Unsocial Media

I am being driven mad by social media. How to resolve what irks me is an issue I haven’t entirely got to grips with. I’m not sure there is a perfect solution. I suspect that quite a lot of what needs resolving is within me, rather than on a media platform, but that’s another post entirely.

I am not too bothered by the same things that seem to upset other people. Algorithms and bubbles, perverts and spammers, it’s all grist to the mill. I am automatically suspicious of anything that seems too good to be true. I don’t click on any adverts or do any quizzes that ask me my children’s names or numbers that might be in my bank account. I don’t believe I’m going to win a free caravan or that if I pass on the equivalent of an old school chain letter that Mark Zuckerberg is going to give me a million dollars. Nothing that asks you to do any of this shit is ever ‘worth a try’. I approach it all with the firm belief that everything online is a scam or bollocks and everything else is photoshopped.

As for the grifters, catfishers and perverts, the thing that annoys me most about them is that they always start their messages: ‘Hello Dear’. I don’t know why it gives me the rage, but it always does. I’d take a thousand photos of badly lit penises over one ‘Hello Dear’ any day of the week.

Other than that, they are just so staggeringly bland, I stand more chance of being bored to death than wooed. There can’t be that many war veteran, heart surgeons in the world, surely? The accompanying thumbnails of bullet headed, rugged jawed heroes clutching the star spangled banner are enough to make me toss up whether to change the password on my banking app first or just dash straight to the chemist for something to cure vaginal dryness.

I’ve all but left Twitter. Ever since Elon improved it, it has been virtually unworkable. Before he got his greedy, incompetent mitts on it, I’d say it was my favourite social media platform. Now it’s just a lot of unpleasant noise where I seem unable to actually see the people I choose to follow in my feed because it thinks what it curates for me is better. What it thinks I like is clearly not being influenced by anybody I follow, anything I actually like or any algorithm my usage has generated. Last time I went on it I reported the first three tweets it showed me for hate speech, blocked a load of TERFS and saw more hardcore porn in ten minutes than in the previous thirty years of my life. It was an experience.

I would like to make a plea to the penis photographers and porn uploaders of the world based on my sadly, extensive exposure to what I fondly term ‘this shite’. If you’re going to do this stuff, please, for my sake, invest in better lighting and some decent bedlinen. Watching someone drilling away in the gloom on floral sprigged, crumpled polyester with mis-matched pillow cases and a sagging headboard is hardly the stuff erotic dreams are made of.

Instagram is now my favourite way to consume social media. It actually shows me things I want to see most of the time and even its targeted ads bear some vague resemblance to my life. It isn’t perfect, but it’s tolerable and until someone inevitably ruins it, it’s where I mostly hang out.

Facebook is another story. Even though Facebook now own Instagram, it’s impossible to state how annoying Facebook is by comparison, although I’ll give it my best shot.

I think the mistake Zuckerberg made with Facebook was trying to keep everyone on it by stealing other ideas and bolting them onto Facebook rather than through innovating new stuff or improving what was already there. Facebook purports to be a Swiss Army knife, but when you try to use it, you realise that it’s one your dad bought cheap off that bloke in the pub and it’s never been near nor by Switzerland in its life. It doesn’t even have that thing for getting stones out of horses’ hooves. Is there any point going on once you’ve discovered that’s missing?

Facebook used to be where the party was at. Now the party is fourteen clicks deep in the dark web on a platform you only know exists if your age has a ‘teen’ in it and you still get homework. Anything cool that’s happening is happening as far away from your Facebook feed as you can get without throwing the internet out of the window and becoming a doomsday prepper.

Facebook is now the exclusive domain of the middle aged, silver surfers, pyramid schemes and SME businesses who spend their days shouting at each other about the brilliance of Tropic skincare even though everyone who wants it has it and everyone who doesn’t would rather cut their own throat than come to your fucking party, Jan.

