Social media
I saw the news that Instagram is/was planning to add 3 second un-skippable ads to the timeline. I became a bit curious about the current Instagram experience (I haven’t used it since last year) so I logged into an account and looked at the timeline. What I saw was the following:
F Sp F Su F Su Sp F Su F Su F Sp F Su F Su F Sp Su F Su F Su
F = following. Sp = sponsored. Su = suggested. This would mean that only about 45% what I see is stuff I’ve actually said I wanted to see. Adding un-skippable 3 second ad videos to this is … I’ll put it this way, I’m surprised people still use Instagram.
But since so many are using Instagram to promote their stuff, and since it seems to be working, I assume I’m the strange person that doesn’t understand how valuable Instagram is for me as a person.
I have a mailbox called “Probably crap” and it makes me happy every time I see it (I usually don’t open it … since it probably contains crap 😋).
Fascinating, I haven’t used Instagram in 5-6 months and my account is real small and very unimportant. But people still try to break into it 🤷🏼 I wonder why, seems like a waste of time.
At work today, I got asked to post a link on my social accounts. “Can’t do, I don’t use any social accounts” was my answer. This made me realize something that I hadn’t thought about before: one of the reasons for me getting off FB, Insta, X … all the posts that try to sell something.
Ohhh … just got a message that Google will delete a Blogger blog om mine … considering that it contains 3 test posts (I have no memory of it - last post was 19.5 years ago) I think it’s OK to delete it.
The top WordPress plugins are… a little sad?
Classic Editor — I get it, but it’s just a bummer to me that we’re like half a decade into the much-improved block editor experience and it’s still not only possible to not use it but one of the most popular plugins is to not use it. I’m hoping it’s mostly just understaffed legacy sites that people want to maintain just can’t prioritize a major change.
Nope, it’s also for people who doesn’t like the concept and think that WordPress have become a bloated mess.
To me this is interesting: some years back I mostly used three social media apps: Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Then I started to get disgusted and removed my FB account in 2018, last year I stopped posting to Twitter and deleted it earlier this year. I haven’t posted much to Instagram in several years, yesterday I deleted the app from my devices … will probably keep my account for a bit longer.
Instead I use my own web site and mastodon. And I’m starting to look a bit closer at PixelFed.
To be honest, I never thought that I would stop using Twitter.
I have to admit that I’m hoping that Instagram will start charging people to use it … that will finally make me quit Instagram 🙏🏻
Please add some content, don't just link/repeat/retweet
I don’t know if it’s just me or if things have started to change recently, for me it looks like more and more people spend their time just repeating information that other have created instead of adding some information of their own.
I’ll explain: I subscribe to a fairly large number of feeds, follow people on twitter (both using the follow function and through feeds), have a friendfeed account etc. Why? Simply because I’m an information junkie and it’s so much easier to consume than to produce — but even I am starting to get fed up with this. The reason is simply that a large part of the info I see is something that I’ve seen 1-2-3-4 times before.
What happens is typically that some web company launches a new service that is in private beta but is “the next big thing”. Immediately some well known person writes a blog post with some information - perhaps even an early hands-on review - this is just fine … but then something interesting happens: others start blogging about this but doesn’t add any opinion just a link to the original post, then there are posts that links to the post that links to original, etc, etc. All without adding any information. And now when Twitter is becoming more and more popular it becomes even worse: there is a tweet that link to the original post, a retweet, a retweet of the retweet etc.
Especially sad to see is the tweets that have a link (which is shortened so you don’t really see where it links to) that links to a web page that just contains a link to the original … and a huge number of ads.
I’m not against linking or referring to other people content … but please add some information so it makes it worth reading your tweet/post — don’t just try to increase the number of hits.
If you just want to link to something consider using a service like digg, delicious instead.