#Hey, check this out
In the past several years, I quit Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr. I went back to all of them, usually after a few months off. I either found where they could be useful, or I found that after some time away, these places didn’t hold the same power over my attention.
Why did I go back to any of those places? Well, maybe I have nuclear fomo. Maybe I’m just a little weak to the whole machine. Maybe the little bit that is fun about these places is sometimes enough to suffer the crap. And maybe that’s untrue, but it’s aspirational.
But I also found that these places have become less friendly over time, and I’m definitely not the only person to notice that. As Nicole Dieker writes:
I used to compare it to hanging out in a library with friends — the sort of thing where you’d look up from whatever you were studying and say “hey, check this out!” — and now it feels like stepping into a room where everyone is shouting at each other. Even when the arguments are important, they still feel unproductive and unhealthy.
I keep these things around now as a sort of social shorthand. And I still prefer chats to email, and a lot of chats are connected to these places. But maybe this blog will be the place where I “hey check this out” my stuff, and those places should more be about telling people to come here.