that contained a $100 bill with Trump's face in the middle, the Art of the Deal, a MAGA hat, a Trump bobble head, pictures, paraphernalia, swag, whatever you can think of. This friend who I knew for my whole life as a good person began spouting pretty hateful things, I guess because Trump made it feel acceptable to do this.

This dramatic shift was troubling to me. I never saw politicians as people to be worshipped. In my mind, we should be eternally skeptical of them and hold them accountable when they go against our best nature as fellow humans. It really angered me how so many of my lifelong friends and family fell headlong into this cult of personality. It angered me how so many of these people I loved were spouting hateful, vengeful, gross, disgusting things. It confused me how so many people that I knew in my heart as good people could believe such awful things about our fellow human and our fellow US citizens. Our political landscape turned from a somewhat mutually respectful arena to something like the Mad Max Thunderdome where the only goal was to vilify and destroy your competition.

I shamefully admit that I lost many good relationships because I could not reconcile what I historically knew about these people with the toxic and hateful things they were saying and doing. It was difficult for me to be around them because I saw them as worshipping someone who was the antithesis of everything I value in life. And if that's who they admire and respect, what does that say about them as people?

Damn, I didn't expect this to become such a diatribe, but it's something I feel passionate about. Let's bring back the discussion back to home base.

I've reflected a lot on the woeful state of our politics and I've realized that where we find ourselves today can all be traced back to social media. The toxicity of our politics started to really become the norm around the same time that Facebook came onto the scene, around the time that Big Data^TM engineering practices allowed mass surveillance of the population. This is when I started to really retract from the social media space because it turned from this thing that allowed me to spread joy with my family and friends to something where I only saw hate from the people I love. This was truly the worst time for social media. Young kids are getting addicted to their phones, friends and family are spouting hateful nonsense, and any sense of genuine connection has been replaced by mass surveillance and targeted ad campaigns. What's the point anymore? We have reached the end state of the capitalist goal and there is no value left for me. My relationships are being destroyed and my life is appreciably worse because of it.

Blogging¶

That brings us to today. My general goal after the Trump era was to disengage from the turmoil. I didn't want to see ads, I didn't want to see hateful content, I didn't want to hear about the shitty political opinions of everyone around me. I wanted to go back to the golden age of the internet, the era where the internet worked for the people and not for the capitalists. I wanted a space to think clearly, to share the things I care about, and to not have my data farmed so some rich gentleman can get even richer. I wanted long-form content where people formulate real ideas that make me think.

I initially made this site as just a public dumping ground for all the technical topics I deal with in my profession. I wanted my notes to be publicly visible so I could easily share it with folks, and I wanted it to be available anywhere without needing to log into anything to view it (which I guess means "publicly visible" ). Notes, of course, are just generally good to maintain, but they're even more effective when you can share them with people. They are maximally effective when your notes have good searchability, which means the content is indexed and you can quickly find the topics you care about.

I began writing a few blog posts about some personal topics I care about, things like camping, my open source projects, some technical concepts, and I quickly found that it's actually fun as shit to go into deep dives on whatever I find interesting at the time and share it with people. Some of my posts on technical topics have been referenced in the Blogosphere many times, and a few people have even gone so far as to consider my thoughts as somewhat authoritative!

These thoughts of mine are mine alone, and no social media site deserves to host them. That might be an uninteresting revelation, and many of you probably came to this conclusion a long time ago. So that's where I land myself today; this blog isn't so much for other people as it is for me to organize my own thoughts, to document how my thinking evolves over time, and to provide a safe way for anyone I care about to interact with me (either silently or explicitly) without being concerned about that communication being harvested for a capitalistic agenda.

I still find myself longing for the period of the Decade-Long Party, the golden era of the internet. I'm not sure we can ever truly return to that, but me disengaging from social media in all forms is one step towards that direction. Even if it's my own lonely corner of the internet that no one ever visits, at least I'll have peace from whatever kind of soul-sucking monstrosity the internet has become.