As a media & cultural studies graduate and former-journalist-turned-product-manager, I've long had a love-hate relationship with media on the Internet.

I've been what you could call “very online” since the peak times of forums and AOL Instant Messenger; I've launched, forgotten and deleted countless blogs and newsletters, from Blogspot to Substack, and have had a presence on most networks since we started talking about them as social (remember Friends Reunited, anyone?).

I sunk a ton of time and effort into building a “personal brand” on Twitter before Elon Musk killed it (and I came to the realisation that it had all been about virtue-signalling anyway) and I've found myself falling into Threads as my new habitual boredom killer.

In terms of the value social media adds to my life, though, it feels like it's been decreasing significantly. The early days of Twitter were anarchic and exciting, but the algorithmically organised feeds that reflect our own thoughts, opinions and biases back at us are becoming boring.

Om Malick recently published a post about social media intermittent fasting, and I thought I'd try the same, for very similar reasons:

Anyway, why am I thinking about “fasting” from social media? Or rather all of “media”? It’s because social media is an “engagement” game driven by “dunking” and derision. Even people I respect and listen to have started to sound tinny. Most of us aren’t self-aware enough to realize that the more we speak, the less we say.

With Twitter (and more recently LinkedIn), I found myself posting for the sake of it to “keep the algorithm happy”, mostly saying the same things over and over again in slightly different ways. In hindsight, what I probably should've been doing was putting more effort into longer form content on this blog–it's this that will become the evergreen stuff, not my old social media posts.

On an episode of Peter Yang's podcast, Nat Eliason talked about the need to optimise for the most durable format of work, which is either articles or videos. What you do elsewhere should only be to serve your main platform. It can be easy to win on social media and build an audience, but if you don't do anything with it, what's the point?

When it comes to creating content, the whole Elon Musk takeover catastrophe with Twitter has reinforced the idea that you should play in your own playground, not someone else's. Building an audience on an owned platform is really building it on sand. While you'll get nowhere near as much reach, you'll be much better served publishing to your own self-hosted blog or newsletter. Even platforms like Substack and Beehiiv aren't really “yours”, however much they try to convince you otherwise.

The next question, then, is about content consumption. Is there enough value in social media content to make it worth engaging with?

A couple of years ago my answer would have been a very definite 'yes'. As a fledgling product leader, I got a huge amount of signal from industry leaders via Twitter. My Readwise is still full of highlighted threads from people like Shreyas Doshi. Nowadays, though, my social feeds are mostly noise and rehashed content from elsewhere.

In a recent Guardian article, James Hall talks about the exodus from X to Threads and why it's actually pretty dull hanging out on Meta's new platform:

The forces behind switching, though, are very much those pushing people away from X, rather than the attraction of the hot new social network that is Threads. “Threads has some great things about it, not least that it is linked to Instagram, which is probably the most useful social media platform around,” Sanghera says. “But not enough of the people I love are on it … I hope this will change. Or maybe I’m just getting closer to the time of quitting social media altogether.

My personal experience has been pretty similar. The OG Tech Threads scene was vibrant and exciting, but that's faded now. On Twitter, there was a hyper-engaged product management community, but on Threads it's mostly established thought leaders reposting old Twitter posts and LinkedIn content.

Obviously, I'm also not a fan of the trolling, fascism and conspiracy theorising that has come to dominate X. I put a lot of effort into keeping that sort of content out of my feed when there was other stuff worth coming back for, but I've now given up on Twitter entirely.

This recent video essay from Joan Westenberg gives a really good account of the state of free speech platforms.

When it comes to content consumption, I'd much rather curate my own personal feed than let someone else' algorithm do it for me. More than a decade on, I'm still gutted about the death of Google Reader, but I'm living with it.

I subscribe liberally to newsletters and blogs and throw them all into Readwise Reader. I gave up reading the news during the pandemic in favour of in-depth, thought-provoking editorial to help me make sense of what's going on in the world.

I very much agree with this intro to an article from Farnham Street on why paying attention to news media is a waste of time:

Our obsession with staying informed often backfires. We consume hours of news, believing it makes us knowledgeable. Yet paradoxically, the more news we consume, the less informed we become. This constant influx of information hinders our ability to think long-term and see the bigger picture.

I'm starting to feel the same about social media.

Does that mean I'm going to delete all of my accounts, throw away my iPhone and become some sort of digital hermit? Of course not. But I'm going to be much more intentional about how I engage with online content.

