What is the Work of Social Media in this Country Anyway?
In my life, I have joined relatively few social media sites, nor was I on many of the precursors to social media like forums or usegroups or any of that stuff. This year, the total moved to three.
Facebook - I joined back in 2009. It's even got its own tag, and as I said back in 2015: "if used for the actual purpose of communicating with your friends, it can be pretty great". Most people don't seem to use it for that, and it makes them miserable.
LiveJournal - Also with its own tag, my primary internet home since 2003. From about 2003-2009 I used it for a lot of ephemera and some longer posts. After 2009, the brief stuff mostly moved over to Facebook (so did most of my LJ friends) and this became much more of an actual journal.
LinkedIn - I joined this a few months ago, in large part because my company has not been immune to the Great Resignation and I needed a way to keep in touch with my coworkers who were leaving without letting them into my more personal networks.
I have occasionally been briefly tempted to join other social media networks, but I treat them more or less like my friend Todd (formerly jackofmany) told me he deals with ideas potential new tattoos. He throws them in a file cabinet and comes back in a year, and if it still appeals to him, he gets the tattoo. So far, none of the other social media networks have risen to that level for me.
Only a few others have even come close. I was tempted by Twitter for years, but I realized I'd mostly only use it to follow a bunch of baseball people (writers and players), and really I can just read Susan Slusser directly. I've also thought about actually joining the forums on Athletics Nation instead of lurking, but I waste enough time on there during the season (and honestly, out of the season) so I've never quite pulled the trigger in the nearly ten years I've hung out there. The recent Photo-A-Day effort and the realization that many of my friends are almost exclusively on Instagram has made that a bit more appealing, but so far I've resisted.
Even on the networks I have joined, my scope has never been large. On LiveJournal, the only person I ever friended who I did not know in person at least a little bit was bart_calendar, and I ended up visiting him in France. On Facebook, the only two people I am friends with who I haven't met in person are one of my wife's friends (she was a witness at our Zoom wedding) and one of my wife's cousins (also a wedding attendee), both of whom I certainly would have met by now if we'd had a non-pandemic wedding.
I'm not trying to imply that using social networks to connect with people you've never met in person is an invalid use. It's just not a use that I am interested in. I already have a large group of friends with common interests, and don't feel the need to grow it that given I don't see the people I like enough already. I'm not some kind of aspiring artist or super-connector or someone with a fanbase, so I can be comparatively discerning on who I add or follow.
For years, my rule for Facebook has been "if I visited your town and wouldn't feel guilty if I wasn't able to see you, I don't need to be friends with you." This helpfully let me eliminate the vast majority of the people I went to high school with (with only occasional regrets) and quite a few folks from college. For coworkers, I established the "if I haven't gone out and done something social with you outside a work event, I don't need to be friends with you on social media." Both rules helped draw some useful boundaries. I did allow a few Cleveland-area folks who I wasn't necessarily close to into the cut if they consistently showed me useful stuff, but that list is tiny. Similarly, I have only Liked a bare minimum of groups - basically it's the Oakland A's and that's it! This has helped make Facebook useful to me by (mostly) only showing me things about people I care about, although that does ebb and flow as Facebook changes things.
I used to regularly cut people from the Facebook friend list, but weirdly the birthday card project has made that harder. It feels a bit dickish to cut someone after you've sent them birthday cards for a few years! I have cut a few people who clearly never update any more and who never respond to messages (especially messages when I was near them geographically), figuring that's a clear sign that they're not interested, but that's not many.
There was a time when I might have usefully applied all of these rules for LiveJournal and cut the list of people I follow by a lot, but that time passed long ago. Since basically everyone I'm friends with has stopped posting other than a very occasional post from kylecassidy, there doesn't seem to be much point and I haven't really cut anyone since the aftermath of my divorce back in 2011, not that it matters greatly since I have less than 25 locked posts in the last 18 years. I will say that there a few people on my LiveJournal list who I have only the vaguest memory of at this point, but then if this was an active network that probably wouldn't be the case.
I'm now in the process of trying to figure out my rules for LinkedIn. On the one hand, I intentionally joined it to stay in touch with coworkers who I might not have allowed inside my more personal networks, so I'm going to be a little more relaxed about it. On the other hand I'm certainly getting a lot of requests from coworkers who are no more than a name to me, or who aren't even that. I'm not sure there's value in that, but nor am I sure that there's harm. The people I don't know at all (hello random VP from the company my former team member went to) don't seem valuable at all, so that's easier. Then there's the middle ground - people I know but never liked enough to friend in other areas, or who I actually unfriended along the way.
This would all be easier if there were clear guidelines for LinkedIn, but of course every network is invested in you knowing as many people as possible, so it's not like they are going to make useful suggestions to limit them. As with most things, it all depends on what you are trying to get out of it, and right now all I'm trying to get out of LinkedIn is "a way to reach people I used to work with who I am not otherwise friends with."
Because of my perhaps idiosyncratic approach to social media, I've never hated it or found it depressing or useless like so many other people seem to. I've occasionally spent too much time on it, especially during this pandemic, but I've avoided the worst aspects of it.
