Why I’m leaving social media(and you should too!).

Before I start this essay, I think I should share a few things about myself. I am 28 at the writing of this post. During my childhood, internet was limited and mostly available to me when I stayed at my dad’s workplace in the summer. Yet I loved the thing – so much information, games, music, jokes and other timewasters! When I was a bit more mature the internet was finally in my house. It was slow as shit but did what it was supposed to – it connected me with people. Over forums, chats and video games, I learned many things about the world and myself. I refused to join social media for a looooooong time. In my country, facebook is the most popular of them all. That’s when I became hooked on the dopamine ‘feed’ it provided. Yet in adulthood, after suffering a pretty painful accident I started changing many things in my life. I noticed that various things I do serve only to hurt me. That I do them out of a habit or I believe that I ‘need’ them, despite no actual need being present. I cut them out of my life and never looked back. I became happier and more productive. And I believe other people are also being hurt by the same things that hurt me. The biggest and worst of them being modern social media.
With this essay, I hope to illustrate how these services are harmful to their users and what could be changed about them. Many people probably won’t agree with me, or believe this to only be a “me problem”, that I am the one using these places wrong. Yet still, I want to share my thoughts. Fuck social media – let’s be happy again.
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For the longest time, human contact was mostly done in person. We would meet, chat, say our goodbyes and leave. With constant progress of our technology, we found new methods of doing the same things:
   • Through letter writing, we could convey our words back and forth with one or more people. The letter could be read out in public if its message was important to be shared with a wider audience – like announcements of new laws in a feudal kingdom.
   • Through telegraph, shorter messages could be sent much faster and over longer distances.
   • Through phones, the messages became voiced
   • Then came the internet…
Imagine a scene like this: A quiet green park situated right next to a calm pond. There are many groups in this park. A food truck owner advertises his product. Two old ladies talk about their doctors visits and grandchildren. Some fishermen wait for a catch to reel in. A man feeds the ducks swimming in the pond. Two lovers kiss, hidden behind a tree. Children of all ages play around.
This is the internet, or at least how it used to be. Part of one whole, but separated into sections. Children would have their websites, old ladies would have theirs. Fishermen would have a forum for fishing, lovers a dating site. Advertisements would be present but easy to ignore. All had their places, nothing was generalized… but now…
A brown hole filled with mud and trampled grass. Ten trucks are parked nearby and men in casual clothing randomly start pleasant conversations which soon turn to ‘sponsorships’ and ‘promotions’ of the brands they enslaved themselves to. A horde of old ladies scream at everyone, including each other over conspiracy theories, vaccines, hatred of younger generations and anything at all. The fishermen have long since left. A bunch of degenerates bathe in the mud, play ‘pranks’ and expose themselves to random people. The lovers have started having sex right there on the grass. While the children mingle with all of these groups and more, growing up into unhealthy adults.
...it’s a shame what happened to my favorite park.
This park, of course is the modern internet. Used to love the place, really. As a child, I spent hours playing silly flash games. As a teen I was discovering music and styles I liked, played MMOs and chatted with people on thematic forums and messaging apps. As an adult, it all began going to shit.
Some business nerds in suits saw how well forums were doing and decided “I’m gonna make it worse!”. Thus began the era of ‘social media’. These media feature a heavy focus on a ‘feed’. Its an endless scroll of unrelated content, provided to you in an order established through arbitrary means. If you are a fisherman who likes to listen to metal and look at pictures of his lover, you will have a random assortment of music, fishes, pictures and adverts. You will also be posting your content for all your ‘friends’ or ‘followers’ to see. What if one of them is a fisherman but hates metal music? He might block you after being presented with a feed of your metal content instead of posts about poles and reels. Or he might get presented with an assortment of things he loves and things he hates about you, thus filling him with mixed feelings. Back when forums were a thing, you would have them split into categories. So your fishing friend would naturally only visit the fishing section and avoid the ‘offtopic>music>metal’ section. He probably wouldn’t even know what music you listened to and that your interests don’t match! And when he did learn, both of you would have bonded so much over fish that such superficial differences wouldn’t hurt your friendship. 
But a ‘feed’ forces your friends heads into a through full of both tasty morsels and the most disgusting slop ever. Now that I mention it, the whole ‘feed’ concept sounds dystopian. It sounds like a term relating to farm animals rather than humans.
But back to the topic. Many would argue that a solution to problems I mentioned would be ‘groups’. Sure, some social medias have groups. Facebook for example. You can have a group where people give car advice and a group where old ladies share recipes. But posts of these groups are regurgitated onto your feed. You might get a funny picture of a cat, followed by a picture of a mangled feline someone is trying to find a vet for in a group ‘cat rescue [YOUR LOCATION]’.
This doesn’t make for a pleasant experience. It is miserable and the constant both hidden and overt advertisements don’t help.
