Category Archives: Deep Thoughts

I think…therefore I’m dangerous.

My Growing Dissatisfaction with Social Media

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I start to think long and hard about my involvement in social media and whether it’s worth the time I spend on it. Maybe you should, too.

Back in the mid 2000s, I was at the height of my writing career. Churning out at least five books a year with two of them guaranteed bestsellers — well, “bestsellers” by tech book standards, anyway; I wasn’t arguing with my royalty checks — I was on the leading edge of so much end user level stuff. It seemed natural that I should dive into social media, which was so new at the time. I may have had an account on MySpace, but it was Twitter, which I joined in 2007, that really attracted me.

Twitter

Back then, it was possible to view the entire system timeline just by going to Twittr.com. (Yes, in the very early days, there was no E. That was a popular naming trend back then. Drop the E in front of the R. Tumblr is another example.) You’d just go to that home page, read the tweets of people all over the world, and pick out the accounts you wanted to follow. I still follow the first person I followed on Twitter — although I follow him on Mastodon now. (More on that in a moment.)

Twitter became an important part of my lifestyle. It was my “office watercooler,” so to speak. I worked alone at a home office, working long, 12-hour days while on a book project and then taking time off to recharge before the next one. My future wasband either worked from his home office or back on the East Coast or, later, from an office down in the Phoenix area. (In the end, it got to be a sort of “job of the month club” for him, bouncing from one job to another. At the very end, it was hard to keep track.) Since my work was mostly solitary, each time I came up from a highly focused writing session for a brief rest before diving back in, I looked for someone to talk to. If my future wasband was busy or not around, I turned to my Twitter friends.

I started to build real-life friendships with some of these people. I met a surprising number of them in person. In those days, I was still traveling a bit for work and would make a point of meeting up with ones who lived at my work destination. Coffee. Lunch. Whatever. These people were folks I could chat with online during the day, cutting a bit of the loneliness out of my workday. We chatted about all kinds of things, from the weather and photography to travel and cooking. Just about anything. (That’s one of the benefits of being a polymath: you can find something to talk about with almost anyone.)

Also, pretty early on, when I was still producing video content for Lynda.com (not LinkedIn Learning), I wrote the very first video courses — or training material at all — about using Twitter. I think I revised that course two times before they pulled it away from me and handed it to in-house authors they didn’t have to pay royalties to. (And that wasn’t the only successful course they snatched away from me to bring in-house. They also took my WordPress course, which was a real money-maker for me for several years. I guess you can see why I won’t develop courses for them anymore.)

Facebook

I also hopped onto Facebook around the same time, although my use of that service didn’t pick up until around 2010. I didn’t like it quite as much. It seemed juvenile. People posting sometimes idiotic, sometimes misleading memes created by others. There are only so many cat pictures a person can look at in a day. Not many original thoughts being shared. Actually, not much of anything that could be considered a “thought.” It also upset me to learn that several real-world friends and family members appeared to have Nazi leanings. Do I really need to know that? Sometimes ignorance really is bliss.

And then there was the time my sister, a life-long Republican, posted a pro-Democrat sentiment on her Facebook wall. My mother, in her infinite wisdom, had the nerve to lecture my sister, right there on Facebook for everyone to see. My sister deleted my mother’s comment and stopped talking to her for a while. I just blocked my mother. Who needs to worry about shit like that?

LinkedIn

I might have hopped on LinkedIn before Facebook. In the beginning, LinkedIn looked like a serious social networking website where I might actually make connections to people who could move my careers forward. (Yes, back then I had two active careers: writing and flying helicopters.) But I never had any success making solid professional contacts there and couldn’t see any reason to duplicate personal content I was already sharing on other social media. And then the spam began; it got to the point that every time I connected to LinkedIn, the only new content directed to me was spam from people claiming to know someone I barely knew or had heard of, trying to sell me on their services.

In fact, sometime between 2010 and 2014, I started to realize that actively participating in three social media sites — Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn — was taking a lot of time and effort. More than I wanted to give. LinkedIn was mostly abandoned; I killed the account completely when the spam started arriving in my email inbox and I couldn’t seem to shut it off.

