Yo, it’s rant time baby. Have any of you noticed how bad the major social media platforms have gotten lately? I mean things got a lot worse after the 2016 election, but I feel like the last six months have somehow fallen even further.
For me, it started with Tumblr. Tumblr used to be a place where you would find some ridiculous political/social posts, a bunch of adult posts, and a ton of “toxic fandom”, but also some really funny jokes and some solid art and photography. It was one of my favourite things to scroll, met lots of fun people on there, and found so much great art and nature shots and pretty models and stuff. Tumblr also used to have this big problem of porn bots spamming people, and at the end of 2018 they started to purge all adult content. I thought it would take care of the spambots but the rest of the site would remain the same. What actually happened is any artists who ever drew nsfw stuff got banned, same with any models whoever posted a single nude photo, and any regular/funny account who reposted anything NSFW also disappeared (banned or just left). The spambots kept going. The horrible political posts also keep popping up.
Facebook and twitter have both gotten worse and worse. I’ve noticed a lot less of normal friends sharing about their lives, and a lot more people complaining about politics or sharing really stale/basic memes. Sometimes there will be a funny joke or two, but often it’s like the same stuff over and over. Lots of like “I like dogs more than people” or “I eat chicken tenders/nuggets for every meal”. Its better than the uninformed political stuff but it gets boring fast.
Then there’s instagram. Hoo boy. It used to be my favourite social media. It was just selfies of friends, cute girls, nature pics, good looking food, and a lot of like updates on people’s lives… even if they are like sort of fake to make everyone’s life seem perfect. Then it started to shift. First it was friends using their personal pages to promote their businesses (which I support wholeheartedly), but then it started being more and more friends making business accounts (which is also cool imo). Then after following a few of those, I just started to get tons of companies trying to get me to follow them, to the point where my feed was more business updates than actual social media/friend updates. Then instagram started adding in more and more ads so it’s ads for businesses, ads for friends’ businesses, with an ad from a sponsored company in between. Same with stories. Then I started getting a slew of spambots and catfish types hitting up my dms.
I like social media to scroll through when I’m bored. If I’m waiting for someone or watching tv or something, its really nice to just look at what’s going on with my friends but lately, I’d rather just sit there and literally do nothing at all than look at social media the way it is. Snapchat has been okay but a bit of a ghost town. Reddit is also not too bad but I find a lot of people on Reddit are kind of annoying so I try not to read any of the comments.
Well friends, do you agree with my take on social media? Is there any tricks you know to make these sites a little more bearable? Any new sites that I should check out? Hit the comments dawg
Sheldauntless 