Social Media Is Controlling You - Here's How to Resist It

How Social Media Is Controlling You

I publish in a great many sources, with hundreds of articles to my name and six books, and I write a great deal in LinkedIn and Medium, with over 100 articles to date. But social media is deeply broken. That is hurting all of us. Here's why.

They control what you see: they algorithmically determine if a post "takes"—that is, has it received a lot of "likes" within the first few minutes of being posted? If so, they show the post to more people. If not, they kill it, and almost no one ever sees it—not even the people who are following the poster.

So the platform is deciding that, even though you follow someone, they are not going to show you their posts. Instead, they show you ads (i.e. paid posts), and other "trending" posts.

The result is that you don't hear from the people you follow unless they post something that is very catchy—rather than thoughtful. This algorithmic preference for catchiness promotes emotion and silliness. It dumbs down online discourse. It is toxic. It results in knee-jerk forwarding of short posts that merely reinforce one's existing views or make people say "OMG!"—and I don't want any part of it anymore. I mean, I like an occasional silly post, but I don't want to be on a platform that effectively downgrades intellectual content.

So if you want to follow someone, I recommend that you don't do so through social media: instead, go to their personal blog, and follow them there.

My Professional Blogging Will Be Here

My writing about Agile, DevOps, Agile 2, Constructive Agility, and social and metaphysical topics (e.g., this article, Consciousness Is Not What We Thought It Was) will all either appear here, or I will link to them from there. Thus, you can hear about all of my postings by following this blog.