Instagram, TikTok, others

Fortunately, I never got sucked into Instagram, like so many other folks have, although I think I did set up at least once account. Again, I felt my hands were already full with the social media I “had” to be on. I did not want to lose more hours of my day building a presence somewhere else.

Ditto for TikTok — most of the content I’ve seen there is amateurish, juvenile, or both. I think TikTok is the perfect platform for today’s vapid population of low attention span, gullible people. I do believe China is (or will be) using it to sway popular opinion. It won’t surprise me at all if it works. Anyone willing to waste hours of their day on the kind of crap the algorithm serves them — no matter how “good” that algorithm is at predicting what people like — is already being led around by a leash.

Social Media and the Publishing World

Anyway, my publishers were thrilled that I had a social media presence. That presence was enhanced quite a bit when I earned a “verified” checkmark on my Twitter account. (Back in the day, verified meant that they’d checked your identity and you were who they said you were. Twitter only performed this service for people with a certain level of fame, which I’d achieved at the time through my writing. Heck, for a while I even had a Wikipedia page.)

Keep in mind, this is still before the word influencer began being used. Authors at my level weren’t influencers yet — and I don’t think I ever was one. But readers — potential and otherwise — could find us online and be “friends” with us. We could post about our work and people who followed us could learn about it. All without costing the publishers a single cent of their advertising budgets. All the work fell to the authors and it sometimes was quite a bit of work.

And this is how things remain today in the publishing world. Part of the author evaluation process is an examination of the author’s social media reach and content. It’s crazy because it forces authors to build an online presence that takes them away from their actual work. It also limits what an author can say on social media — one unpopular tweet can land an author in seriously hot water. (And I’m sure I could find at least six good examples of this, but since I’m writing this in the middle of the California desert with no cell signal, I can’t look now.)

2015 to 2022

Let’s fast-forward to the mid 2010s. By this point, I was pretty much addicted to participation in social media, including Twitter and Facebook. (I’d mostly given up on LinkedIn by then.)

My writing career had wound down — who buys computer how-to books these days? — and my flying career had taken off (no pun intended). I was happily divorced, living in a home I had built to my specifications on 10 acres of view property in Washington state. I was exploring new hobbies like beekeeping and, later, silversmithing. I had a great garden. I had a little jet boat I’d take out on the Columbia River. I had real-life friends who lived nearby in addition to my social media friends.

The need to keep my publishers happy by maintaining a social media presence had pretty much faded away. But still, I was spending hours every day with my nose in my phone or iPad, scrolling through Twitter and Facebook, clicking Like buttons and Retweet buttons and replying to posts I had something to say about.

It was around then that I started to realize that Facebook wasn’t showing me all of the posts by all of the people I followed. It was showing me a selection of them. If I went to the person’s wall — do they still call it that? — I would see what they’d posted, but I had no patience to do that for everyone I wanted to keep up with.

The posts that seemed to come up the most were political memes. Holy crap! How many hateful, usually misleading memes are out there? Are people so freaking stupid that they can’t comprehend a thought unless it’s 25 words or less in big type on a picture?

And then there were the ads. They never seemed to stop. But when they started showing me ads related to things I’d searched for on Google, I completely wigged out. Facebook was tracking my activity across the Internet and using that info to display advertisements for things it thought I might like. This had to stop.

In the meantime, Twitter grew exponentially and became the platform of choice for the news media to quote. Not a day went by when a television newscast didn’t include at least one tweet.

Understanding the Algorithm

Filterworld Book Cover

If you’re curious about how the algorithm used by social media companies affects what you see and how you feel about it, you really ought to check out Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture by Kyle Chayka. This book takes an extremely detailed look at how algorithms are used to addict us to social media and then manipulate us when we’re there. It’s full of real-life stories as examples.

I “read” it in audiobook format on a long drive and was really struck by a lot of things it covered, mostly because I’ve already seen examples in my own life and social media use. It has made me glad I’ve gotten off of algorithm-based social media platforms but has also made me think hard about the time I spend online.

And then I noticed that tweets weren’t appearing in the reverse chronological order I loved. And that tweets were missing. Twitter, like Facebook, was employing an algorithm that determined what it would show me and what order that content would appear in. Among ads. I found myself repeatedly going into settings to revert back to the chronological timeline of all the tweets by people I followed.

