#I'm betting myself a nickel that the next in-feed ad I see will be the snake lifeguard with the abs

[thecurioustale]

Social Media Sucks and I Think I Have Used Up Most of My Lifetime Tolerance for It Over the Years

I "hid" my first Tumblr ad the other day. It was a body horror thing of some lifeguard shaped like a snake with lots of ab muscles, and the first couple times it showed up were whatever but Tumblr pushed it so hard that eventually I had seen it like twenty times and it was starting to make me feel icky, so I decided that it was time to take action!

I may be a Tumblr idiot, and a social media idiot in general, but I did have enough knowledge to know that if you press the Ellipsis on an ad post you might get the option to "hide" it, so I did, and it did, and I did, and it didn't.

That's right: No one-and-done when it comes to making Our Sponsors the slightest bit inconvenienced. First, of course, I was presented with an automated survey asking me why I was hiding the ad. And, of course, the survey was terribly designed.

Let me go on a quick side rant here: IT IS ASTONISHING HOW BADLY DESIGNED MOST SURVEYS ARE. Corporate ones, academic ones, governmental ones...it's like most people never took any kind of instruction, nor applied even the most basic common sense, on the principles of survey design. Well, here, in a nutshell, is the number one tip and trick you can use to life-hack your way to a better survey:

IF YOU ARE MAKING A MULTIPLE-CHOICE SURVEY, EITHER MAKE THE OPTIONS CONCEPTUALLY COMPREHENSIVE OR PROVIDE AN "OTHER / NOT APPLICABLE" OPTION.

Needless to say, my reason for wanting to hide the ad—I'd been fed it so many times that the body horror had gone from off-putting to actively disgusting—wasn't on their damn list. The two closest options were "offensive" and "too frequent." I decided on "offensive," and when I clicked the button the offending ad was instantly snapped away back to Hell where it began, and I went on with my life.

UNTIL THE VERY NEXT IN-FEED AD, where it returned like some #&%%@*$ demon in a dark comedy, grinning as if it had never left. So this time I "hid" the ad and selected "too frequent," and I'm not holding out much hope on the matter.

Social media, even Tumblr, has evolved to make you as powerless, immobile, and docile as you can possibly be made through the long reach of an electronic series of tubes. While some social media networks are better than others, the general rule is that you have very little options to control your own "user experience"—and this is by design, because "UX" is something they optimize for on their end from their perspective of what "optimal" is.

Increasingly gone online are the days when Buttons Do Functions. That is a form of direct control: Click a button, and a pre-knowable thing will happen. Like flipping a light switch. Or pushing Stop on a tape deck. Baring some kind of malfunction, you know what will happen. That's less and less of a thing on the Internet now, especially on social media, where buttons are treated more like data inputs to an algorithm somewhere, and god only knows what output will be spat out at you—if any at all! Sometimes the buttons literally don't do anything.

Oh and by the way they PERIODICALLY REARRANGE EVERYTHING so that you have to find everything all over again, and relearn the whole damn GUI, and some of the functions that actually did work are probably gone now for good measure.

This is so dehumanizing, and it is going to be generationally rebelled against SO HARD someday. And the rebels of that era are going to think themselves sage and wise, and turn up their noses at our "dark ages" of user-alienating barbarism, never knowing that the original Internet didn't do this at all; it was a societal development fueled by the lust for profit and a failure to empathize with users.

But in the meantime, stuff like this has a cumulative exposure for me. Every time I get fed the latest indignity, the latest of infinite variants on some gross thing that won't go away and which can only be temporarily dispelled by lying on a poorly-designed survey that no one will ever read, a little text pops up that says "Josh will remember this."

And one day, I'm just gonna stop. I already don't use most social networks, and, of the ones I do use, I flat-out do not need this kind of bullshit in my life. My 6-week Return-to-Tumblr experiment is nearly over (come the Equinox), and I may or may not write a post about it at that time, but if I do then this is one of the points I intend to make. I can feel my interests and utility both steadily diverging from whatever this weird direction is that social media continues to evolve in. I am both outgrowing it and drifting apart from it.

I just don't like being treated this way, and I think that's not unreasonable of me. I understand they'alls gotta make their money. I understand it's their platforms, their rules. I understand that "most users don't know what they want and Numbers Go Down when we give them more control." I understand all of that. And I am willing, to some extent, to trade a modest of dignity and agency in return for the benefit of being able to use a service with lots of fascinating content and the potential to reach people with my own ideas. But I have my limits.

I know there's no one at any of these social media companies who actually cares if one of their advertisers' ads not only fails as an advertisement for one particular user but also estranges that user from the entire service—not all by itself, of course, but as the proverbial straw that breaks the camel's back. And if not an ad, then some other inanity of the functionality of the service. It doesn't even matter what the last straw actually is, really. To the people running the show, we're not even people. Just metrics. And there's always another sucker, so for the most part the people who finally give up on this stuff after a long season of exasperation and small cuts are more than drowned out by the rising tide of new users joining. Until suddenly one day the ratio crosses the inflection point, the tide reverses, and the whole company folds like a house of cards...by which point the original looters have long since cashed in on their fat salaries and benefits packages.

We live in an era of no loyalties and no pride. The notion of caring about the products you make or the level of service you show your customers (or, more to the point, your users) is positively quaint. The people have spoken: We want it cheap; we want it easy; we want it now. That's what gets the clicks.

This is all increasingly dystopian and I am getting tired of it.