Facebook - I joined back in 2009. It's even got its own tag, and as I said back in 2015: "if used for the actual purpose of communicating with your friends, it can be pretty great". Most people don't seem to use it for that, and it makes them miserable.
LiveJournal - Also with its own tag, my primary internet home since 2003. From about 2003-2009 I used it for a lot of ephemera and some longer posts. After 2009, the brief stuff mostly moved over to Facebook (so did most of my LJ friends) and this became much more of an actual journal.
LinkedIn - I joined this a few months ago, in large part because my company has not been immune to the Great Resignation and I needed a way to keep in touch with my coworkers who were leaving without letting them into my more personal networks.
I have occasionally been briefly tempted to join other social media networks, but I treat them more or less like my friend Todd (formerly jackofmany) told me he deals with ideas potential new tattoos. He throws them in a file cabinet and comes back in a year, and if it still appeals to him, he gets the tattoo. So far, none of the other social media networks have risen to that level for me.
Only a few others have even come close. I was tempted by Twitter for years, but I realized I'd mostly only use it to follow a bunch of baseball people (writers and players), and really I can just read Susan Slusser directly. I've also thought about actually joining the forums on Athletics Nation instead of lurking, but I waste enough time on there during the season (and honestly, out of the season) so I've never quite pulled the trigger in the nearly ten years I've hung out there. The recent Photo-A-Day effort and the realization that many of my friends are almost exclusively on Instagram has made that a bit more appealing, but so far I've resisted.
Even on the networks I have joined, my scope has never been large. On LiveJournal, the only person I ever friended who I did not know in person at least a little bit was bart_calendar, and I ended up visiting him in France. On Facebook, the only two people I am friends with who I haven't met in person are one of my wife's friends (she was a witness at our Zoom wedding) and one of my wife's cousins (also a wedding attendee), both of whom I certainly would have met by now if we'd had a non-pandemic wedding.
I'm not trying to imply that using social networks to connect with people you've never met in person is an invalid use. It's just not a use that I am interested in. I already have a large group of friends with common interests, and don't feel the need to grow it that given I don't see the people I like enough already. I'm not some kind of aspiring artist or super-connector or someone with a fanbase, so I can be comparatively discerning on who I add or follow.
For years, my rule for Facebook has been "if I visited your town and wouldn't feel guilty if I wasn't able to see you, I don't need to be friends with you." This helpfully let me eliminate the vast majority of the people I went to high school with (with only occasional regrets) and quite a few folks from college. For coworkers, I established the "if I haven't gone out and done something social with you outside a work event, I don't need to be friends with you on social media." Both rules helped draw some useful boundaries. I did allow a few Cleveland-area folks who I wasn't necessarily close to into the cut if they consistently showed me useful stuff, but that list is tiny. Similarly, I have only Liked a bare minimum of groups - basically it's the Oakland A's and that's it! This has helped make Facebook useful to me by (mostly) only showing me things about people I care about, although that does ebb and flow as Facebook changes things.
I used to regularly cut people from the Facebook friend list, but weirdly the birthday card project has made that harder. It feels a bit dickish to cut someone after you've sent them birthday cards for a few years! I have cut a few people who clearly never update any more and who never respond to messages (especially messages when I was near them geographically), figuring that's a clear sign that they're not interested, but that's not many.
There was a time when I might have usefully applied all of these rules for LiveJournal and cut the list of people I follow by a lot, but that time passed long ago. Since basically everyone I'm friends with has stopped posting other than a very occasional post from kylecassidy, there doesn't seem to be much point and I haven't really cut anyone since the aftermath of my divorce back in 2011, not that it matters greatly since I have less than 25 locked posts in the last 18 years. I will say that there a few people on my LiveJournal list who I have only the vaguest memory of at this point, but then if this was an active network that probably wouldn't be the case.
I'm now in the process of trying to figure out my rules for LinkedIn. On the one hand, I intentionally joined it to stay in touch with coworkers who I might not have allowed inside my more personal networks, so I'm going to be a little more relaxed about it. On the other hand I'm certainly getting a lot of requests from coworkers who are no more than a name to me, or who aren't even that. I'm not sure there's value in that, but nor am I sure that there's harm. The people I don't know at all (hello random VP from the company my former team member went to) don't seem valuable at all, so that's easier. Then there's the middle ground - people I know but never liked enough to friend in other areas, or who I actually unfriended along the way.
This would all be easier if there were clear guidelines for LinkedIn, but of course every network is invested in you knowing as many people as possible, so it's not like they are going to make useful suggestions to limit them. As with most things, it all depends on what you are trying to get out of it, and right now all I'm trying to get out of LinkedIn is "a way to reach people I used to work with who I am not otherwise friends with."
Because of my perhaps idiosyncratic approach to social media, I've never hated it or found it depressing or useless like so many other people seem to. I've occasionally spent too much time on it, especially during this pandemic, but I've avoided the worst aspects of it.