And no, I don’t want to listen to your podcast. I cannot stress this enough. If you are in business and you are thinking of starting a podcast - DON’T YOU FUCKING DARE. For the love of everything holy, step away from the microphone. You are doing yourself no favours. Nobody, but nobody wants to hear about adventures in accounting from the mouths of Steve and Jean with their special guest, Edina, who will be sharing some genuinely hilarious stories about succession planning.

They met Edina at a networking conference they found through a Facebook ad. She was such a great motivational speaker. Who even knew accounting could be that funny? Her podcast - Counting your Blessings - well, that’s what inspired Steve and Jean to start theirs, because God knows, the world needs another amateur podcast about sums.

So that’s a lot of what’s wrong with Facebook. Then there are the suggested posts and targeted ads, which, much in the manner of Twitter, seem to be taken from the algorithm of someone as unlike me as it’s possible to get. Could they be any more useless? I am an active user of a Facebook group for my local area, so why would I need to join the Dorking Residents Page? I’ve even tried clicking the ‘I’m not interested in this’ button. That’s when it showed me stuff to do in Cardiff. Yesterday I moved further afield with the suggestion that I might want to join a group about Americans who enjoy posting about the places they unfurl Confederate flags.

They seemed nice. I nearly joined just so I could suggest a few places to put their flags, but I’m trying to give up online trolling because I enjoy it too much.

The rest, and this is very much my own problem, is people who you friended who you can’t now unfriend but have literally nothing in common with and who insist on being excessively chatty. I have a list of things I hate that these people post.

Of course I do.

First place on my shit list is reserved for people who do what I call ‘vague booking’. These are the people who have perpetual beef with everyone and who like to talk about it without actually talking about it. Posts like: ‘Can life actually get any harder?’ or ‘So pissed off right now (you know who you are)’ and ‘I can’t believe that just happened to me’.

Christ alive, I know more than most that sometimes there are things you would like to talk about but you can’t and you just need to blow off steam once in a while. It’s not that that offends me, it’s the deliberate vagueness which seems to be solely for the purpose of getting as many people as possible to write; ‘u ok hun?’ in the comments. With these kind of posts I would rather cut my own head off with a spoon than ask.

Then there’s the stuff that’s basically chain letters for the modern age. ‘Post this if you have lost someone to cancer. If you don’t post, I’ll know that you hope everyone you love dies of cancer and that you’re cruel and heartless.’ That kind of thing. Into this category I also cast this type of post: ‘I’m having a friend clear out. If you don’t post in the comments section about where we first met, I’ll know that you have always secretly hated me and we can never be friends.’ I never, ever respond to these and sadly, most people who post this stuff never actually unfriend me afterwards, which is a shame.

There’s the: ‘I’m leaving Facebook,’ posts, where you know that within 24 hours they will be back, posting as much shite as ever, denying they ever said they were leaving. These type of people seem to have quite a lot of crossover with the ‘This is the worst day of my life but I’m not talking about it except all the time,’ people.

Then there’s the people who are what I call the ‘Live, Laugh, Love,’ people. The ‘You don’t have to be mad to work here but it helps,’ sort of people. If there’s a cutesy meme in comic sans with a wee me and some Disney emojis they are all fucking over it. These posts make me feel like a cross between Wednesday Addams and Charlie Manson. Even though I like people of an optimistic disposition, these kinds of posts take me to the dark place every time.

So why do I stay?

I stay because I have some genuinely lovely friends on there, who make all the shit worthwhile. I stay because I am trying to be a better person and accept that if the ‘Prosecco O’Clock’ people are having a lovely time, maybe I need to lighten up and accept that it’s none of my fucking business how people enjoy themselves. I stay because I run a CAMHS group for parents that seems to be helping people and in a sector where that’s rare, I think it’s important to stick around. I stay because I’ve done all the things that annoy me, except hard core porn and joining the Dorking appreciation society, and perhaps I need to learn to lighten up.

I stay because I can’t announce I’m leaving and then sneak back in to see what’s going on. That would be the worst, and I don’t know how to cancel myself.