In the perfectly coined word by Cory Doctorow, social media — all social media — was becoming enshittified. After getting us addicted to their platforms, they were adding crappy “features” no one wanted to display advertising, change opinions, and collect information about us that they could sell to third parties. You know what they say: nothing is free. If you’re using a free service, maybe you’re the product they’re selling to someone else.

I knew what was going on and I didn’t want to be part of it. Something had to give.

After staying off Facebook for a whole year, I decided to delete my account. The hardest part about it was not losing touch with the few real friends I had there. It was knowing that the hours I’d spent participating on the service, giving them content that they might or might not show to the people who followed me, was time ultimately wasted. All that content would be deleted. Gone for good. (At least I hope so.)

I was down to just one social media account: Twitter.

2022 and Beyond

My love affair — fueled, in part by addiction — for Twitter soured considerably when the Space Karen, Elon Musk, bought it. It didn’t take long for him to try to monetize it by allowing people to pay for a “verified” check mark and trying to force those of us who already had one to pay up to keep it. I elected not to pay and found myself suddenly unverified. I was no longer who I said I was?

Me on Mastodon
My current profile on Mastodon.

I saw the way things were going — although I admit I never expected it to get as bad as it did. I set up an account on Mastodon, an open source platform that networks servers around the world, very much like the old Fidonet network my BBS was part of in the mid 1990s. Over time, I weaned myself off of Twitter and onto Mastodon. I fully expected it to meet my “watercooler” needs, bringing me a handful of friends I could chat with online no matter where I was.

Mastodon reminded me of Twitter when I first joined. No algorithm. Posts appear in reverse chronological order. I see every toot by everyone I follow — unless, of course, I blocked certain words or phrases with filters. I currently use filters extensively on Mastodon to block out as much political content as possible. I don’t need to follow politics on social media, where memes and desperate pleas attached to article links fill our minds with so much oversimplified crap.

When I learned my Twitter content was being used to feed AI systems, I wanted my 150,000+ tweets off Twitter. I paid TweetDeleter to do the job for me. Due to constraints on the Twitter platform, it took two months.

I set up Mastodon to automatically delete toots after a year. I had realized that nothing I shared online was so important that it needed to be kept forever. Life is fleeting, social media life is even more fleeting.

And this is where I am now:

  • I still have my Twitter account. I have to hold onto the user name so no one else gets it and tries to impersonate me. (Yes, it has happened before.) But I rarely look at it and, if you looked at it now, it would tell you to find me on Mastodon.
  • I participate throughout the day every day on Mastodon. Am I addicted? Sadly, I believe so.

My Current State of Dissatisfaction

And that brings me to the point of this post.

You see, even though I believe that Mastodon is my best option for participating in social media — keeping in mind that my solitary lifestyle gives me a need for the always attended “watercooler” for chatting with others — I’m finding myself less and less satisfied with it. Simply said, I don’t think it’s meeting my real need, which is thoughtful or amusing conversation.

If I wanted a distraction, I’d look at YouTube or do a crossword puzzle. Or, for Pete’s sake, work on one of my hobbies. (Did I mention that I recently started linocut and bookbinding? It never ends.)

But it’s not just distraction I want. I want meaningful conversation with intelligent people who don’t get bent out of shape if you don’t fully agree with everything they toot. People who aren’t sucked into current events so deeply that all they can do is whine about the current political landscape and share idiotic memes. People who can share a joke or provide insight about something I mentioned or share their own interesting experiences. People who aren’t so focused on the illusion of being a better human that all they can do is toot about the latest catastrophe or outrage that should make us sad or angry or frustrated and boost the toots of every out-of-luck user begging for money. People who don’t hate.

Am I getting that on Mastodon? Yes, to a certain extent. I fine-tune the accounts I follow daily, cutting out the ones who toot things I don’t want to see and turning off boosts for the ones who share everything they like, regardless of its more universal appeal. (The theory these people cling to is that they’re doing the original posters a favor by sharing instead of liking since there’s no algorithm to give them exposure. What they don’t realize is that they become one of thousands of algorithms, and that by sharing nearly everything, they’re filling our feeds with too much stuff.

