Hey, I know that being condescended to by someone that has quit using social media feels bad. I try not to shame people for using it. I used social media hours and hours a day. I'm just trying to help others recover from it and try to think of other ways to interact online.

work in progress.

Mark Hates Users

Advertising Scams

Real Name Policy

Content You Never Asked For

One of the things maybe that this should highlight is the way that on "web2.0" platforms, specifically via the infinite feed, we are bombarded with content that we had no choice in seeing. This in itself, you would think, would be offputting - after all we hate seeing advertisements when we are going about our daily life, we hate being harassed by a random stranger while walking around, we hate neighbors who are loud and rude when we are trying to relax.

All of these things though are basically what we accept via the layout of infinite-feed social media: a bunch of stuff we never asked for, given to us by a black box algorithm we can never understand and which might even be intentionally designed to hurt us.

Gambling & Infinite Feeds

I was talking to a friend who had never used Myspace before. One of the immediate things that they were flabbergasted by was that Myspace didn't have an infinite-scrolling news feed. How did people find content to engage with?

Well, on Myspace there were messaging groups you could join that were basically like mailing lists, but then main way that people interacted was by commenting on each others' profiles. Especially having used infinite-feed platforms so long, this seems bizarre.

You had to actually go to someone's page to interact with them, and the primary content of the platform is interactions themselves: people read the comments on each others profiles, read people's interests and about me and browsed their photos and notes (little blog entries). One of the tricks of gambling and why it is so addictive to people is the randomness itself - you never know when you will win big, or win a small prize, etc, so every time it happens you feel grateful and lucky and good. This is basically what the infinite feed does to us, and what the notification systems do.

We might complain that a lot of our feed is "irrelevant" content, that many notifications we get are "bogus" notifications that are meaningless. This is part of the design and addictive nature though. It is exactly because genuinely meaningful things are nested between "annoying" and "pointless" content which makes the act of checking more satisfying.

Checking in itself is a compulsive habit that makes us feel in control. When we check, we may not have control of what we see, but we can judge and respond to what we check, and that act of "judging" and "evaluating" the thing being checked is satisfying to us in itself, regardless of the content.

Love, Hate, Repeat

Even worse, the more extreme the random reward or "punishment" is, the more addictive it gets. You would think that after getting into a heated argument or flame war or harassment battle on social media, it would sour you on using it.

In fact, it does the opposite! Traumatic, painful and unpleasant experiences actually keep us using the platform similar to how abusers will hurt us, and then turn around and offer us something nice to "make up" for it, which makes us confused and kills our ego and sense of autonomy. Negative experiences on social media do the same thing to us, we are drawn back in because of how extreme the negative emotions are mixed with the "making up" for it with content we like or need.

Mark Hates Users

Judging from the fact that Mark Zuckerberg is quoted as having said people who using facebook are "fucking idiots" and that the site was designed to rank women by attractiveness, it isn't surprising that these abusive tactics are used, and it wouldn't be surprising if they are actually very intentionally planned.

Advertising Scams

If you have ever had the misfortune of running a page on Facebook or many other Web2.0 platforms, you might have been suckered into paying for on-platform advertising.

You may have, like me, paid for ads only to realize that not only has the platform taken your money and simply fed your page a bunch of fake bot "likes" or follows, but that you have actually paid money to destroy your own page because those low-engagement likes and follows de-prioritize your page!

I thankfully didn't spend much more than $30 on ads on Facebook, but the fact that that money not only didn't help but hurt my page is absolutely infuriating.

Real Name Policy

These web2.0 platforms require your real name. If you have talked to any trans person, you will realize how problematic this policy is, but furthermore if you have ever been harassed or stalked on these platforms you will realize that stalkers and nefarious actors using fake names almost never get banned, but Domestic Violence victims, trans folks, sex workers, are regularly banned for not using their real names. Is this surprising? I'd like to see some research on this, because everyone i know only has anecdotal evidence, but Facebook consistently lies and makes excuses for this type of stuff so why would research on the harms or maliciousness effect anything?

Table of Contents

Content You Never Asked For

Gambling & Infinite Feeds

Love, Hate, Repeat

Mark Hates Users

Advertising Scams

Real Name Policy