Some sites even have ‘open groups’ whose content can be reposted to feeds of all the sheep who follow you. I really don’t want to see DoktorWanker666, whom I follow for his game reviews to share images from a group with pictures of car accidents… but he has an option to. He probably will do it one day – incentivized by the hormonal reward he’ll feel after posting a photo of some ‘road rager’ getting ‘instant karma’. Some of his friends will laugh too but others won’t see any joy in what they’re seeing.
I definitely wouldn’t. As a victim of an accident I’d get triggered over this being pushed onto my feed. I understand that others have other interests and capacity for finding joy in horrific situations. I don’t want my triggers to ruin Doktor’s fun. If only he could stick to websites specifically catered to this macabre interest… but he can’t. They no longer exist. Everything now is a social media site of some sort, together with some sort of mixed up ‘feed’ containing an algorithmic assortment of awful.
Thus, spaces of various people are forced to clash. Feminists will see radical Christians preaching about female submission. A democrat will see half his friends post republican memes. A conservative will be bombarded with news of drag queens and trans bathrooms. From a quaint little park we transform into a queer little pandemonium. Everyone is at each other’s throats and whichever side currently holds the reins, suppresses content of the other. This isn’t just the problem of mainstream social media – alt media sites like Minds also force their users into conflicts and echo chambers… not to mention how dead they are of actual, worthwhile content.
Some would argue that it is best then to focus on just one thing in your account. But am I, as a person defined by one thing? Am I just a writer? Just a fan of electronic music? Just a cat person? No, I’m all of these and more. Why should I then just become a gimmick account that posts of only one thing and follows only a single topic? Or do I break community guidelines and make multiple accounts to follow multiple topics and never clash or cross over to another?
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I would rather just… not be on there in the first place.
I left facebook a few years ago after coming to a certain realization. Not only am I addicted to browsing that piece of shit website, I also do not like being there. I kept escalating my posts and interactions just to get more ‘reach’ or ‘likes’ but it made me feel awful. At the end of it, I would often try to get banned on purpose and often ENJOYED the thirty day break. This was not healthy.
Like an abusive lover, these sites pulled me back in. I convinced myself I ‘needed’ them – to get in touch with people I know, to meet new ones, to look at cute cats… but that’s not true.
People I knew in real life had my phone number and we were all connected on instant messaging software like discord. People I knew only on the internet usually also shared a server on there or on another platform like guilded. Memes and cute cats were also abundant on there. The structure of such servers allows me to temporarily or permanently mute certain channels within the server – if I don’t like peoples music taste there, I block the music channel. If I don’t like their politics, the political channel gets blocked. But we still talk on general, share memes or post our pets. All without clashes and dumb manufactured drama… together with NO ADS.
I could gush about the positives of these platforms more, but there is still much I want to discuss about the bad ones. Lets go with youtube next. Ah youtube… what a mess you are. I can’t stand how much this website changed, yet its still one of the few platforms I can’t fully leave. Thankfully, I’m just a consumer and not a creator. Yet the changes forced on creators have impacted me too in one way or another. I’m a big fan of true crime content, movie reviews, video essays, news and music. All of these have suffered because of one thing. Money – ‘the root of all evil’. 
I am not some kind of revolutionary who believes that banks should be abolished or anything like that. Yet the constant race for profit only hurts the quality of this website. Advertisers have their own agendas. Many don’t want their ads to be displayed on certain content. Others want their ads to be displayed as far as the eye can see. Some are plain, predatory scams. At the moment of writing, there are many ads, as well as suspiciously strongly upvoted comments pretending to be certain popular creators. These ads would direct you to ‘giveaways’ which are usually just surveys designed to steal your information or lead to shady websites filled with other ads, hungry for your money and attention. Yet creators have no way of choosing which ads they DON’T want displayed under their videos. Are you against unethical practices of a certain corporation? Maybe making a whole series about it? Shame – their ads will be plastered all over your videos.
The more ‘safe’ ad campaigns aren’t any better though. Due to ‘adpocalypses’ and various media uproars, youtube made it easier for advertisers to discriminate against content creators. Google’s algorithm will flag videos as ‘not advertiser friendly’ based on everchanging vague guidelines, bias, fraudulent copyright claims, randomness and more. Of course, a family friendly brand of orange juice wouldn’t want their ads to show on a video showing gruesome war footage… but their ads also won’t show on a video where someone jokingly says ‘fuck Bill Gates’ – after all, that’s profanity! But I’m pretty sure the juice company wouldn’t really mind that. Yet they aren’t provided any ways to narrow down what kind of ‘unfriendly’ content they want to advertise on. They probably wouldn’t want to risk it either – if they ticked a box for ‘slight profanity’ what kind of videos would fall under that category? How would this category change over time? Is it even needed?