I can count on two hands the accounts I interact with — keeping in mind that the only thing I want from social media is interaction. The rest is a steady stream of photographs that may or may not have been taken by the person who originally posted it. (I recently blocked the Pixelfed instance and that really cut back on the flood of photos. Enough remain.) And don’t get me started on the holier-than-thou mavens who find it necessary to tell us all how to toot and include alt text and use hashtags. I tell people how to mute and block people like that. ;-)

In general, however, social media is not serving me what I want to be served. It’s not filling the socialization gap in my life that’s inherent with living or traveling alone in a relatively remote area. And that’s got me wondering why I waste so much time on it.

The Solution

The solution is easy:

  • Cut back on social media use. I’ve tried before but will try again to limit my access to social media to 7 PM to 7 AM. In other words, no scrolling during the day. I’m also going to try to limit all access to less than one hour a day.
  • Continue to fine-tune the list of people I follow to dump the ones who share stuff I don’t care about and don’t interact with me and replace them with more interesting people. (I’ve been doing that a lot lately.)
  • Turn off boosts (like a retweet or share) for the people who share a lot of crap I don’t want to see.
  • Continue to fine-tune my filters to block out content I don’t want to see. These days, it’s pretty much anything to do with politics, war, gender and race issues, gaming, and programming. I figure that I already see just a fraction of what the people I follow post because of my extensive filtering. That’s fine with me.

While I don’t think any of these things will make my participation in social media more satisfying, I do believe that it’ll help break my addiction (because of less access) and help keep it from getting any more disappointing than it actually is.

The next step, of course, is dropping out of this last social media platform and staying off social media completely. But I don’t think I’m quite ready for that yet.

In the meantime, what do you think about your participation in social media? Is it giving you everything you want to need? Are you satisfied? Do you feel as if you’re using your social media time productively or wasting it?

Another New Year, Simple Resolutions

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I look back at the year that just ended and forward into the year just beginning.

As I get older, I’m spending a lot more time thinking about the past and the future. I thought I’d take a moment to jot down some of my thoughts as we change calendars and start a new year.

Goodbye 2024

AGLCA
I’m not a member of this organization, which seems to exist primarily to separate Great Loop cruisers and wannabes from their money. I got the flag for free and flew it to identify myself as a Looper to others; not many realized I hung it upside down.

I’ve been thinking a bit about the year that just ended — as most of us probably do around New Year’s Day. It was my first full year of “retirement” (whatever that is in my life), a year when I completed a handful of personal achievements to move me forward in my life.

The biggest of these was the completion of my Great Loop cruise, a non-event that occurred on August 12, 2024 in Chicago, IL when I cruised past the entrance to the Chicago River and into DuSable Harbor. It was the culmination of about 16 months of cruising, mostly solo, over the course of 22 months in the boat that members of my family (who I now realize never really knew me very well) claimed I’d never use.

Do It Now at Walburg
One of my favorite anchorages last winter was just off the ICW in Georgia.

In the 8,300+ nautical miles I traveled on all kinds of waterways — rivers, lakes (including three Great Lakes) , bays, gulfs, canals, the ICW, and the Atlantic Ocean — I really honed my skills as a mostly solo boat captain. That served me very well in late September, when those skills were recognized and I was offered a job as a powerboat instructor for single and twin engine boats up to 50 feet in length. I took two classes to get the additional certifications I needed (in addition to my USCG captain’s license, which I got in 2023). I start that work later this year.

(I could write a whole blog post about how my hobbies and interests have turned into paying work — and even careers — throughout my life, but I’ll save that for another day.)

I put my silversmithing work pretty much on hold during 2024, although I did get a few jewelry classes in at Gallery One. I also managed to sell some jewelry to a new wholesale account on Bald Head Island in North Carolina. (Be sure to check out the Silver Peddler for my work if you’re ever out there.)

I did start a new hobby — like I needed one — bookbinding. This combines my love of addiction to paper with my love of books and writing. I’m just starting to get the hang of it now. I find the stitching of text blocks to be strangely soothing and rewarding. I think a lot of my friends will be getting books as gifts in the months and maybe years to come.

