Like most adults of my age in the USA, my use of social media is primarily YouTube and Facebook. I have accounts with some other services that I created just to access something specific at some point in time, but my use of them is quite limited. I thought it would be interesting to open up the apps and share my impressions of what was on offer.
Please note that I’m just having fun; I’m not looking to actually engage with any additional services. To hopefully prevent any vituperative comments, I will acknowledge in advance that my impressions are no doubt biased, ignorant, privileged, out-of-touch or otherwise objectionable to someone…and I simply don’t care. If this post isn’t fun for you, my advice is for you to go take a hike…both literally and figuratively.
Here’s a look at what social media platforms US adults had ever used from 2012 to 2024:
I have accounts for Instagram, Pinterest, TikTok, LinkedIn, and X. I’ve consulted Reddit, but I don’t have an account for it, and I killed my Nextdoor account years ago because I found it to be concentrated ignorance.
I’m 58 years old, and my reliance on just two of the popular platforms fits my age demographic pretty well:
I have no interest in the ephemeral Snapchat, and texts and Facebook Messenger are already sufficiently distracting that I have no intention of using WhatsApp. Reddit strikes me as similar to the Usenet newsgroups I accessed via a university engineering network from 1985 to 1988. As for BeReal, I’d never heard of it, and a daily notification about sharing photos of day-to-day life sounds truly annoying.
To put things into perspective, I was accessing CompuServe back in 1982 on a 300-baud modem when it had 40,000 subscribers. It grew to about 3,000,000 by the early 1990s, and it was sold to AOL in 1997. I accessed and ran dial-up computer bulletin boards from 1983 to the early 1990s, and I acquired the MEADOR.ORG domain for my online blog on the world wide web back in 1996.
The Instagram app shows I joined in December 2017, have 0 posts and 192 followers, and that I am following one account, that of science fiction writer J. Michael Straczynski. Evidently seven years ago I wanted to see something he had posted. Clicking on the search icon produced what is shown at right.
Hmm. Off-putting images of tattoos, veins, and anatomical drawings, a blood-stained graph, some meme about alcohol, a stupid map, and multiple images displaying the breasts and bikinis of women I don’t recognize — a distillation of lowbrow titillation.
To make Instagram bearable I would need to follow accounts of people that I know or who produce work I’m interested in. The default is just trash.
NEXT!
I joined Pinterest in October 2016 because some school district staff had requested it no longer be blocked for their accounts by the district’s internet filter, and I was checking on its content moderation.
Over the past eight years, I have used the service to “pin” about 30 images, mostly historic images of Bartlesville, but there was a funny doctored image of The Gorn driving Captain Kirk in the 1966 Batmobile and some other random images I had saved.
The Home page showed me an ad along with some items based on past searches. For a recent blog post on television, I had accidentally pinned an image of the cover of a 1967 issue of TV Guide that had a television equipment overview, so the service thought I might be interested in more vintage TV Guide covers, in this case one of F Troop — that was a swing and a miss.
It also showed me a vintage ad for a Fat Boy Drive In on US 101, which no doubt was based on searches I did almost two years ago while researching a blog post on Oklahoma drive-ins, although I grew up with Coit’s, not Fat Boy, and US 101 is quite far from Oklahoma. Research for another blog post on Fisher Price toys prompted the algorithm to offer up an image of dolls for boys (action figures for those with fragile masculinity) from the 1969 Sears Christmas catalog. The ad was for Intuit QuickBooks. None of that interested me, but at least it wasn’t off-putting imagery like Instagram offered up to my blank account there.
The app says I have 0 followers and that I am following nothing there, and that is A-OK with me.
TikTok
My wife watched a lot of funny videos on TikTok, but I abhor how it autoplays when you open the app. I found a setting to mute videos by default, which was a slight improvement.
My impression is that most of its videos are about 15 seconds long. I’m a long-form guy, preferring in-depth YouTube videos that are 20 minutes or longer, and I used to subscribe to The New Yorker magazine for its long articles before editorial decay led me to cancel my subscription. I find most YouTube Shorts and Facebook Reels unsatisfying, so TikTok doesn’t appeal to me, regardless of whether or not its Chinese ownership poses some sort of security risk.
I checked out the Explore option on its Home screen, and it showed me several women in a pool displaying a great deal of cheek while wearing football shirts, an ad about a muscleman who supposedly used a hair tonic to speed up growing long locks to create a wig for his daughter, clickbait about a terrorist, and an AI Jesus. Again, all repellent trash.
Later this month TikTok might be banned in the USA, but I don’t care one way or the other.
I use this service to look up vendors who contact me or customer service representatives and customer success managers who are assigned to our district’s accounts.
I set up an account with my credentials and background information in June 2013, which I’ve maintained since I think it is a valuable business directory service, but I’ve never posted, and I’ve only had a couple of interactions with others via the service.
At right are unread messages in my Inbox. I’ve worked for the same employer for over 35 years, so I’m certainly not a job hunter, and I directly hire and evaluate only three positions in the district, so my usage will remain very limited. I had another LinkedIn account years ago with a personal email address, and it generated huge quantities of spam and annoying notifications, causing me to kill that account, not have the app on my phone, and set up an account with just my work email along with filters to redirect all LinkedIn emails to an unread folder.
After taking the screenshot, I deleted the app from my phone and moved on.
X
X, previously known as Twitter, has long held an outsized cultural influence because of journalists, who crave the timeliness and pithiness of its posts. I found their reliance on it emblematic of the decline in long-form quality journalism. Sound bites in text form…how depressing.
I created a Twitter account back in June 2009, about three years after it was created and three years after I set up my Facebook and YouTube accounts.
For many years, I’ve heard some pundits refer to Twitter/X as a toxic dumpster fire. However, I knew it was one way to drive web traffic, so I linked my Twitter and WordPress blog accounts so that for some years each blog post I made would generate a tweet with a photo and a link. That ended in mid-2023 when Twitter raised the pricing on its application program interface and WordPress dropped the service. I haven’t bothered manually sharing my blog posts on X.
The X app’s For you home screen showed me an uninteresting post about politicians at Jimmy Carter’s funeral, while the Following section showed me a post from Bartlesville High School about a basketball tournament. That led me to wonder what X accounts mine was set to follow.
I found eight: a former newspaper columnist in Minnesota, a couple of YouTubers, a couple of school district accounts, an author of non-fiction books about Star Trek, an old friend, and a technology podcaster. Nevertheless, I’ve never paid attention to my own automated posts on Twitter/X, let alone whatever someone else posted.
Oh, there was a ninth account, which was a former technology columnist. I noticed that he was now constantly sharing misinformation from Libs of TikTok, the handle for a lady whose lies have instigated bomb threats against various schools, libraries, and hospitals across the country, including in Tulsa. I took the time to UNfollow him to clean up the feed I’ve long ignored.
The app also showed I had 75 followers. Most of those were co-workers or former students. My posts in recent years before the WordPress tweets stopped had a handful to a few dozen “impressions” while posts a decade ago had well over one hundred. I read that X posts generated an average of over 2,000 impressions in 2024, but also that there were significant declines in user engagement in 2023 and 2024 after Musk acquired Twitter. Twitter used to bring to mind birds chirping and bluejay jeers, but now I just hear crickets and flames.
Well, that’s enough of this grumpy old man griping about social media. I’ll post this and be sure to share a link on Facebook. 🤦♂️
Meador Manor 