This essay is a response to @gelliottmorris.com's article entitle "You should quit social media for good"https://www.gelliottmorris.com/p/you-should-quit-social-media-for

Morris makes some excellent, and obvious, points about the negatives of social media engagement. But like all such critics, he makes a crucial mistake. When he looks at social media, all he sees are posts about politics and the culture wars. He appears to be totally ignorant of or uninterested in anything else. Given that perspective, then yes, one could make a decent argument for d¹¹úisengagement.

But social media, especially Twitter (before Elon) and, to a lesser extent, Bluesky and Threads, are so very much more.

BREAKING NEWS

Some time in the teens, Twitter became the goto place for breaking news, a role once owned by CNN. Missing cat or dog in your neighborhood? Post it on Twitter. Major fire in a high-rise apartment building? Twitter. Earthquake? Tornado? Tsunami? Twitter. Death of a well-known person? Twitter. You name it and no matter where in the world it happened, you'd learn about it first on Twitter. No other social media site has the international presence that Twitter had. It still serves this purpose to some extent, but nowhere near as uniformly or as well. And no other site has grown enough to take its place.

When Covid struck, I quickly found a community of experts on different aspects of the pandemic, from transmission to how the genome kept changing. When Russia invaded Ukraine, experts on military strategies abounded, but I also found experts on tanks and tires and other "mundane" factors.

SERENDIPITY

One reason I fell in love with Twitter (member since 2009) was the wonderful serendipity it fostered. Follow Person A because she is an expert on Subject A. But she reposts Person B who has Hobby B which also interests you. So you follow Person B. But Person B follows Person C who is an expert on Subject C, a field you'd like to know more about. So you follow Subject C who, of course, follows Person D who has Interest D. And so on and so on and so on. I couldn't being to enumerate how much I've been exposed to that I would never have known existed without this incredible serendipity.

COMMUNITIES

Most critics of social media see nothing but politics and culture wars. But there are thousands of communities, especially on Twitter, on probably every interest and subject under the sun. Fiction (fantasy, sci-fi, romance, modern, ancient, etc.), non-fiction, film, art, archictecture, gardening, bird-watching, the sciences (every possible field), do-it-yourself, museums, sports (every kind including futbol), music (every possible genre), knitting, crocheting, etc., and subgroups within these larger groups. If your social media site gives you tools* for curating your experience, it doesn't matter what the algorithm says, you can create your own little community.

POLITICS AND THE CULTURE WARS

Politics on Twitter became toxic during the 2016 Democratic primary when Hillary supporters were attacked from both the right and the left. Even today, if you want to post something positive about Hillary, or Kamala, on Bluesky you would be wise to turn off replies and reposts.

But, unless you think Fox and the Sinclair stations provide all the news you need, well-curated feeds on a place like Bluesky are important if you want to know what is going on in the world. You should want to know what Congress or your local City Council is doing. You should want to know where ICE and the National Guard have been deployed. If you care about the world, it helps to stay at least marginally aware of what is going on elsewhere, whether that be Italy or Russia, or South Africa, or any other country.

*TOOLS

The best and most important way to take charge of your online experience is to use the tools provided by the sites. AFAIK, Bluesky, Threads and Twitter all let you mute and block as well as create lists or feeds of posters who share your varying interests. Bluesky, in my opinion, has by far the widest arrays of tools for creating an environment you will enjoy. I admit to being upset with those Bluesky users who complain that, for example, the default moderation settings are bad. They immediately assume bad faith on the part of the developers**. They want somebody else to set the parameters of their experience, and if those parameters don't coincide with what they think they should be, the site is "bad". They consider it an imposition to be required to know what the defaults are and to choose how those settings work for them. If you are unable or unwilling to take advantage of the tools provided, you have nobody to blame but yourself.

An early "rule" I learned when I joined Bluesky was to not engage with trolls, to use mute and block freely. I've also learned that there are some hot topics where I hold what I consider to be nuanced opinions that are best left unsaid if I don't want to be blocked or worse. Is this self-censorship? Yes. But avoiding unhappiness on Bluesky as well as at Thanksgiving dinners with family or one's workplace makes this practice a good one. I now use those rules on Twitter which, along with my curated lists, have kept my experience there (on the few times I visit) little different than it was pre-Musk. (Uncurated Twitter is, of course, noxious).

YOUTUBE

I admit to being baffled by Morris's inclusion of YouTube. Over the years, I had rarely used it except for the occasional music or "how-to" videos (necessary because vendors seem to have unofficially delegated instructions to the YouTube crowd). Then K-Pop Demon Hunters arrived, and I wanted to share my experience with others. Sadly, pretty much nobody IRL or on Bluesky shares my joy, so I turned to YouTube and discovered First Reactions by vocal coaches and others. (I may or may not produce a rant about how these work.) Now, I don't know how YouTube's algorithm works, but since fishing for everything I could find on KPDH, I have been introduced to videos about life in Japan and Korea, cats and more cats, exercises for various non-life-threatening problems (anybody else have a bad back or a shin splint that won't go away?), language-learning, calligraphy, piano playing, etc. There are, of course, political videos by liberals I respect. They have, however, pretty much turned me off since the labels they use to describe the videos they post are almost uniformly useless click bait, and they all take forever to get to the point, if there is a point. But, guess what, I do not have to click on them and if I stop clicking on them, I figure YouTube's algorithm will stop presenting them to me. It's a clumsy way to game the algorithm, but it works.

Even if you don't subscribe, you can find old films on YouTube and KDramas! (I found my very favorite one dubbed in Spanish, which is how I first saw it.)

AFIK, YouTube has a very limited set of tools for curating your experience: it seems to rely primarily on subscriptions and search. But why should I give up on a site that shows me a video of k.d. lang singing Hallelujah or documentaries about the Edmund Fitzgerald?

CONCLUSION

My social media device is a tablet which lives in a silo along with my smartphone. The latter is more than a little annoying when some sites I must visit insist that an id/password plus email are not sufficient to prove I am who I say I am. They must also send me a text code & give me 60 seconds to input it. We are beginning to live in a world where it is assumed that everybody has a smartphone tethered to their bodies.

I've made two major changes in my social media usage: I no longer keep a tab on my work computer open to a media site, and the media site where I spend 96% of my time is Bluesky. Second, although I've created a number of lists and subscribe to many feeds, I've also begun to use the notification feature on Bluesky so I don't miss posts from VIPs. These changes help to reduce doomscrolling.

There is no question that social media prioritizes the worst possible behavior with respect to politics and the culture wars. But we are not slaves to the algorithms. We have four major sites we can choose from (Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads and Twitter). The protocol Bluesky relies on can support multiple apps such as BlackSky and anisota.net. It is unlikely that any of these will be perfect or even near-perfect for most users. But we do have choices, we do have tools to control our experience on these platforms. If we choose to engage with trolls, if we choose to let the owner decide what we see, and we don't like the experience, we have, quite frankly, nobody to blame but ourselves.

If one wants to completely disengage from unpleasantness, one should also stop watching the morning TV shows, CNN, Fox, and MSNOW. And avoid Thanksgiving with family.

Morris apparently thinks we should throw the baby out with the bathwater. Instead, we should learn how to use the tools we are given and take responsibility for our own experiences.

**I've been on Bluesky for more than two years and call me naive but I trust the developers. I know they have difficult decisions to make and I will not always agree with those decisions. But they are not evil. They are trying to build something new that will give us a better option than simply starting over on another site. I am hoping that they succeed.