social media – Bradley's Old Fashioned Weblog

Short update

September 28, 2025 Bradley FarlessLeave a comment

I haven’t really posted much or regularly for quite a while and I think it’s not so much for lack of interest, but lack of time and that spark of creativity. Working full time, long commutes, and trying to do errands and fulfill other responsibilities on the weekends is time consuming and draining and it doesn’t do much for creativity. Plus, the last five years or so have been pretty tough with family members and pets passing away. I feel like I’ve spent more time distracting myself than engaging with anything creative or meaningful. I haven’t even gone to the museum in what feels like and probably is years.

This has been an especially weird year for me. I barely did any reading this year, instead turning to podcasts and watching the news. I became obsessed with watching every press briefing, watching Congressional proceedings, and then listening to podcasters talk about the same things that I’d just watched or listened to myself.

As the year wore on, I started to find myself wanting to disengage, so I put away the political podcasts and turned off the news and eased myself back into reading again with Brandon Sanderson’s Skyward series. I wound up rolling through all of those books in about two weeks. It sparked my interest. I guess it sparked joy. I moved right on to Old Man’s War, by John Scalzi, which is the start of another series that I’m currently devouring. It’s also scifi, but it’s a different tone and flavor from Skyward. More mature I guess. The tone of it is like watching old war movies from the 70s.

I spent a lot of the last few years trying to read books for education, personal enrichment, and growth. I burned out on those genres. I realized that when I forced myself to finish Kokoro by Beth Kempton. It wasn’t the right book at the right time for me, even though I think it was overall not a bad read. I’m going to spend the rest of the year glutting on scifi and fantasy books to scratch that itch that got me interested in reading in the first place when I was a teenager. Then I’ll flirt with the heavier stuff again. I guess I just want to stop pushing so hard at things that are serious and try to enjoy life too.

I dumped Threads. The site is being overrun by bots and trash posts that are more attention seeking than informative. Beyond that, it’s a cesspool that was bringing out the worst in me. I’d read a few posts by people talking about how social media was making them feel. Enraged essentially. And I knew intellectually that algorithms on social media platforms are designed to push for engagement, and what’s better at getting people to engage than something that pisses them off? I don’t need that. I’m getting older. I don’t want to waste my time arguing pointless arguments on the internet with people that don’t mean anything to me. I’d rather do things I enjoy and look at things I enjoy. So now I’m down to Facebook (for family), Instagram (for the LOLs), and Reddit (for topic based engagement).

Flipping through Reddit, I noticed that a lot of posts from the Apple page are people joyously announcing that they bought a new Apple device. It feels like they’re buying the device more to feel a sense of inclusion in something rather than because they appreciate the device for what it is. Like people have a desperate desire to feel a sense of belonging and place. I feel like it’s a need that people used to fill with religion, but religion doesn’t do a good job of meeting people’s spiritual needs anymore. Not Western religion anyway, perhaps because of the insistence on faith over reason and perhaps because of the movement that tried to push the idea of biblical inerrancy in the US, rather than recognzing the Bible for what it is: a collection of stories by various authors at various times and places trying to explain the unexplainable. I’ve spent a good amount of time reading about different religions and all of them have flaws, but I thnk it’s important that people are able to committ to something that acknowledges that there is something greater than themselves, something that can provide meaning and context to our lives. I’m still searching and thinking.

Summer is basically on its way out the door. I missed most of it. I spent most of my weekends this summer at home recuperating from the work week. I wanted to go out and ride my bike more this summer. I just couldn’t muster up the will to do it, even though I knew it would be fun. I don’t know what that’s about. Just fatigue I guess? Or maybe I need to work more at prioritizing what I enjoy. Maybe I’ll find a way to work it into my schedule so that I can make a habit of it, for exercise purposes. Even when it gets cold. I have some cold weather workout clothes, if they still fit!

I got a promotion and a few raises this year at work so that’s pretty good, and worth noting. I actually enjoy going to this job. I don’t dread waking up to go to work. That’s winning. The pay is almost up to what I feel like it should be to do what I do, and in a few years I’ll be comfortable there too.

All in all, 2025 has been pretty good to me, especially in light of the last 5 years. I feel like I’m starting to come out of a rut. I’m also excited for Fall and hoping the end of 2025 has that cheerful spirit that seems to have been lacking lately.

Jumping on the MeWe Bandwagon

January 23, 2021September 4, 2021 Bradley FarlessLeave a comment

I rarely use Facebook, partly because it eats up a lot of time but mostly because I started to realize just how much Facebook was doing with and profiting from my personal data. It’s creepy. So, I cut back my Facebook time to about 30 – 40 minutes every month or so. I’m not keeping up with everything on Facebook anymore and sometimes I wish I could when it comes to family, but Facebook really isn’t about family updates anymore and hasn’t been for a long time so I don’t really feel as guilty about walking away from it as I might have 10 years ago.

With everything going on with the election and the inauguration, alternative social media platforms have been getting a lot of sun. I’m always keen to try out new platforms, mostly to see if there are any great memes, but I hadn’t heard of MeWe so I decided to give it a try. It’s surprisingly well put together and fun to use, once I got over the learning curve and figured out which groups to avoid.

