Thoughts about Things
I’ve been thinking about social media some lately. Partly because of the recent changes to the facebook news feed, and partly because I’ve been spending more time on it.
The Facebook news feed changes struck a particular cord with me, because it validates something I’ve been doing for over a year now. I decided on my own that I was sick of seeing politics and random news stories on Facebook, so I decided to do something about it. Every Time I saw any link or story shared by one of my friends I would click on the three little dots on the top right of the post, and click the button that says unfollow or hide all.
I made sure to do this for all news sources and stories regardless of what I thought of them. The things is, it did not work super well at first. I just start seeing things people shared from increasing obscure sources. Eventley though, I managed to unfollow basically every outlet on the internet. So my news feed became dominated by a couple people who posted constantly, and updates from a few popular groups I was in. Oh well, at least I don’t see as many bad memes. Maybe Facebook will finally solve this one for me, but I doubt it.
This all plays into a larger thing I try to do with social media. I attempt to separate out places where I see things from people I know in real life, and places where I see things from people I follow. On Facebook I only follow friends and family. Twitter is only for people whose work I’m interested in. Instagram is like Facebook. Tumblr has become, strangely enough, for organizations. And I don’t count Snapchat as social media, it’s a messaging app.
I don’t if there are really any benefits to this sort of social media segregation. I just find it a little bit nicer not to see a friends engagement next to a crazy news story, next to the latest hot take by some D-list internet celebrity.