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Mar. 3rd, 2015 12:26 am
Social Media
On a previous night, a close friend called me. During our talk, he asked “what the deal was” with myself and social networks. I had left Twitter, Ello, and many other sites, settling on only Facebook as my sole social media site.
Social sites do not sit well with me, and the forced social features seen on so many websites tend to turn me away from them rather quickly. This is because I am not a fan of the extreme levels of negativity and hatred found in such places. I find that it simply causes me to become depressed when I surround myself with that sort of content. I am empathic, so emotions can affect me more than most.
With Facebook, I am given tools which allow me to mute posts, removing them from the news feed so that I do not have to view them. After the site learns of my habits with likes and mutes, it begins filtering out content that I do not wish to see. This allows me to keep my emotions under control while I use the site.
Blogs do not have this issue for me. I can easily ignore posts that I do not like, and while sites like DreamWidth allow for things such as friends-only posts, I can still subscribe to authenticated RSS feeds in many cases to receive updates. Unlike Twitter, I am not forced to mute or remove someone from a friend or follow list to stop seeing such posts. I can also easily keep up with blog posts, where as streams such as Twitter can be nearly impossible to keep up with when someone posts hundreds of times or more a day, and the clutter of such a timeline is simply too much for me.
Admittedly, I am one of the early bloggers, starting long ago when the term had barely begun circulating. Moblogging (mobile blogging) had not even been created, and the best smartphone was a Blackberry. I my first “blog” was a small PHP script updating a specially-crafted plain text file. In many ways, I am rather biased in that regard.
Social sites do not sit well with me, and the forced social features seen on so many websites tend to turn me away from them rather quickly. This is because I am not a fan of the extreme levels of negativity and hatred found in such places. I find that it simply causes me to become depressed when I surround myself with that sort of content. I am empathic, so emotions can affect me more than most.
With Facebook, I am given tools which allow me to mute posts, removing them from the news feed so that I do not have to view them. After the site learns of my habits with likes and mutes, it begins filtering out content that I do not wish to see. This allows me to keep my emotions under control while I use the site.
Blogs do not have this issue for me. I can easily ignore posts that I do not like, and while sites like DreamWidth allow for things such as friends-only posts, I can still subscribe to authenticated RSS feeds in many cases to receive updates. Unlike Twitter, I am not forced to mute or remove someone from a friend or follow list to stop seeing such posts. I can also easily keep up with blog posts, where as streams such as Twitter can be nearly impossible to keep up with when someone posts hundreds of times or more a day, and the clutter of such a timeline is simply too much for me.
Admittedly, I am one of the early bloggers, starting long ago when the term had barely begun circulating. Moblogging (mobile blogging) had not even been created, and the best smartphone was a Blackberry. I my first “blog” was a small PHP script updating a specially-crafted plain text file. In many ways, I am rather biased in that regard.
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