This article contains some sad considerations, because mainstream social networking world has changed in ways we totally dislike.
Let’s share our experiences one after the other, because each of us has experienced social networking differently.
Elena/Elettrona: the social network illusion
In 2008, I first heard about Facebook as a ‘system for catching up with old friends’, an idea with which Zuckerberg deluded the whole world.
During my teenage years in the 1990s, I had made friends with people from different regions of Italy, and at that time there was no technology that would allow a blind person to correspond by letter with someone sighted.
Plus very few of us had computers so it was inevitable that relationships simply died.
In the end, when Facebook came along, I added several of them and after the initial enthusiasm of getting in touch with each other by sharing old anecdotes, we went back to being strangers like before.
This also happens with class reunions organised thirty years later, but I admit that the barriers due to my disability prevented me from thinking rationally so I chose to join that social network, conditioned by old friendships memories which weren’t mutual at all.
Not too bad, I was involved already! If it’s not useful for friends, let’s use it for hobbies and work.
Games, pages, groups, I started to build up a nice network based on topics I followed and over time I felt it was a kind of “heaven”: people, associations or companies I was interested in were all there without me having to bother accessing their web spaces.
It became a frustration and time saver because I was always reading information from the same interface without having to deals with web accessibility problems which normally affect “traditional” web sites.
We used to make fun of each other, argue, exchange information and everything was in chronological order, until 2014-2015, more or less.
However, I started to realise how deceptive Facebook was, as soon as Zuckerberg introduced his algorithm: automated system gives visibility to sponsored contents, or posts with the most interactions, no matter if they are positive or negative.
From that moment on, content quality started to drop and the robot decides what is good and what is not.
Even PlusBrothers was born on Facebook in 2019 and the algorithm didn’t bother us that much, then from 2020 the pandemic with its effects on people locked in their homes, increased misinformation and online hatred exponentially until we too were caught in the middle.
But worst fears arose after Trump’s election at the end of 2024, because Facebook decided (at least in America) to relax restrictions to protect ‘freedom of expression’, at the risk, however, of clearing the way for online hatred and hiding those who in some way oppose Republican politics.
Advertising and political messages hiding interesting content? And I can no longer do anything about it? I want to get off, even though in Europe it seems that technology companies have signed an agreement against hate speech. But since haters have always been there, I don’t trust billionaires at all.
Looking back, should I have closed my Facebook profile in 2008 after being fooled by the fake story of old friendships? Probably yes, but I would avoid reasoning with hindsight. I closed it in 2025 and that’s fine.
Twitter, on the other hand, at least initially was different: at first with a 140-character limit for posts, and then 280, it was interesting and quick to manage because it was mostly text-based and at most there were links to shared articles.
I used to follow plenty of blogs and newspapers about information technology, but after a while advertisements were gradually rolling out there too, then hate speech became more and more frequent, until Elon musk’s takeover sealed the final goodbye.
Alessandro/Gifter: gay, HIV and social networks
Unlike Elettrona, I have never been a fan of social networks; in fact, I joined Facebook using my real name in 2016, just to leave some time later due to time wasting, useless junk contents.
The only ones I joined for the longest time were Twitter, from which I unsubscribed at the end of 2020, and Google+, which ended in 2019 but I stayed until 2013.
I always felt uneasy with the idea of sharing my life in real time with strangers, all the more so for HIV. Google+ and Twitter were full of gays I could talk to, although it was very difficult for me to trust someone on line.
I prefer forums rather than social networks as they’re more discrete and you can be partially anonymous, luckily they still exist so despite my real life contacts know about my HIV status, I would never like to expose myself to stigma over Internet.
The damn algorithm interfers where it’s not its business and I’m not going to show myself naked (literally) in front of the universe – I gave ELettrona a helping hand as long as she maintained Facebook page and by now that is part of the past as well.
I miss the old Internet where it was probably harder to search for information but you didn’t risk finding dating app advertisements while reading an article.
By the way dating apps are worse than social media! Just forget them!
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