The Social Media sucks thread

I created a myspace profile when it was big, and a facebook around 2005. I never put a picture on them or really did much of anything with them before I deleted them in 2007, when I left grad school.

When facebook broke wide, I had family members trying to get me to get an account and I just held out until they stopped. When those requests came in, they'd usually come with a "you may know ..." thing that would have multiple unconnected people who I did in fact know, and that freaked me out enough that any thought I might have given to creating one evaporated.

I created a fake facebook profile a few years back solely to transfer my account from one device to another in Marvel Puzzle Quest (which I don't play anymore). It was literally the only way to do it. It's not under my real name, has no friends (except things needed for game saves), and has no information about me at all. I keep that account to do things like browse menus. Despite that, I still would get "you may know..." emails for people I actually knew until I figured out how to disable all notifications.

I don't really do twitter at all, though I've occasionally been directed to something posted on it. I can sort of see the appeal, but not enough to do anything with it.

The rest of the services (instagram, snapchat, whatever) I've never done anything with.

I had a Facebook account for exactly one week back in 2008, at the urging of friends and family. I did not know what to do with it. I never posted anything and just found the whole thing boring and awkward. To this day people still look at me like I have three heads when I tell them I don't have a Facebook. I somewhat enjoyed Twitter for about 8 months, but I followed too many accounts and it got really political to the point where it was bringing me down and started to feel like work to keep up with.

For me, Instagram is where it's at. I like taking pictures and seeing pictures. The accounts I follow are mostly bands/musicians, photographers, breweries, beard models (shut up, it's a thing) and tattoo artists. It's a gallery of my favorite things without a lot of yap-yap going on. However, I rarely post a picture of myself and will quickly un-follow an account if it is a constant stream of selfies. I know what you look like, good grief. Not cool.

Nope. As fantastic as that is, it's just dudes with beards.

It's irritating me how it's virtually impossible to do online dating if you're not on Facebook. I'm terrible at meeting/asking out women IRL so it would be great to at least have that option, but all of the apps that are actually active (Tinder, Bumble, Coffee Meets Bagel, etc) require you to link to your Facebook, which I don't have. OKCupid is an option but the pool of users in my area is minuscule, and Plentyoffish is just god awful.

I do not have a Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or Snapchat. I also Do Not Have A Smartphone.

I am the worst millennial.

"I" might have an obscure Facebook account that "I" use to keep a wary eye on "my" meatosphere associates, and Floyd might have a facebook account that he hasn't posted to in a year or two, and might remember to look at every 3 or 4 months, that is mostly connected to folks from here and TOC. Floyd might also have a rarely used Twitter, and could possibly be susceptible to  Spot.IM flashbacks if he looks at it for very long. 
How do people make any sense out of all that stuff flying by and piling up? Seriously, how are you supposed to parse it?

Floyd sometimes enjoys that feeling of arrogant aloofness expressed by speaking of oneself in the third person. He can be a real jerk that way.

I use facebook for work, and to keep up with a bunch of the clubs I'm involved in. I unfollow people who mostly just 'share' other content, especially if that content is from Breitbart, Fox and other bullshit sources. I use it less now that you have to reset it to 'most recent' every time you log in. Its utility decreases every time they take control of the feed away from users.

I was using Twitter a lot, but it's harder to fact check things from there, and it was giving me ulcers and high blood pressure, so I stopped.

I'm pretty sure you're much happier for it. you're not missing anything.

Two things.

Until recently, I did not have a tumblr, although I do visit several tumblrs frequently. A few weeks ago, a tumblr which tends to host NSFW pictures decided that I couldn't visit unless I had a tumblr account. So, reluctantly, I signed up.

Within an hour, I had a follower. Probably a bot.

I have Facebook. I use it mostly to check in on people I know and see that their children are still alive. I also have a FB page for my side business that I routinely fail to update. Also, Facebook seems to have replaced email, so when a family member wants to communicate with a group, it's pretty much all done there now. Also, it's a good way to get upset every time I'm reminded that my step-dad is kind of racist.

I have Twitter too. I'm not good at tweeting myself but it can be useful sometimes to see what's happening. Although the whole thing has a become a near incomprehensible pile political post that I don't understand since I'm not in the, uh, "woke" twittersphere. I just see incomprehensible posts with know context (see anything with corncobs).

I do like Instagram. But I like photography and it's fairly apolitical.

I guess I have Snapchat too but I don't really understand it. I can send stupid pictures to my 14-year old nephew though. Just to bother him. He's a cool kid.

Uh, I have a Google account, so that means I have Google+, which is a thing that apparently still exists.

I went to one of the first non-Harvard colleges to get Facebook. I thought it was dumb at the time (2004), but I caved and made an account at my friends' urging. I used it fairly regularly up until about January 2013, when one of my friends' boyfriends decided to lecture me on something that was none of his goddamn business to start with and then picked a fight when I told him his critique was neither welcomed nor appreciated. (He's one of those guys who considers it his moral duty to lecture people and his girlfriend, who is one of my oldest online friends, always excuses his rudeness with "well he's Dutch and English is his second language so he can be blunt sometimes and he doesn't mean to be." No, he's a condescending asshole, and he absolutely does mean to be, but whatever. You're the one who has to fuck him, not me.) Out of sheer annoyance with him, I deleted my Facebook, and I haven't reactivated it since then, even though my IRL friends use it to plan social get-togethers and I frequently miss out on things because nobody "remembers" to text me.

I can't get into the email address I used long ago to sign up for Myspace so I can't delete it and I don't remember how to get into the account as it is.

I do have Tumblr and Instagram, which I use fairly frequently.

Instagram for the win, hooray! (not exactly the consensus but I'm declaring it anyway) My sister who is hard to keep in touch with, loves Snapchat. I downloaded it a few months ago and I'm still like "what in the fuck". I think I shall stop trying to understand it.

I avoided Facebook for a while until a former coworker convinced me to join around 2006. Since then it has become my primary means of keeping in touch with most of my computer-savvy family members and a lot of friends.

It has also been responsible for me cutting off contact for good with several former friends over major political arguments, and unfriending my father a few weeks ago for the same thing. I don't miss most of the friends (except one), but the thing with my Dad makes me sad. I still talk to him on the phone anyway, and will probably see him every month or two as usual. (He's become increasingly insufferable, as I have mentioned in the irrational/rational anger threads, ever since Trump ran for president and Dad decided he and Bernie were kindred spirits...and then when Trump won he went full-on Breitbart and InfoWars reposter. The last straw was parroting the alt-right arguments about the Charlottesville protests. I am NOT putting up with that fucking shit!)

And yeah, the attitude Facebook has of "We know what you want to look at better than you do, and we're not even going to give you a Settings option to override it, have fun remembering to choose Most Recent feed every time you look at your page!" infuriates me to no end. I have very nearly deleted my profile several times, but just can't if I want to keep in touch with my family. I have literally found out about special events at stores near me the day after they end because Facebook decided it was more important to fill my feed with my cousin's political posts because I liked a couple of them.