Social Media Truther

Social media sucks. Of course who am I to talk, I'm on it all the time. However when I am on it, I spend most of my time scrolling past garbage.

90% of y Twitter feed is advertising tweets and tech doomsday. 'If you don't learn how to leverage AI your company will fail'. I have carefully crafted my feed hoping to see nerdy Linux, Java, tech, and Drum and Bass posts. I've failed. Why? because Twitter, and other users are trying to get their ads in front of me to make revenue.

Facebook is FAR worse.
There amid fuzzy kittens and cool posts from people I know in meat space are more ads and - worst of all - politics. Sure I agree with some of them, but that's what groups in Facebook are for. Instead politicians and activist groups seed Facebook with posts designed to get people pissed off and share them. So it really is nothing more than a political soapbox. I liken it to a backyard BBQ where most of us just want to hang out and eat burgers, but 'that one guy' keeps spouting off about politics.

IRC with its tightly controlled concept of channels is so much better. You spew politics in #bbq and you're banned.

I wish the social networks people migrated to were open source platforms, monetized by donations or corporate oriented distros (Slack-like). A place that doesn't cull your information or pummel you with ads or push politics on you. A barebones public arena with groups in which most of the interaction occurs. your feed would be a set of group 'modules' that you have full control over. And maybe it's the social network API that's the real product, so you can chose whichever UI you want to view it in.

Companies can try to sell their own implementations of the API if they like, but open source or commercial, it's all the same back end.

Maybe someday.