It’s July of 2023, and I am ready to quit social media. Again.
I quit FaceBook in 2019, because I was spending too much time arguing with total strangers. I didn’t like the obsessed, furious person I became when I was on the site. Moreover, I didn’t like the effect FaceBook had on our culture. Social Media in general, and FaceBook specifically, manipulated our emotions and our elections. Me, leaving, wouldn’t solve any of the larger issues, but it might make me less angry and anxious. Ultimately, deciding to leave was hard, but leaving was easy. I don’t miss it at all.
At about that same time, I started spending more time on Instagram. Yeah, yeah, I know: same-same. At least Instagram made it a little harder to argue with total strangers, and once I learned to curate my feed, I really enjoyed scrolling through pictures of yarn, cats, and more yarn. A common criticism of Instagram is that it shows a distorted version of the world, to which our own real-messy lives suffer by comparison. I never had that problem. If an account made me feel icky, I unfollowed. I filled my feed with fat activists, Black artists, and regular people sharing their creative pursuits. All that is great, and I expect that I’ll miss it, if and when I manage to delete my account.
My problem with Instagram is, “the algorithm.” If I could actually see the actual accounts that I actually follow, I might stick around and continue to give Zuck more eyeballs. But no. I see ads. So many ads. And I’m constantly inundated with what I’ll inaccurately call “bots.” Fake accounts follow me every day, which I have to remove and block. I’m tagged in ads for obviously fake companies. I get DMs asking me to represent some product, which again, is obviously fake. All of this is annoying, but then, Instagram tagged ME as a bot, which was really the last straw. I was put into “Instagram Jail” for two weeks, for reasons I’ll never know, without any recourse. One maker I know had the same thing happen to them. Because they relied on Instagram for their business, their solution was to pay to upgrade their account. Which, I’m sorry, is this a protection racket? Is Meta copying their business plans off 1940’s mobsters?
There are theories, of course, as to why I was put in jail. Too many hashtags? Not enough hashtags? Maybe my comments were too similar to each other? Maybe it’s because I like to use emojis? So many theories, no actual information. Which, of course, is the entire Instagram game: trying to figure out “the algorithm.” Post on Tuesdays at 10:am Pacific for best engagement, but don’t post too regularly, because the algorithm doesn’t like that, and it will throttle your posts.
I came to realize this all sounds like an abusive relationship: constantly trying to guess what’s going to make the algorithm happy, and walking on eggshells trying not to make the algorithm angry. I have had enough of that in my life, and I’ll be damned if I’ll stick around for more.
So here we are. Blogging. I’ve never blogged, but I’ve thought about it over the years. I want a place to compile my Beans & Rice research. I want a place to track my knit and crochet projects. If anyone else wants to see these things, I want to be able to share them.