I'm going to move the bulk of my writing back to this blog and revive my Farcaster account for short-form stuff. LinkedIn's still important, but I've got no interest in becoming an influencer. I want my brand to built on rocks, not dust.

#riffs #socialmedia

My last (now deleted) post on this site was about how I was heading back to Twitter after initially abandoning my account in the wake of Elon Musk's takeover.

I'll admit I tried, but it's been hard to get excited about posting content to a platform that’s being torn apart by the whims of its extraordinarily rich owner.

Which got me thinking about why I even care about social media in the first place.

I’ve had a social-media-site-formerly-known-as-Twitter account since 2008, and it’s played a crucial part in my growth and development as a product manager and leader over the last decade.

When I became a product manager, I was the first and only PM at the company I worked for and had no one to turn to for support, guidance and mentorship. If I was going to stand any chance of succeeding, I needed to find some people to learn from, and fast.

I tried LinkedIn, but it never really chimed with me. Twitter, on other hand, was perfect. I’d used Twitter in my previous capacity as a music journalist to connect with artists and their PR agencies so using it to connect with product managers and tech people was an easy step.

But what started as a way to build a product management network I could call on for support soon evolved into a personal branding mission.

Why?

I think the biggest reason was imposter syndrome. I’d never been a product manager before and had no one to compare myself against to know if I was doing a good job.

But having 20,000 people following me on Twitter made me feel like I knew what I was talking about. The people liking and retweeting my content couldn’t be wrong, could they? I was telling myself I was tweeting to help and teach my fellow product managers, but really I was doing it for self-validation.

In her last blog post before she died, Hachyderm founder Kris Nova made some similar observations:

We have lost our prerogative to enact change. We aren’t using social media to drive action. We are using it to farm a false sense of worth. To cast stones at anyone who foolishly stumbles into the latest virtue-trap. Petty nuance has replaced bold hope.

But using social media to create a sense of self-worth isn't fulfilling. Later on in her post, Nova has these observations:

Broadcasting virtue to the world will never provide internal fulfilment regardless of how true it may be. Virtue signalling is effective in shifting public perception, but remains powerless in shifting an internal self-image.

You can’t tweet your way to self-respect.

Social media has provided a mass platform for extraordinary volumes of external engagement. However it has robbed us of the most critical dialogue, our dialogue with ourselves.

As well as robbing us of our internal dialogue, social media is also impacting our creativity. We might all be calling ourselves content creators, but when we're creating for social media we're really creating for the algorithms that get us our dopamine hits of likes and comments.

YouTuber Casey Neistadt talks about how social media affects creativity in a podcast with Rich Roll:

When influence is valued above creativity, craft is supplanted by self-marketing. Creativity is replaced by serving algorithms. And art is dead.

Maybe it's not all doom and gloom, though.

The disintegration of Twitter (no, Elon; I'm never going to call it X) has kickstarted a social media power shift. People who have no idea what federated content is all about have now heard of Mastodon, and Threads has rocketed to 130m users on the back of its feelgood antithesis to Twitter's hell-scape.

According to Rolling Stone, the Internet is about to get weird again. And one of the places it's already starting to get weird is social media:

A generation ago, we saw early social networks like LiveJournal and Xanga and Black Planet and Friendster and many others come and go, each finding their own specific audience and focus. For those who remember a time in the last century when things were less homogenous, and different geographic regions might have their own distinct music scenes or culinary traditions, it’s easy to understand the appeal of an online equivalent to different, connected neighborhoods that each have their own vibe. While this new, more diffuse set of social networks sometimes requires a little more tinkering to get started, they epitomize the complexity and multiplicity of the weirder and more open web that’s flourishing today.

The idea of global social networks where everyone can “build a brand” is starting to feel a bit outdated. This isn't about broadcasting your own voice to millions of people, it's about finding a community of like-minded weirdos you can have fun with online.

If you can let go of your ego, stop virtue-signalling, and forget about trying to be influencer, social media still has an incredible power to bring people together. It doesn't matter how niche your interests are, you can connect with people all over the world who share the same.

It feels like early Internet-style communities are coming back in a big way across platforms like Discord and Slack.

Just look at what the amazing Eleonor Rose is doing with Tech Threads.

What do you think?

Is the age of personal branding and audience building over? What does the future look like for our online personas?

#riffs #socialmedia