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November 2024

#Goodbye

If the most painful thing that’s happened to someone was their emotional response to a virtual issue that has zero direct effect on them or anyone they know, then that’s a clear sign that that person is out of touch and should spend less time interacting with unfiltered social media.
You can tell how retarded a person is by whether they have a Bluesky account or not. The wisest individuals operating today have zero social media. The vast majority (I would argue all) of the users on Bluesky migrated from X rather than give up posting their micro-thoughts on the Internet.

I’ve gone through many cycles of news consumption in my life. From reading my father’s discarded Times Colonist newspapers as a child to a decades-long period of news blackout that started with my adolescent descent into my hometown’s underworld, continued with my life in Japan, and ended when I first subscribed to the Wall Street Journal a couple of years ago. When I was involved with Facebook and Twitter from their inception up through my indie game developer salad days, I never used those networks to absorb news. For me it was always just personal posts and photographs. I can’t recall precisely when they became vehicles for delivering actual journalism—and I’m skeptical that they even have—but during my active time there I can say that wasn’t a use case that ever crossed my mind.

I’ve been looking at X for the past month and a half, trying to get a handle on its current state. Due to Elon Musk’s obvious influence in American politics and his active hand in the mindshare of X users (at the minimum) and those user’s wider sphere (at the maximum), I was curious about the usability of the platform and the type of information it would serve me.

It took a week to curate my “For you” feed on X until it stopped feeding me World of Warcraft, OnlyFans women, and livestreamer drama updates. If you’re unsure of how to shape the data yourself, it’s supposed to work by activating the three dots in the top right of any post and selecting “Not interested in this post” followed by selecting “This post isn’t relevant” when the option appears below the promise that “X will use this to make your timeline better”. Through this process I was able to prune all those unwanted posts and before long my “For you” transformed into what I believe is the generic default.

As of today, a month into daily scrolling the feed, the posts are consistently: Elon Musk’s last five to ten tweets first, served in succession with no other content between them other than the occasional ad (ads which are invisible on a blocker-enabled web browser). At first, I thought this was a conspiracy. But prior to my curation the feed hadn’t included any of Musk’s thoughts. I believe this front-loading occurs because he’s the most-followed user on the platform and therefore receives the lion’s share of engagement, and thus the feed is showing me “what’s hot” based on a now empty series of interest tags.

After Musk’s had his say, the posts are typically a mix of the top trending topics. But interleaved with these are posts of human beings murdered or knocked out. I’ve seen more people shot, crushed, and blown up in the last three weeks than in all the previous five decades of my life. And despite my attempts to be “not interested” in their “irrelevance”, the feed doesn’t seem to care.

That’s very disturbing to me.

As far as viability as a news platform goes, I can’t see it. After several years of digesting long-form journalism via WSJ (and I get it, that paper may or may not provide “the truth”—whatever that is—depending on your own biases) trying to extract a detailed worldview from posts on X is more work than it’s worth. The source of most information from X boils down to “trust me, bro”. Even if someone has hyper-curated their feed by only Following specific user accounts, only looking at their “Following” feed will spare them the roiling noise of potential misinformation, surreptitious OnlyFans advertisements, and the clout-shouts from the sea of drowning people who are dying for a beachhead on the titanic cliff face of influencer-dom.

I maintain that using X and similar platforms is irrelevant. It’s a waste of time; it’s designed to be one. I don’t believe the information that’s disseminated there paints an accurate picture of reality. I think the various spheres of influence that orbit those spaces aren’t so much portraying what’s going on in the real world as they are trying to paint pictures of what they wish it was. And then what happens with chronic users is that they end up with this warped duality in their minds as they try to navigate their lives thinking one thing yet experiencing another.

It’s a lose-lose situation.

To that end, I’ve left X (#GoodBye!). I will not create an account on any other social media platform to fill this gap: I think that they’re all horrifying, evil messes. If you were following my X account to receive website updates, I apologize. I’d like to leave Instagram as well, for other reasons, so I’m going to refurbish this site so that it has its own new-content notification system. In the meantime, I’d recommend you subscribe to the CMON1975.com mailing list if you haven’t already.

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Thanks for sticking with me. School’s going well, by the way: I’m on track for an A- in data structures and algorithms, and the semester project (building an interactive fiction website) is all but complete.

See you next month!

2024.11.26

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