Dad and Me
My stepmom took this photo of my dad and me at their house in Florida last winter. At the time, my dad was 84 and working full time at Home Depot.

I also reconnected with my dad after so many years of him just being a background figure in my life. This actually started in 2023, when I first cruised to his Florida home in my boat on my way north along the Great Loop route. I stopped there again twice in late 2023 and then again in early 2024. It was a pleasure to be with a family member who wasn’t judging me or trying to get me to do what they thought I should do. A family member who seemed genuinely proud of who I am and what I’ve achieved. Sadly, I lost my dad to a combination of illnesses in September. He was 85. I need to blog a bit about that, but I’m not quite ready.

Realizations

I realized a few things about my extensive traveling over the past two years.

First, even after spending more than half my time traveling, I still love to travel. There’s something very appealing to me about every day having the potential to be very different from the day before it. I love seeing new things and meeting new people. I love the challenge of plotting a course — whether it’s on a boat or in a car — and seeing where it takes me beyond just the expected geography. Of seeing how it helps me learn and grow as a person.

But, at the same time, I really do love my home and enjoy its comforts. It’s nice to have a washer, dryer, dishwasher, soaking tub, and unlimited water, electricity, and high speed Internet. I love the views and the privacy and the peace. I missed my garden and the chickens I had to give away. It’s easy to see why so many people would rather just stay home than explore beyond that, where things might not be as easy or as comfortable. But after just weeks at home starting in October, I was aching to get out again.

Home
I admit it: near the end of my Great Loop cruise, I was a little bit homesick.

Other things I realized:

  • I spend entirely too much time on social media. I’m only on Mastodon these days — an algorithm-free Twitter-like system with a much higher percentage of smart, socially conscious people than you’d find on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. That has fueled one of my two tiny resolutions: no browsing social media between 6 AM and 6 PM. I’m tired of so much of my time being sucked away. I want to be more productive.
  • I am losing focus of the things that matter to me. Those things are mostly my writing and other creative endeavors. I blame time wasted on social media for that. But I also blame myself for being so easily distracted. It’s another thing I need to work on in this new year.
  • I’m getting old. I’ve actually been realizing this bit by bit over time, but now it seems to be on my mind more. Feeling out of shape, losing the strength I had just 10 years ago when I was building my home. It’s harder to do some of the things I used to do with ease. Part of that is letting myself get heavier again; so much energy is wasted just moving my body around! Another part is simply not being as physically active as I was. That’s another thing I need to address in the new year. But another part is the fact that my friends are starting to die off or get seriously ill. I’m not the only one aging. Time is short for all of us.

Looking Forward to 2025

The completion of my Great Loop cruise — which had been a personal goal for a few years — left me without a goal or direction. I have some ideas of what I want to do in the next stage of my life and have taken a few steps toward those things. Using my boat captain credentials to teach people how to drive boats is just one part of that. Taking a break from long-term cruising and putting my boat into a charter fleet so it can earn me some money while being ready for me to cruise when it’s not booked is another. And yes, I even started a new business to manage both of those boat-related endeavors.

At the Beach with my Pups
Here’s a rare selfie of me sitting on the sand with my pups at Marineland’s beach.

But I think I’d also like to return to the northeast to do some cruising in New York and Canada. I just don’t want to do it in my current boat. I want to upsize. And I want to take others along to see what it’s like. To share the joy I feel when I cruise across a smooth body of water on a perfect day, or pull into a marina at a brand new destination, or drop anchor near a deserted beach.

And I think I’d like to spend my winters in Arizona, where I can look out the window and see desert hillsides studded with saguaro cacti, mesquite, and palo verde. Where I can feel the sun on my skin in December and January. That means selling my house — I know the folly of owning more than one home — which means downsizing. It also means finding the place that’s right for me. I think I have just one more move left in me so I need to make it count. And I know how hard it’s going to be to find a place that comes close to the near perfection of what I have now, someplace I can move to without regrets.

In the meantime, I need to finish a few projects I started that are related to the Great Loop trip. The biggest is the blog that has too many gaps in the account of the trip. That blog will eventually become a book — my first in nearly 10 years. That’s the kind of project I’d like to get done before the boating season starts again.