Still, these youtubers will do anything to stay on the good side of the platform and censor themselves to the point of becoming incoherent. As I mentioned, I like true crime content. You cannot imagine what kinds of dumb word gymnastics these creators have to do to stay monetized. Some resort to euphemisms to replace words. These usually work the best and don’t take away from the seriousness of the content too much… for a time. At first, ‘suicide’ was an okay word. Then it wasn’t, so people started using ‘killed himself’. Soon, that also wasn’t acceptable so it turned into ‘self deletion’ or ‘did a Kurt Cobain’. It made them sound like they don’t treat the problem seriously and it becomes even worse, since now I’ve noticed some using ‘sewer slide.’… suicide → sewer slide… Ha ha ha… not funny. But forced by the algorithm to earn ad money this way, they have to censor themselves.
They could always use audio and video editing to censor their words though, right? Sure, they could, but that also leads to other problems. The algorithm soon started flagging words that are beeped out. Also words written on the screen instead of said. Also words whispered… so now, people usually completely chop the audio in creative ways, usually in a way that makes the first syllable audible, while the rest is either completely missing and silent or scrambled. You will usually be able to tell that SU[       ] e is suicide or that MuoeardagheR is ‘murder’ from the context of what’s being said. Yet it makes the video less pleasant to watch and might not be as obvious to people with less knowledge of the creator’s language. These methods will probably also not be enough soon.
But these aren’t the only methods for creators to earn money!… yet without being on the good side of youtube, their content will be seen by less people, also hurting these ways of earning money. Not only that, these methods also have their dark sides to consider. 
Lets start with sponsorships. These are usually the same things everywhere. I’m not even gonna mention the name of THAT mobile game – the weird, identical ad read filled with half-truths and meaningless slogans is already playing in my head. How can one creator earn money from this ad, if hundreds of thousands of youtubers also read this identical ad? The market turns saturated and soon either all your viewers bought what you’re trying to sell them or know they don’t want to see this thing shown to them ever again. No matter the product, the problem is the same – too many creators, too few, identical, boring products that everyone either already has or already knows they aren’t gonna buy it. Some of these sponsors are also scammers – either wanting control over a creator, offering him awful rates, or offering the viewers products that are of dubious quality. ‘Japanese steel knives’ made of average steel in china. “Title of a lord” that you “can put on your official documents”, except its all bullshit. Financial cryptocurrency platforms which will crumble as soon as you put your money in.
But even with these crap sponsors you are not secure in your income. As soon as you get into drama, your contract will be void. Hell, some youtubers have a tendency of contacting other creator’s sponsors as a tactic to put down their opponent.
There is also patreon, as well as other sites for fans to give monthly support. If you are large and controversial enough, you will be noticed and dropped by the sites themselves over the most mundane shit, not even done on their website but somewhere else on the internet. Usually though, when facing drama, your viewers whipped into a frenzy by other creators, will be the ones holding your leash and threatening to drop their support.
I won’t even get into copyright and how it ruins the whole youtube space. Companies can automatically claim you over seconds of music, or even block the publication of your video because the clearly fair use, yet negative review somehow is ‘infringing’. Ranting and raving about these corpos is another topic entirely though.
What I wonder when faced with all these disadvantages is ‘why do these people bother’? They tell their followers not to do youtube for money, yet they clearly do everything to stay on the good side of youtube. It gets comical – ‘Welcome back, today we will talk about a gruesome case from virginia. But before we tell you about a K-rack AD[  ]ct who buoirned her child in a microwave, lets listen to a message from our five sponsors!”
Are you really passionate? Or just desperate and unemployable? In this pursuit of various sources of income and the ever-elusive monetization, their content not only loses in quality, but also is a clear source of frustration for them.
Youtube used to be a site where you posted what you liked to post. Even if it was just you at a zoo. Now, people always chase after what the platform, advertisers and consumers want. Monetization of content turned people greedy. Greed turned hobbies into jobs. Jobs killed passion of hobbies.
Maybe not in every scenario. Some creators still hold some passion and don’t hold back in their words or content. But slowly, either a hobbyist gets outshined by a professional, or the hobbyist turns into another clone of a pop creator.
I’d much rather continue writing my short stories, in my own setting, than become another pop creator who spews out fanfictions about k-pop stars kidnapping and raping teenage girls or whatever the hell is selling right now. Sure, it hurts not being seen in this sea of mediocrity but… there is another way.
As I mentioned, I love instant messaging platforms like guilded. On there, I can go to servers for fellow writers to share my stories. Or go to a meme channel of any server and browse the latest memes. Hell, there are even gruesome servers posting war footage straight from the Ukrainian frontline. There is no ads, no sponsors, no crap. Just people with passions, sharing their passions.
I have no idea how to make the rest of the internet like this. How to return the muddy hole into a quaint little pond. But I am not gonna take a mud bath any time soon. Thank you for reading up until this point. Hope you found any of this enlightening. May your time on the internet be calm and pleasant, not a constant ‘feed’ of chaos shoved down your throat.