In this post I collect my thoughts on why I maintain this website and what I want to post here.
social media - the outreach
TikTok, Instagram, X, LinkedIn and even YouTube all come with the same problem: They push content into users’ feed and exploit psychology to first distract people with notifications, and then keep them from all legit use cases in an infinite loop controlled by “smart” algorithms.
While notifications and the fact that you consume content you did not consciously choose are already terrible, you additionally give up a lot of your autonomy, just by the design of those applications.
You do not choose your input anymore. You just consume whatever is shown to you and react in a specific way to it. You might learn something, you might get funny or interesting input, but you become more vulnerable than ever before to selection and confirmation bias.
You get to see preselected content you usually cannot control and then you are forced to think about random topics without doing so consciously and on purpose.
The same holds not only for information and politics but also for personal content. You get to see random pictures of friends or unknown people and you don’t know at all what you will see. You cannot prepare for that emotionally and your feed will just show you what everyone is doing.
Your feed tells you when to laugh, how to feel.
Your notifications tell you when to open the app.
And your phone time restrictions tell you when to stop.
This is not the way I want to consume or share content. I want to consciously select the material of my friends and people who produce the content I actually care about and consume it at a point when I decide to and actively want to see.
On the other hand I do not need, nor want to push my life or opinions into someone else’s life. If someone is interested in me or my perspective I am very open to share it.
I am, however, very interested in hearing your opinion and different perspectives on stuff I think and write about. So please do reach out and convince me I’m wrong.
Connecting to other people and exchanging thoughts and ideas is indeed one of the main arguments why I will post here.
no external metrics $\to$ less pressure
$\to$ more authentic $\to$ more value; less noise
Another point why I think this is better than posting on LinkedIn and for many minor research results also better than publishing a paper, is that one does it only for oneself and not for the outcome. It doesn’t matter whether your paper is selected by a conference. So you do not have to change it artificially or make it bigger than it is. You can skip the huge workload of formalities and concentrate on the essentials. You do not have to write catchy or performative phrases to show off on X, or LinkedIn.
To be fair, I never published a paper yet and never made an X or LinkedIn post, but I feel like there is too much noise out there - Sturgeon’s law.
personalization
In a homogenizing world, in which individualism is still evolving, it makes sense to choose your own design. You can express not only through content, but also through the design itself. I love that I can change it exactly the way I like it to be.
I want to customize as much as possible (while keeping everything basic and being lazy).
Less bloated than Instagram 😎.
your data.
As long as no one scrapes my blog [:/], I will always be in control of my data.
My texts and pictures are, at least legally, my own property this way.
On other platforms this is not the case.
the process
While all this is readable for others, I still do it to a large extent for myself:
These blog posts make me think ideas through in more detail, structure them better and rethink from different perspectives.
I guess this is possible without posting as well, still this helps me do it properly.
Basically I do not claim any originality and most stuff I’m writing here has probably already been formulated in the depths of the internet and also much better written and explained than I do.
Still I think in the modern world, bloated with information overload, it is fundamental to build your own opinion, make ur own experiences and thought processes - getting away from being an echo chamber, which is building on knowledge instead of experiences.
This is a meta example of how writing texts helps with structuring: Only through writing this text did I rethink my motivation, my boundaries of privacy of thoughts. I wouldn’t have done it in such detail otherwise.
This is also a way to hold myself accountable for my beliefs: through actually writing down, why I personally think social media is not for me, I internalize the attitude and won’t want to use it in the future. Before, I only felt other people’s opinion against social media resonating with me, but didn’t actually stop using it!
I encourage all my friends to share what they are up to or burn for, on a decentralized platform - e.g. the so called internet - and not on social media:)
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