The only two things I do anymore that are remotely social media are this board and YouTube. I post comments on YouTube but don’t read replies.
If someone links to a reddit post I will read the post and comments, but I haven’t had a reddit account for a few years. Or Facebook even longer than that.
I just completely lack impulse control on social media. It makes me angrier, more emotionally volatile, and more prone to oversharing, and I will spend hours and hours posting no matter how bad it makes me feel.
For engaging in public text conversations, often with strangers: Besides the Dope, and sometimes Facebook (less than I used to), about once a week I’ll post a comment or a reply in the New York Times crossword column “Wordplay.”
(Using a comments function as a kind of message board is interesting. Ezra Klein recently told of a group of middle schoolers who cleverly got past their parents’ ban on Snapchat, etc., by communicating via some National Public Radio podcast comments section – because surely no one in the world bothers to look at NPR listeners’ comments!)
I also comment on some YouTube videos but usually don’t check for replies, unless I asked a question. I use this forum and a couple others.
Sometimes I search on Reddit (no account), but the site has a huge “hive mind” problem (people are “downvoted” if they deviate from a popular-on-Reddit opinion), and many users are nasty and judgmental by default.
When I go to YouTube, I’m usually either following a link or looking for a music video. I have no clue whether I’m sometimes watching a short. I have no account there.
I have an account on Reddit, because years ago when the snopes boards died some of us tried to keep up message board type discussions there. It didn’t work as that format works very poorly for that purpose, and last I looked (some time ago) that reddit’s basically dead. I go to reddit rarely and usually don’t sign in.
I frequently visit a small number of subreddits (1 most days, 2 or 3 very occasionaly)
(I don’t use it as “social media” - just to answer any questions I know.)
I watch many YT videos - mainly music, comedy and instructional (eg plumbing, DIY,
music related stuff etc.). Some of them are shorts.
Right? My feed appears to be filled with a lot of (I guess you’d call them) Facebook influencers who have a lot of followers; I guess since I cut out most of my personal feed, they’re trying to fill in. It’s glurg.
I have accounts on Facebook, Instagram, Threads (Meta’s Twitter alternative), and Reddit.
I used to be very active on Facebook, posting regularly, until a few years ago. I now post only rarely; I made a half-dozen posts in the last two months, on the heels of my father’s death, and that’s more posts I had made in the previous three years combined. I look at FB every so often, but the signal-to-noise ratio on it is terrible now.
I look at Instagram several times a week, but rarely post there either; my sister and I mostly use it to send fart memes to each other. I occasionally look at Threads, as IG will feature Threads posts (undoubtedly in an effort to get people to use Threads).
I was very active on Reddit (mostly on RPG subreddits) a few years ago. I rarely look at it now.
I didn’t cut my personal feed. I still have hundreds of Facebook friends (unless they’ve all unfriended me) and i am still in a number of Facebook communities. And if i mostly saw posts from those, i might return to Facebook. But i, also, get mostly glurg from people I’ve never heard of. And I’m just not interested in that. Yes, kitten videos are cute, but I’m not really in the market for more meaningless time sinks.
Alas that’s what the Facebook feed has become these days. They decided they’d make more money from doomscrolling than from connecting people. No one sees their friends’ content on their feed anymore. I am reluctantly still on it to keep in touch with shipmates and talk to people in the dog rescue and sailing communities, but I specifically limit my activity to checking a few groups once or twice a day.
I’ve been known to express my impatience with such witticisms as “whenever you have a minute” or “the gas pedal is on the right”, but always when I’m alone in the car. I live in New Jersey - hollering and gesturing at other drivers is a state pastime, but my cautious nature precludes me from participating or encouraging my offspring to do so.
I talk to other drivers all the time. “C’mon buddy, now is the time to merge.” “Would it kill you to use your turn signal?” “If I had known you were going to get in front of me and slow down, I wouldn’t have let you get in front of me in the first place.” “Get off your frickin’ phone!”
It really annoys my wife, and she’ll usually tell me just to calm down. First, I am calm: I’m not angry, I’m just doing the play-by-play. Second, never in our nearly 50 years together has her telling me to calm down ever calmed me down.
Huh. I often say things like, “damn that was close”, or “get off my tail”, or, “go, go, go!”. But only when there’s someone else in the car with me. I’m really talking to my husband about the driver, not talking to the driver.
