…So… I figured… I have opinions. I have this space. I could put my opinions on this space. So instead of cluttering whatever social media platform I use or worse: Ranting about some obscure subject to some poor uninterested soul in person… I can drag my soapbox over here and vomit whatever comes to mind into the cold dark void of the internet.
Yes I know, I’m starting off my rambling here a tad bit controversial, but I’m just as likely to drone on about the history of the spork. I’m treating this space as a sort of ‘junk drawer’ of whatever thoughts come to mind. Feel free to ignore and look at the pretty pictures. I’m also rethinking how I illustrate my comic. As crazy pathetic as it appears from the outside: Driving Nowhere is my focus and it’s important to me that I keep chipping away at this thing…
Anyway back to my soapbox:
Threading the Needle of Social Media
I’m social media neutral, so I generally just ignore whatever drama is going on and go wherever the people are. Me whining about whatever dumb shit some billionaire says solves nothing. I’ll leave when the platform starts to suck. And believe me, I never wanted Twitter to fail. I joined super early (thanks Diggnation for the tip in early 2008 lol) and landed the handle @kevinmoulton. I actually had a few people offer me money for it. 😂
Twitter or “X” has seemingly been infested by bots recently (which is hilariously ironic considering the claims before…) and half the feed basically shoves certain individuals down your throat through an incompetent algorithm that makes hiding/muting irrelevant. I’m not a conspiracy theorist, it’s just obvious that half of the feed Twitter/X spits out is actively pushing controversial figures to rage bait users. And it works. Well. Worked. Until a competitor showed up that appears to do everything better for advertisers and the casual user.
Instagram, for all its faults, has a good algorithm. Your feed eventually settles into just the sorta things you want to see. And yes, that includes products you may be interested in. Now don’t get me wrong.. I’m sure I gave permission to Zuck’s AI to track my sleep and listen to my inner thoughts through 5G microchips snuck into my McNuggets by the deep state collaborator Ronald McDonald already, but if that means I don’t have to see some douchebag rant about qanon despite repeatedly muting/hiding them… okay. Have you tried the Oreo McFlurry™, it’s pretty good-… wait what was I talking about…? oh right social media.
Same energy towards Threads as me not wanting to know how hot dogs are made. I’m okay pretending everything is great. I don’t need to know the details about acceptable amounts of rat content per hoagie. Keep it pleasant and I’ll happily play along. Similar to there being other food than just hot dogs, there are other websites than Threads/Twitter/X. I can post whatever the hell I want on my website here… if it’s legal in my country. If you truly are afraid of being ‘silenced’, then you’re either overly paranoid or using social media in a dumbass stockholm syndrome way.
And yet… at this point, I feel like I’m in social media limbo. I have zero confidence in “X” and only spend about thirty seconds a day to see what’s “trending” before the nausea of what that platform has become sets in. “Threads” is taking a bizarre amount of time to implement essential features like hashtags/trending/search, and the longer they take to do so the less likely they are to take the easiest W in history. If I was an investor at Meta I’d be SCREAMING at them to be faster. All the other alternatives are either crap or too niche for me to bother. Meh.
In a weird way, I’m kind of enjoying the lack of certainty. It’s almost a return to how the internet was before social media. Back when the expectations of a single general platform weren’t really a thing… Suddenly it’s cool to have your own website again!
If you’re a millennial you already have experience with social media platforms coming and going. I understand this is a new concept to generations before and after us… but I assure you that everything will be okay.
And if you simply cannot part with that tinfoil hat… get a VPN. Don’t put any one platform/publisher/journalist/pundit/celebrity on a pedestal—even people you like.
Hell, don’t put ME on a pedestal–
–…what am I doing. I can probably make money grifting frightened people desperate for answers from a confident asshole… uhhh. Send me cash and I’ll tell you what to think. You like that? Bitch. The voices in your head are real.
-K
