Time to leave social media

Ever since social media appeared on the internet, it has gradually taken over both traffic and content that had previously been created elsewhere. Online forums are probably the best example. Because of social media, they have almost completely “died out.” Due to the reach these platforms offer, the situation often looks similar in the blogosphere. This does not mean, however, that we should simply give up. I have personally decided to leave social media behind when it comes to creating valuable content.

Another problem is the form, length and, one might say, the shape of the content we create. Not so long ago, it was still possible to publish somewhat longer posts on many platforms. Today, even when they still technically allow it, they certainly do not promote it. Users’ attention spans are shrinking, while the platforms themselves are designed to provide quick bursts of dopamine. As a result, short videos, Shorts and Reels perform best. The thing is, not every creator has to be interested in this format. I am not. I do not monetise this blog. I create content whenever I feel like it, purely out of passion, so I prefer longer pieces in written form. In today’s world, which is often dominated by delegating tasks to AI, this is also good training in concentration, attention, drawing conclusions and analysis - for me as the writer, as well as for the readers.

Publishing content on social media also causes a peculiar kind of isolation. These platforms make sure that accessing their content is extremely difficult for users who do not have an account. This ranges from directly requiring people to register to small, subtle but significant interface tricks - for example, LinkedIn sending users back to the top of the page when they use a browser instead of the official application. Brick by brick, all of this means that the content we create and publish on a social media platform is available only to its participants. This gives them even more reasons to stay there and spend more time on the platform. Meanwhile, we are entirely at the mercy of algorithms. Perhaps someone will see our post, or perhaps it will simply disappear into the depths of the feed.

Let us look at it from another perspective. By publishing this kind of content on such platforms, what we are really doing is increasing their traffic and profits. Is this simply the price we have to pay for all the opportunities these platforms provide? To me, that explanation does not hold up. After all, promoting yourself effectively on social media also costs real and often considerable amounts of money. I therefore see no reason to support the very platforms that frequently evade responsibility when it matters - for example, when it comes to properly filtering false information. I do not consider them evil incarnate, but I do not want to contribute to their continued growth because I believe that, some time ago, they completely lost sight of the original ideas for which they were created.

Of course, someone might say that we can publish the same content across multiple social media platforms at once, perhaps by using automation tools. That is true, but in practice it only creates more chaos because every platform still has to be managed separately. I have decided to limit myself to sharing links. This blog is intended to be the only real source of truth. And what about social media platforms limiting the reach of posts containing external links? Well, that is a problem, but in my opinion this is the only reasonable alternative. It is the first step towards helping at least a small group of users break away from social media for a moment and encounter an external website. Even if they do not stay here for long, and even if they do not read the entire post, that does not matter. What matters is that the step has been taken. As the saying goes, constant dripping wears away the stone.

Once published, the content no longer belongs to us, the authors. Of course, in most cases we can edit it, delete it at any time and control its visibility to some extent. But let us not be naive. The provider of a given social media platform most likely has access to its complete history, including data that has supposedly been deleted, and can do with it whatever it wants. Have we decided to delete our account entirely? No problem - although even that will probably be an ordeal - but the content may remain where it is in order not to disrupt the platform’s integrity. If we are fortunate enough to live in the European Union, we can demand that our data be erased, and the provider is theoretically legally required to comply. But does that actually happen in practice? Given the numerous scandals and situations in which technology giants have bent or broken the law, I am not convinced.

We can therefore safely assume that content left on social media no longer belongs to us. We do not know what will happen to it. I am not persuaded by arguments such as, “Who would care about the data of an ordinary nobody like you?” That is not the point. The point is generating value from something one did not create oneself. This may include training AI and consequently providing users with better answers as part of paid subscriptions. Paradoxically, capitalist ambitions for profit have led to the creation of something resembling communes that possess knowledge and require people to share their knowledge with everyone else. Lenin is probably smiling from beyond the grave.

All right, you might ask: if social media is the wrong choice and posts are going to appear on blogs and external websites, how are we supposed to keep track of everything in an age when there is so much content?

I have two pieces of advice.

The first and most important is to reduce the amount of content reaching us. There is truly no point in bombarding the mind with a constant stream of stimuli from all kinds of different fields. Watching fifty Shorts - even if they are all about the same subject - will not make us wiser, despite giving us the impression that we have “done a lot.” Reading and analysing one valuable article is a form of training. It gives us an opportunity to learn, confront different views and engage in discussion.

The second piece of advice is to return to old, reliable and proven methods. RSS and newsletters worked well in the past, and they can work even better today because we can use AI to perform a certain degree of selection based on our preferences. It can work like a feed, except that it is controlled by us and genuinely created according to our interests.

RSS readers make it easy to quickly browse new content from many different sources, archive it and organise it into groups. In other words, they give us freedom instead of forcing us to constantly and manually jump between numerous websites just to check whether anything new has appeared.