Goodbye commercial social media
That holdout, of all things, was LinkedIn. I held on to it for reasons that felt like an obligation, but I never really got anything out of it.
And, well, I think it's the lack of authenticity. The platform clearly wants you to engage, but on the platform's terms. More engagement, more eyeballs, more ad revenue. You can even have AI help write the post but — as is often the case with tools like that — if AI writes it, does it need to be written? Does it need to be read?
I dropped off of Facebook before our first child was born and we kindly asked family and friends not to share photos of them on any of Meta's platforms. I've been happy with this decision since I made it and Meta's recent changes and abdication of any sort of meaningful responsibility for the discourse on its platform only affirmed this feeling. How do you save money and appease the new administration and save money? You make the users do their own moderation. Will it become a hellscape like X? Probably. Does Meta care? Not as long as people are looking at ads.
Why would I engage with a platform that's facilitating the spread of a conspiracy theory about an even where countless homes have been lost and damage has been caused? Community notes won't fix that behavior, they won't even begin to address that behavior.
