It’s practically cheating to write about social media, yet here I am.
Reason number 1 - I haven’t yet done today’s post and I’d like to avoid breaking my streak as far as possible. I don’t exactly know but I think I have a good one going.
Reason number 2 - It happened to be an item towards the top of my ‘thought starters’ list.
Reason number 3 - It narrowly won over my desire to go meta by writing about that ‘thought starter’ list. Arguably, though, all this exposition and throat clearing is nothing but meta. So my desire won over after all.
I don’t do a lot of social media. Or maybe I do. Who knows? Disinformation, remember.
Anyway, so let’s say I don’t do a lot of social media. And let’s say that I do LinkedIn only. And maybe some reddit.
I’m writing based on my first, recent perceptions so it may not be accurate but this is my real estate so who the hell is gonna fight me? I don’t even have comments on. Perhaps I’ll turn on contact@nestedworlds.com at some point in the next week.
On reddit, I’d expect the diversity to be more. It’s such a varied space without any restrictions on what you could be talking about. Yet, not just my feed but also ‘popular’ and ‘best’ feeds are so monotonous. There’s always that one askreddit post that’s already been done to death. There’s a lot of political commentary, usually left wing.
Not that I’m ‘discovering’ this. Since the dawn of karma farming, conformant (?) opinions have taken over the spaces.
LinkedIn, paradoxically, is more diverse as the platform and its people discover themselves. LinkedIn’s reinvention has been a journey in itself - a masterclass in product management.
Now, with all the thirst-traps and MLM quagmires and wannabe thought leadership and FOMO farms and ‘good job bro’ circlejerks and AI slop comments, LinkedIn has a personality. Not an enviable one. More like the kind that’d make you clutch your purse and your mace harder.
A personality nonetheless.
My point, then, is what would you say to a man who seeks out LinkedIn of his own accord in his free time? Opens up his mind and soul to all the glorious stinking bullshit on the platform at the most vulnerable of moments? And then this orgy continues on and on until the scrolls are mere muscle twitches while the brain sits rotten, detached, depersonalised.
And all this after fighting the algorithm and setting the feed to most recent first. There’s no glory on God’s green earth.
Only us with all our flaws, broken promises, with all our fates and our fatalism and our fatal flaws. Trying to swim upstream in a rigged river, whatever that means.
I do wish this thing would go away.