I was a very early adopter of Facebook. When I got my first Facebook account, I was a high-school student and you still needed a college student to vouch for you. I really got in on the ground floor of the Internet's enshittification, which is described as follows by Cory Doctorow who coined the term:
The enshittification of the internet follows a predictable trajectory: first, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
Background
I haven't actively used social media sans looking stuff up on Reddit or getting info from a Discord server since around 2020-2021 for one very simple reason: the algorithms helped me curate my feed into a persistent anger and outrage bubble. The angrier I got, the more I engaged and the more I fed the algorithms the info they needed to make me madder and more engaged. I was always so anxious and angry and depressed. But doing that has really separated me from society as a whole which has its own challenges (and also I'd like some chance of someone else reading this blog, that would be cool), so I made new social media accounts to post updates to.
This is not a controversial take, Facebook has admitted to letting researchers emotionally manipulate people for science. It's foolish to believe they took nothing useful away from that. They run a website funded by attention. To quote the abstract from that study:
In an experiment with people who use Facebook, we test whether emotional contagion occurs outside of in-person interaction between individuals by reducing the amount of emotional content in the News Feed. When positive expressions were reduced, people produced fewer positive posts and more negative posts; when negative expressions were reduced, the opposite pattern occurred. These results indicate that emotions expressed by others on Facebook influence our own emotions, constituting experimental evidence for massive-scale contagion via social networks.
Persistent rage prevention
I'm attempting to be diligent about which content I interact with on all the various platforms and blocking the outrage-mongers before I they can even make me mad. I have disabled notifications in all the apps and I'm really just broadcasting the information and then closing the app. Since the only people following me are porn bots, I don't think I'm getting much engagement anyway.
I'm hoping to integrate automatically posting to social media sites as part of my publishing process process so I can cut myself out of the process almost entirely while still building up that social media credit score.
