#social media blackholes
Just an amusing musing from someone whose done UX before… and why I don’t follow site protocols for my own mental health. Also, picture the caps as a version of a screaming baby with their icon as a mask over their face. Or is that how I imagine it?
TUMBLR
REBLOGGGG DAMN YOU REBLOG!
I reblog occasionally. I’m not focused on boosting followers by random reblogging. I’m focused on delivering best content. I did do reblogging a lot in the past on other accounts, but then the contents got messy and I rather reblog the things that are relevant to the focus of the blog. Also, I have a custom name for the website and it’s professional type website, so going into tumblr black holes isn’t for me. I rather escape velocity of internet black holes. The QAnon effect is real.
HAVE YOU SEEN…
Dun care.
Dear Tumblr,
I wish you had an auto save feature that saves to drafts… also, your platform seems to have trouble processing long posts. Javascript handling error, I suppose.
MYSPACE (lol I remember it)
Put up music, flashing gifs, list allll your profile info. Give us your personal contacts.
I’m HSP, though I didn’t know it at the time because the term wasn’t invented. And generally, sharing your personal contact info when your name (at the time) was rare, is a BAD idea. Stalkers with no protections is terrible. And I stopped using the website around the time they allowed animated gif wallpaper. !@#$ No. Also, automatically playing midis gave me a fright from my childhood PTSD and HSP-ness. I was also underage… sooo…. no.
Dear My Space,
You were a nightmare for HSPs and Autistic people. Also, it was hard to network on you. Also, you didn’t really protect minors that well.
POST A PICTURE OF YOUR FACE~~
No, you racist assholes. No.
True story, in a PRIVATE group, I posted my face and then Facebook bots came after me left and right. I deleted the single picture and Facebook stopped coming after me. We know you’re racist, you assholes. Why should I post a picture of my face when you’re going to try to chase me off the website.
JOIN MORE GROUPS
Too much work to keep up with them. Facebook isn’t my life. I rather have a handful I engage in rather than 1000 plus.
HAVE MORE FRIENDS 5,000!! 10,000!!!
You mean faceless strangers I don’t know to feel popular? Popularity isn’t my goal in life. I don’t need the internet to validate my existence.
Unfortunately the internet doesn’t often go towards my values of empathy, kindness, seeing people as human beings, and *friendly* debates. So accumulating people I don’t know who could attack me, no. I filter hard.
GIVE ME YOUR PERSONAL INFO
I’m no longer a minor, but stalkers exist and data mining on Facebook makes it easier to do things like, say Credit card fraud. So NO. Fuckers, no. Also, stop selling my info to scammers.
ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO UNFRIEND THIS PERSON?
yes.
ARE YOU REALLY SURE YOU WANT TO UNFRIEND THIS PERSON?
Yes. YEEESSSS.
Dear Facebook,
Good luck finding liberals who are blatantly racist transphobic and hate Republicans. That’s what your algorithm tells me. This is why you lost users after the announcement. But you don’t want to admit that you’re racist. Oh and I beat your racist algorithm. You really should remove the racism though you know about it and won’t do anything about it.
DO YOU KNOW YOU CAN FOLLOW MORE TOPICS?
Yes. Am I going to? No. Are you going to push them on me anyway because your bots come after my tweets? Yes. Do why are you asking me to follow topics?
YOU CAN FOLLOW FEEDS.
See previous. Also, QAnon effect often happens when one follows feeds and that gives me a headache.
FOLLOW THESE PEOPLE BACK
HSP, information overload. Honestly, I’d probably cut back on my feed. I can’t control the topics on my feed. I can’t control people replying to me but not intending to. Why do I want more of that in my life. It’s not real validation.
YOU KNOW YOU CAN MUTE PEOPLE YOU FOLLOW
Then what is the point in following them unless they give you a job offer and you just want to DM them?
RELOAD/CLICK ME SO YOU DON’T LOSE YOUR PLACE.
I know why they added this feature. Yes. But still feels like they want to suck your soul out from your foot and make sure you don’t have a life outside of twitter.
Dear Twitter,
I noticed that your social media platform has a bunch of users who seem to be hung up only on the platform and have no life outside of it. This is not healthy since too much social media leads to depression and bad behavior, and the QAnon effect. Also, it would be nice if there were not necessarily “Inspiration porn” but the occasional funny or amusing news in amongst the terrible.
General note: I tend to block or not connect my face to face friends and my family members just so they will ask: How have you been and try to actually contact me, rather than say nothing. This is a huge social media sin, apparently, but it saves my mental health quite a bit.
Conclusion
I use social media badly. I know UX, so there are two things I think UX on social media could fix: The QAnon effect–that is where you get into increasing weirder social media black holes. And the lack of user to user empathy causing social media burn out. If you want people to stay on the website, then fighting social media burnout should be a goal of social media websites. I have a few theories to get there, but UX is so focused on UX person to user, that it’ missing a large part of the User Experience: Interaction with other users. And User Experience can shape that.
Oh and FACEBOOK STOP BEING RACIST. That’s my UX hot tip for you. Make a big announcement about how you’ve changed the algorithm. Also, don’t allow foreign bots to do credit card fraud.
I believe the way forward for UX is to try to create empathy and common ground, but I get rich people, programmers’ egos (a joke programmers would get) and UX people these days are more focused on individualism, which BTW, goes against the social part of Social media. So the next level would actually be leaning into the community and social parts of social media by looking at social media as tiny governments and societies and then looking at ways to shape that community from the first to get there. But then you’d need social scientists of different types to get you there.
