I've been thinking this for quite a while, as you've probably noticed from past posts I've made on the subject, but I'm beginning to feel completely burned-out on social media. Everything has to be social these days. Everything has to have little like buttons and little comment buttons and allow every denizen of the Internet to spew their ill-informed thoughts and opinions over it, or to share it pointlessly to Facebook.
Earlier today, I was distressed to discover that an official Pizza Hut app is coming to Xbox 360, presumably aimed at those people who find phoning, using a mobile phone app or using the Internet to order a pizza too easy and would instead prefer to do so by navigating the monstrosity that is the Metro interface. One line in the Polygon article about it — here — jumped out at me and kind of drove it home how "way too far" we've taken social media these days. Here it is:
"After submitting an order, users can share their choice with friends via Facebook."
Why. Why. Why why whywhywhy would you want to do this?
Pizza Hut aren't the only offenders in this regard, of course — Amazon offer a convenient facility to tweet or share on Facebook anything that you've just bought, as do a lot of other websites. You can even set up the PlayStation 3 and Vita to automatically share every purchase you make on PSN to Facebook. And every time I see this facility, I wonder why on Earth anyone would want to use it. But apparently people do.
This glut of auto-sharing is killing the original point of social media, which was to allow people to engage in conversations with one another by sharing things that were important to them. Now, it's more like a convention of ADHD sufferers running around going "I JUST BOUGHT A PIZZA! LOOK AT THIS VIDEO OF A DUCK RUNNING! HERE'S A PICTURE OF A CAT! I'D SAY SOMETHING PASSIVE-AGGRESSIVE BUT 'SOMEBODY' WOULDN'T LIKE IT!" rather than what I remember my early experiences with Facebook being like.
I vividly recall resisting signing up to Facebook in its early days, because everyone seemed to be doing it and I just couldn't be arsed with it. When I eventually started using it, however, I was impressed to discover a site that was seemingly built for real-life friends. Any time I added someone to my friends list, I had to indicate how I knew them, and the other person had to verify that story. My profile was only visible in full to those whom I had marked as a friend, and there weren't really any privacy settings to worry about. Stuff that was shared was the sort of stuff you'd share if you were actually in the same room with friends — what you'd been up to, some photos from your holiday, perhaps a longer piece of writing in the form of a "Note". No games, no spam, no "I Fucking Love Science" posts. Just actual interactions. The Like button was there, but it didn't have the all-encompassing power it has now, and people hadn't really started using it as a substitute for actually saying things.
Now, though, with the proliferation of "LIKE IF YOU HATE CANCER, SHARE IF YOU LOVE KITTENS" posts, the signal-to-noise ratio is all out of whack, and people are used to posting tons of crap while simultaneously saying nothing of value. This has the side-effect of meaning that when you actually want a response from someone, it's quite difficult to get one. The other day I attempted to find someone to take care of our pet rats while we're on holiday in Canada; the only responses I got were jokey, non-serious ones, and within a couple of hours it had dropped off the face of everyone's News Feed, never to be seen again… unless I were to slip Facebook $7 to "promote" it, of course.
Or take today, when I saw someone post an actual non-rhetorical question that needed an answer, and the first response was a "Like".
Not helpful. At all. You "Like" my question? Great. Do you "Like" it enough to actually fucking answer it, perhaps? No? Then piss off. I'm not so desperate for validation that I count the number of "Likes" a particular post gets and see it as some form of brag-worthy e-peen.
That said, if you want to "Like" my new "K-On Girls Wear the Union Jack" fanart cover photo, feel free.
Sigh. I'm such a hypocrite.
I've been rediscovering forums recently — I was a member of a My Little Pony forum for a while before it shut down due to admin drama, and I'm currently taking some tentative steps into the RPG Maker community. While forums have their own issues — largely people being a little lawyerish about the community rules and regulations — I'm beginning to think they're not such an outdated means of discussion as many seem to think…
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A lot of the new "social" apps hitting the app store seem to serve very little purpose, too. I was checking out Tracks earlier this week, and can't for the life of me work out why anyone would want to use it. It just groups photos together. Similarly, despite thinking that the premise of Knotch was kinda interesting (a "temperature" gauge for everything…kinda like hot or not for anything you can think of) in practice it seemed really impersonal, and a bit like just filling out a questionnaire for no apparent reason. All the social apps seem to advocate broadcasting every thought that pops into peoples' heads, but increasingly seems to discourage any kind of actual discussion about the topic once it's out there.
Right. A lot of them are social for the sake of social. (And they use the word "beautiful" far too much.) I reviewed Tracks the other day… I really struggled to see the point of it. And it isn't the first I've felt that way about either — there are way too many things that try and leverage the power of the "Like" and then don't do anything whatsoever with it.
I reviewed one a while back whose sole purpose was to allow you to "Like"… anything at all. Anything. Cake. The colour yellow. Having a dump with the door open. If you could think of it, you could Like it. I expressed the fact that I couldn't really see the point of this and promptly got hounded by the company's CEO on all forms of social media as he attempted (unsuccessfully) to explain the appeal of his stupid app. He's dead now. (He isn't really.)
Social apps need a purpose, a function and, perhaps most importantly, a clear focus; they need to distinguish themselves from the existing, well-established general-purpose solutions out there like FB, G+ and Twitter. If they don't, there is no reason whatsoever for people to use them. If, conversely, they're designed to cater to a specific market and allow them to focus on something they're interested in while simultaneously filtering out all the garbage on the "general" networks… great. 😉
I find myself drifting away from some social media channels because of this type of irrelevant sharing. Pardon me while I say to all the offenders (you know who you are), "I don't care what you had for dinner, what annoyance you experienced in traffic, or what you bought on Amazon." Keep bothering me with stuff like this and I'll decide I don't have time for you. I don't want to be negative, but this feeling that every moment of your life has earth-shattering relevance is tiresome.
… I apologize for ranting all over your post. I'll go home now. 😉
No apology required. I feel exactly the same way. 🙂 I know that's rich coming from someone who writes a blog post every day that doesn't always have particularly meaningful content therein, but that's a slightly different situation. I tend to limit my social media posts to things I actually want to talk to people about, rather than, as is more commonly seen these days, "vanity posts".
I'm pretty sure the whole point of a Pizza Hut app is to make you "share" that you just ordered pizza. You share, others see, they want pizza – it's essentially a free advertising app. As social media "evolves" (and I use the quotation marks deliberately), marketing strategies evolve with it and this is the result. Depressing, eh?
That's exactly what it is. Social isn't about, well, social any more; it's about marketing.
Damn… so they went to Canadian pizza stores, too. When I saw the Pizza Pizza app on my 360, I did a double take.