I’m Not Your Support Person

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Just because my blog addresses one of your problems doesn’t mean I’m willing to spend time giving you more help or advice than what you find here.

The other day, I got an email and three texts from a fellow maker. He sells on Etsy and has had a bunch of problems with them, all of which he listed in his email message. He had read the post I wrote last year about why I left Etsy and seemed to think I would be his go-to source for help finding an alternative for his niche market handmade items.

I saw the email and got the gist of it after reading just a few lines. It was early evening — unlike too many other folks, I don’t sit with notifications turned on and respond to every bing emitted by my phone. Email, in fact, is one of the worst ways to reach me because I hate checking it. So I figured I’d give it a closer look in the morning.

Text Messages
Here are the initial three messages. I did get the email he’s referring to. I just don’t drop everything to answer emails from strangers. Does anyone?

I’m not much better with texts, which is the next way he chose to reach out. He sent three of them.

That got me kind of annoyed. Yes, I wrote a blog post about why I left Etsy. And I believe that every creator of quality merchandise should do the same. (I won’t repeat why here. Read the post.) But just because I left Etsy and wrote about it doesn’t mean I’m anyone’s source for one-on-one support for Etsy dissatisfaction.

Deja Vu All Over Again

It’s just like when I wrote computer how-to books for a living. Someone would buy one of my books for about $20 — of which I’d be lucky to see $1 of income — and they’d automatically assume that I would answer all of their questions regarding the topic of the book. I cannot tell you how many email messages and phone calls I got in the early 2000s. That’s why the Contact page on my blog says this, right at the top of the page:

Support and Frequently Asked Questions

I no longer provide support for my books, articles, Web site, or anything else by email, contact form, U.S. mail, or telephone. There are no exceptions to this rule. I simply cannot provide one-on-one support for my work — especially work that is no longer in print.

Note that it includes “Web site” and “anything else.” This person used the form on that page without bothering to read what was right on the top.

Unfair Expectations

More Text Messages
Here’s the first round of responses. When he came back with more nastiness this morning, I responded and then deleted the thread.

Rather than just delete the email message and text messages — as, in hindsight, I really think I should have — I answered him honestly, trying to be gentle about it. But he got snippy and sarcastic. When I told him that I’ve been dealing with requests for help for the past 40 years — okay, maybe just 30 — he came back with more nastiness and told me I should give up blogging.

Oh really? Being a blogger means you’ll help any schmuck who reads your words and wants personalized assistance?

I told him that after blogging for more than 20 years that wasn’t likely.

I also told him that he needs an attitude adjustment and he needs to stop expecting strangers to help him with his problems. (I wish I still had the actual text I sent, but I deleted the whole exchange right after sending that last one and, for once, Apple has actually removed it from Messages on all of my devices. Go figure.) I wasn’t being nice anymore. I was being blunt. I wanted this guy to go away and I really don’t give a damn if he likes me or not.

But that’s my point of view on the issue. Yes, I wrote about it. I wrote 2600 words about it. That’s all I have to say on this matter in a public forum. My blog does not exist as a gateway to using me for support. It’s all of the support I am willing to give, all packaged up in individual blog posts.

Solve Your Own Problems

And that brings me to this, which I see as a major problem in today’s world: no one wants to do their homework anymore. Everyone would rather just get all the answers from someone else, even if that person is a stranger.

Like me, this guy has become dissatisfied with Etsy. Well, Etsy isn’t the only place to sell. There’s Shopify and some maker co-op that the folks on Mastodon keep pushing and the solution I went with: setting up a shop with my Square account. A Google search for “where can I sell my homemade widgets” will get him started on possible solutions. Reading reviews and blog posts and forum posts about those solutions can help him learn the pros and cons of them — so he can pick the one that’s right for him and his business.

Expecting a perfect stranger to take him by the hand in a phone call and walk him through the process of finding his perfect solution is unrealistic.

I have a full life and lots of things to take up my time. (Including, apparently, ranting about situations like this in my blog.) I’m running three small businesses by myself and trying to bring in some extra income in early retirement, before taking social security payments. I should be working on my Great Loop book or making jewelry right now. (I hope to do both with the rest of my day.)

Maybe our text exchange will be a wakeup call for him.

Or maybe it won’t.