There are, however, some really basic things wrong with MeWe that are surprising. Here are three things I’ve noticed so far:

If I create an album in My Cloud and upload photos to it, there’s no way to share that album with anyone, whether they be Close Contacts, Contacts, or Public. Those photos are dead weight. You have to create a photo post and add 50 images, share it, then create another photo post and add 50 images, share it, etc. That’s really messy. It would be nicer to create an album, caption the photos, and share it when it’s finished one time so people see the finished product. Granted, I don’t have a lot of albums that would need more than 50 photos, but I do have a few and other popular social sites offer this functionality and have offered it for many, many years.
There’s no way to delete an album and have it just delete the photos in the album as well. You have to first delete the album in My Cloud and then you have to manually select every photo in your Photostream, clicking one at a time and then clicking delete which is absurdly tiresome and shouldn’t be how things work in any social network, free or paid.
Once you’ve created your account, it’s apparently impossible to change your email address so I may have to delete my entire account to change to a new email address. Why this is a problem shouldn’t even need to be explained. I figured this out after opening a Proton Mail account, which is encrypted and comes with 500 MB of storage on the free account. I figured it might be nice to have a new account for professional messages, since my Gmail is now an advertising-filled dumpster fire like my Yahoo! email was before it.

I don’t want to use Facebook, but the alternatives really make it hard to settle in with glaringly obvious problems that should have been addressed a long, long time ago. MeWe isn’t brand new after all.

I’m reminded of how Signal is just now trying to add custom backgrounds and more customization options after this influx of users. They’re going to lose out to Telegram, which isn’t as secure, because it’s just more user friendly and more fun to use, because they didn’t take the initiative. It’s also possible to search for public channels or chat groups, which Signal doesn’t seem to support.

I submitted feedback about those issues more than once over the time I’ve been using the app. Now, the Signal boat is sinking and they’re trying to bail it out with new features rushed out in their beta version while people are choosing whether to hop on board or swim to the Telegram boat. I wonder how you explain that to all of the people who donated to Signal to create an exceptional and secure messaging app? That they created a product that lost out to another messaging app run by a Russian oligarch as a pet project?

I think I’m going to wind up using MeWe mostly for a handful of groups and some personal updates, but probably nothing too personal. I didn’t even sign up with my full name. The way that social media is being weaponized now is honestly terrifying and has a chilling effect on speech. Something you say today that is conventional might become a weapon to attack you in 10 years.

I think the 2020s are going to be a time when people take a step back and anonymize and the web goes back to how it was in 90s, before every post and comment online became part of a global ePeen contest. If we can get around current government and corporate efforts to prevent that from happening anyway. I imagine they want and need the US to move more towards a blending of offline and online identities leading to a shadow social scoring system. Sometimes I wonder if there isn’t one already in place.

Signal to Noise Ratio Online

April 29, 2020 Bradley FarlessLeave a comment

This week was much quieter than previous weeks. It’s not that there isn’t as much going on. I suppose it’s just that I’m tuning it out more and focusing on my own issues. Caring about other people’s problems is a luxury and a burden, and sometimes that burden just gets tiring.

What I mean is that there are people on social media platforms that are constantly whining about the plight of some particular group of people or vociferously advocating some political agenda. There’s so much spin online that it’s a chore to try to find content that doesn’t suck and to sort through the noise in the responses to see if there’s anything meaningful.

I’d like to think that there was some magical era in the Internet’s past when this type of behavior didn’t exist. I remember trash talking in AOL chat rooms in the late 90’s. I remember griefing in MMO chats in games like Ultima Online and World of Warcraft. But it wasn’t this widespread and pernicious. It was localized. It was something you could turn off and walk away from and it was separate from your real life. Or at least that’s how it felt.

Probably three things led to the escalation and spread of the problem: smartphones, more widespread social networks like Twitter and Facebook, and the idea that you should use your real name online and “put yourself out there”, which later evolved into the idea of building your “personal brand” online.

The idea that you could turn yourself into a “brand” and attract attention led to polarization to gain and influence people politically, which fueled the spread of conspiracy theories and crackpot ideas on all ends of the political spectrum. And of course there are all the idiots eating tide pods and creating challenges to monetize their notoriety.

I had this idea when I was a kid that the Internet was going to help me learn things and that I would meet interesting people from all over the world that could teach me how to be a better person. In some cases that’s true, but there’s a lot more chaff than wheat in the field.

I guess I need to put more effort into curating the content that I look at, but the Internet seems geared towards overcoming people’s personal preferences to push sensationalized content for ad revenue. I would like to believe that if the barrier for self-hosting content (like, on a server in your house) were lowered both in terms of education and hardware/access costs (some ISPs charge extra to open the ports necessary for a home server to connect to the Internet) then we could overcome a lot of this BS, but I also feel like this somehow ties in to larger issues of wealth disparity and that some people are willing to push anything online if it’s going to make them money.

Maybe I’m just getting old and this is the equivalent of wanting young people to stop playing their boomboxes so loud, but I hope that one day the Internet is more than it is today in terms of quality.