- Expressing support for marriage as being exclusively between one man and one woman.
- Doubting the official narrative of global warming as being settled science.
- Posting against sexual education of children.
- Expressing support for nationalistic ideas over globalism.
Oh these are just a few I'm sure there is more. And we all know that once it is out there, heck even starting to type something and then changing your mind, on a lot of sites as you type things are captured. All this stuff is stored. I'm not sure how well it is sorted yet, but as artificial intelligence capabilities grow one day all this data can be parsed and a profile of each individual can be assembled, if it isn't already happening to some degree already. Those profiles I actually believe already exist both in the national security world and the corporate world. But for now most of us live in countries that still pay at least homage to the idea that citizens still have at least some sort of freedom to express themselves.
There is the whole other topic here of nerfing, throttling, sock puppets, tread milling, shadow banning, and all the various games social media companies that are mostly run by young leftist leaning people now are doing to keep mainly conservative ideas squashed. But I'm leaving that for now except for what I call tread milling. Tread milling is when a person things they are posting to a large following on the various social media platforms, but really most of their followers are "bots"...not the kind of bots that antagonize, but the type of bots that look like like minded people who share similar views who like and repost your content. Real followers are slowly stripped away, and they are replaced by these type of bots. And a person's post are algorithmically depreciated away so that real followers of a persons content don't see their post on timelines, but the bots cheerfully "see" them and give a person the dopamine boost of having information they shared be liked and reposted, even though in reality less and less people original poster wants the post to be seen by actually see them. I think this is going on more than people think. It keeps people engaged on social media platforms who have some sort of monetization scheme going on so they want to keep non-conformist there and posting, and the platforms can do so while essentially quarantining secretly people who do not conform to the new global ideology that just strangely enough almost the entire tech sector seem to subscribe to. More on that possibly another time.
Why do I bring this up? It is all about return on investment and risk analysis. I spend a lot of time on social media. Why? I like to be informed. To be honest I don't get a lot of information from social media except for maybe two people that send me stuff. Just cruising through my timelines at this point it is mostly people posting things I've already read or just things that I agree with that I don't necessarily need to see all the time. Every day I learn a few things by browsing social media timelines, but very rarely is it information of high value to me. I spend my time on social media pushing information. But I think that is about to come to an end, at least on the platforms I'm currently using. Why?
- That whole treadmill / back-filling thing I have a sense I'm a victim of. Real people that I can reach are growing fewer and fewer because of it.
- shadow banning and algorithmic nerfing is taking it's toll on both information I see and who sees information I share.
- It is a natural progression on social media for people to gain and want to gain more followers. Most people once they get beyond a certain point, even if they like your content and regardless of the games the programmers play behind the scenes to stop your content from being seen, simply won't see your content anymore because your content is competing with 1000's of other content providers your followers now follow. Your content is literally infocided, burried in an ever growing see of information of which you become a smaller and smaller part.
- Addictive nature of social media. Let's face it, most of us on there all that time are addicted, but by the ability to access information (hunting) and getting positive feedback for information we share. We like making a difference, but it is getting harder and harder for our information to be seen. Being addicted to something that has a diminishing value and potentially greater risk over time isn't a good thing.
- And the whole rope to hang thing. I know my post are pretty innocuous, but I do post what I consider to be the truth on certain subjects that go directly against that progressive semi-official world view. Future employers will and are looking at your social media accounts, and if they see things that are against the semi-official world view they might fear trouble in the work place as this semi-official world view is becoming more and more supported by various legal frameworks, that a few "wrong" post might cause an employer to pass.
- Researching is becoming less productive. I like to research things, and that probably will not change. But adjusting my research to go deep, not so much worried about flinging links, will for me perhaps give me better understanding of things that I want to understand. To be honest, for my purposes, I've already solved in my mind how the world works. There is a God, He loves us, but we are fallen beings. That God sent Jesus, God in the form of a man, the Son of God, to live a perfectly sinful life and then offer himself as a sacrifice for our sins, blowing the door way for anyone from our fallen humanity that wants to get saved the ability to do so. It isn't about our righteousness anymore, it is about Jesus's. Good thing too as none of us are righteous enough to please a Holy God. God loved us anyways. He made a way. But we have enemies, Satan and a host of fallen angels, and our own corrupt sinful nature. Our enemies desires play out in our world, causing all sorts of problems. Don't understand some of the weirdness that people do and how our politicians act? It is all explainable to me anyway as the playing out of the conflict between God and goodness and Satan and our fallen flesh. I get it. I liked to share information that subtly lead people to this understanding and sometimes I am not so subtle about it. After awhile constantly learning about what goes on behind the scenes is unproductive. I get the patterns. I no longer feel I need to know every detail. A large part of my research was on the details, and that research now a days is better done by others.
- Everyone seems to want to preach their ideology now, which is fine, I preach mine, but now if you don't see everything exactly the same it seems more and more people now label you as an enemy. Sometimes I call out fellow Christians for posting about "leaders" that I think are really wolves. That is almost always not-well received even though evidence to support my argument is easily found. Sometimes I point out that not every group who is pushing information that seems good is on your team (Q I'm talking about you), that sometimes agendas are being played out that are very manipulate on people. I think at times forces that appear good but are not have used me in their agendas. I don't like that, and I don't like that people are closing their minds. People might think 80% like you but you disagree with them on one point and instantly you go in the adversary box. That gets old.
- It seems it is harder to make real connections. In the early years of social media platforms I could connect with really interesting people that I normally could not connect with via other means. That is still possible, but getting harder.
- I travel. Sometimes I travel near nations that I brazenly critique. In the future that could lead me to having problems.
- Lastly, the big one for me, is time. I'm a techie, and I have a great job. But even though it is awesome, it is lacking something. Something that makes me want a new job and new challenges. Plus tech for me has always been about putting food on the table. It is something that I have moments of enjoyment with, but those joyful moments are being more and more replaced by the mundane. I don't know if it is my situation or if I'm approaching a stage in life where I need to do something different. I need to figure that out and I need to do it quickly as the great job that I have will go away fairly soon, and while I'm there I need to be better for them. I need to embrace more tech, learn it, master it, and decide where to go with it, if anywhere. That is going to take time. There aren't too many areas that I can suck time from now a days. Social media and researching non-tech things is one huge pot of time that I can suck from. So I'm going to have to do it.
As much as I hate the direction the leadership of many of the social media platforms have taken, I am thankful that for awhile they gave me a voice. And that voice did have an effect. So did yours. I'm grateful for the connections I made via social media. I've enjoyed meeting people (in a virtual sense) that social media platforms enabled me to meet. But since social media platforms are nerfing me, back-filling me, are presenting my data to those who do not have my best interest at heart, addicting me, I'm depreciating you. You have made the time I spend on your platforms both less interesting to me and dangerous I have to depreciate you. Twitter, you are the biggest offender. Thus the end of the year I will no longer post regularly there. I have about 2000 followers, and I want to witness Jesus to most of them before I go inactive. I'd delete you completely from my life, and might still chose to do so in the future, but during breaking events I still might find you useful. Thanks for the past, but not the future you have created on your platforms. We've both changed, it isn't good bye but we aren't hang out friends anymore.
I do think sharing and gathering information is a thing I will always do, but just not on the big social media platforms as they exists now. Exploring other options.
I do think sharing and gathering information is a thing I will always do, but just not on the big social media platforms as they exists now. Exploring other options.
No comments:
Post a Comment