a half-baked rant on social media and social anxiety

2024-12-15 00:28

i don’t know how many people subscribe to my website via my rss feed. there’s theoretically a way to contact me but i don’t quite make it obvious¹. plus it’s just a reality of the modern internet that people are less inclined to interact with something that isn’t immediately interactable.²

of course, there’s a reason why i do this: on a social media platform it’s easy to get ratioed, which is to say that your post generates an order of magnitude more replies; on many social media platforms (like twitter³) such replies tend to be shallow and negative in nature, a less-immediate but arguably more toxic form of the missing dislike button. i think while most posters on twitter were aware of the prospect of becoming the main character, they interacted with the platform without that fear in the background. this to me checks out with the surveillant nature of social media platforms: just like the now-omnipresent CCTV camera, you literally can’t see the people looking at you. unless they decide to act.

anyways, i think that’s why this blog is so barren? unfortunately for a variety of reasons i am very mindful of surveillance and so in exchange for me feeling like i want to speak what’s on my mind i make interaction intentionally difficult and disable any form of tracking.

but this makes it difficult to use the internet as a platform to, you know, talk. i do miss that part of social media, where someone would say something insightful and get me thinking, or if it was just some banter. it was like hanging around at a neighborhood bar in that sense.

i’ve alluded to this but i’ve replaced this online interaction with more talking to people irl. i do feel like this is better for me and more “scalable” (in that it can’t scale) but there’s a whole group of people online which i find hard to talk to now and that’s sad for me. alas…

i’ve noticed that blogs are harder: both in following (adding to my rss reader) as well as interacting. i think there are people i’ve been meaning to follow from my past lives that i haven’t out of pure inertia. i promise one day i’ll get there!