How do you use social media?

Personally, I do not use it much. I have been forced to use it in a lot of ways in my private life. Parent groups, schools, kids’ activities are all posted to social media.

I never post about my kids. I do sometimes post a picture or a blurb about something from my life. A lot of pet pictures on my accounts. I try to keep personal information off the internet.

For work, I use it a lot to try and publicize things and bring communities together. It has been very useful to do these things, but it is rather limited in a lot of ways that I find irritating. The way algorithms work makes it difficult to find the people that would be interested in what you are posting about. If they do find you, then the platforms themselves make it difficult for them to continue to see you and not try and pass off someone else in your place. It is very frustrating. My work accounts see this happening when I try and follow fellow collaborators. They disappear from my feeds. It is crazy. No amount of trying to correct the algorithm seems to fix it on the user end.

Social media really needs to go back to its roots and stop trying to target users by changing the feeds. Targeting ads would be much better than both targeting ads and messing with algorithms. There is currently an issue on Bluesky with people who follow the pets feeds who are being inundated with posts about people posting about their pets passing.

I feel like this has become one of those free market debates from economics class. The idea being if our algorithms were free to create themselves we would be able to find what we want, but currently it is not. It is managed by corporations who are trying to earn more revenue. In the end, it is a worse experience for the user. It does not matter how good your content is, if the algorithm is set against you.

The internet is a crazy enough place without having people censoring our feeds, which is what is happening when they try to force an algorithm onto us.

The nice things about prompts like these is that I never realized how many opinions and thoughts I have about a subject until I start writing. The process of writing takes you to so many different places.