What Social Media Used To Feel Like

I do not post to social media anymore. I used to love the engagement that came with it, although we did not even call it engagement at the time. It was participation. It felt genuine and rooted in friendship. You knew the people you interacted with. Occasionally, you would come across someone new, maybe a friend of a friend, yet there was always a real connection somewhere in the mix.

How the Feed Got Loud

Today’s social media almost does not care whether you know anyone. It cares only whether you will engage with a post. This applies across every platform. I am old-school, so I think in terms of text first, yet photo and video have become the default shape of social media, and the same problem applies more loudly.

I have reached a point where I want to reduce the noise. The noise today is not the same as it was fifteen years ago. The feed serves what you interact with most often, and people tend to interact with content that provokes outrage, whether personal or observed.

When the algorithm does what it is designed to do, the timeline becomes saturated with extremes. The most hateful and divisive material rises. It becomes the majority of what you see. Anything that does not fit appears only when the system tests whether you might like something different.

The Myth of “The Algorithm”

The word algorithm deserves a closer look. I have used it several times already, yet it no longer means what many people think it means. It began as a useful way to describe how information was sorted and shown. In common use, the word now carries a sense of mystery, as if there is a person behind a curtain pulling levers. “The algorithm did it.”

Modern AI does introduce real opacity. Even so, there is always a director. People set the targets and adjust the dials. Every metric and every change serves engagement, because engagement drives profit. The algorithm is not a mystery. It is a tool run by billionaires whose primary concern is personal profit, not the well-being of the people using their platforms.

Why Reform Is So Hard

I wish we could return to a time when people mostly posted for friends and when posts reached mostly those friends. I do not mean Facebook. In my view, Facebook and Instagram have perfected advertising that feels disturbingly precise.

Changing social media runs into money. Scale costs money. Data centers cost money. Engineers cost money. Even a platform without marketing would need millions to reach functional size. The economics make sincerity difficult.

The psychology makes it nearly impossible. We are surrounded by outrage and objectionable content. Deep down, we know this is harmful, yet we return to it repeatedly. We chase the same dopamine rush that once made these platforms feel alive and connected. Something once meant something to us there, and we keep coming back, hoping to feel that again.

Entire fields of psychology study this behavior, and the largest technology companies employ psychiatrists and behavioral scientists to refine it. There is even a term for design meant to exploit that cycle—dark patterns. Every alert, every scroll, every “next post” is part of that design, and it keeps us engaged even when we know we should look away.

Choosing a Smaller Circle

There must be a human-focused network someday, something that breaks the cycle of outrage and control. Right now, people are getting pulled toward extremes by the same systems that keep these companies alive.

For now, I am staying away from social media. I am not perfect. I still check Instagram, Threads, and TikTok, especially for watchmaking. Leaving completely is difficult, and I am not insisting that anyone else do it. I am looking for alternatives.

What I Am Doing Instead

This page is my alternative. I know that perhaps five people will ever see this, and that is fine. For me, it is not about engagement from others. It is about putting the kind of energy I want to see into the world.

If even one of those five people feels inspired to do the same, that is enough. This is how I take back control of my attention. I will not hand it to a company that lets an algorithm decide what I should think about months later, when a bot drops a like on a post I barely remember.