MEASURE

How many miles of likes,
How many gallons of reposts,
How many acres of followers,
equal
one genuine connection?

Daily Musings

Today's #vss365 prompt is "Measure."

By the metrics, I'm getting more engagement and likes on BlueSky than on X with fewer followers, but I don't entirely trust the numbers. Are these real people? I've been burned too many times to entirely trust.

I'm never been a fan of social media, even back when it was "good." Like, subscribe, repost, repeat...to what end?

In an ideal world, we'd all have the reach and engagement we deserve from an adoring horde of Genuine Humans, waiting by their phones day and night for our latest profundities to drop. Here in the real world, it's become increasingly just bots, conspiracy theorists, rage-posts, misinformation campaigns, and oh so much hate, especially on X.

My experience is that lately the hate posters have gotten better at gaming the algorithm. My feed is filling up with seemingly innocuous posts that lead into threads of misogyny, ones with carefully coded words that invite a cascade of racist comments, and folks who are "just asking questions" as they stand by the entrance to a deep well of conspiracy theories.

In a social media world that's closer to ideal than what we now have, the platform would be owned by its users, we'd have a selection of competing algorithms, and the ability to customize our choice with a flexible menu of options and preferences. Nobody else would be able to see our filtering preferences unless they paid us directly for that privilege, and we'd be able to block entire categories of unwelcome advertising and content.

More Tomorrow.