One Month Cold Turkey News - How's It Going?

It's been a full month since I gave up the News (hopefully forever, but at least until 2029.) It has not been easy.

Culling myself of my television news habit was the easiest one to break; While I still wistfully glance at the clock around 6pm - I no longer turn on the boob tube. Now my only brush with news on TV is the oft-interjected 'news updates' they slide in mid-show during broadcast television - football games especially. Since it's often boring, local & sensationalized news (another fire!) it's easily ignored on mute. Having posted one of my No News Is Good prints right below my television is a daily reminder to avoid it. Side benefit: the Mute button on my remote has gotten a lot of use lately.

I'm still training my Android phone on what news I do and don't want - but it's getting better at finding stories that are more technical or hacker in nature, and less inflammatory political crap. I've resisted carrying my digital leash around with me at all times, so I don't rely on it for news reading anyway. I'd tried to pick up using a 4G Nokia bar phone (actual buttons! tiny screen!) for a week to really make it difficult to do nearly everything, but threw in the towel quickly. Texting was hard, my contacts didn't transfer over (the numbers did, but no names!). I was glad to go back to the touch screen of my second-hand Pixel 5a.

Same old shit, different Domain

Social Media however, has been much harder to quit. I'd watched the membership numbers creep up higher and higher of the newest Twitter replacement BlueSky and jumped on the hype train. I saw it as another possible marketing channel for my t-shirt businesses, just like I'd abused Twitter initially. With Twitter, all of my followers were either Bots or Sex Workers - not customers.

However, Blue Sky is the same Fediverse looking feed I disliked at my Mastodon account (looks the same, too) filled with the same influencers who also jumped Twitter's sinking ship. As I don't actually collect 'online' friends, there's no one I know IRL or care about on BlueSky. I follow minor celebrities and esoteric bands and snarky commenters. They all gleefully repost up-to-the-minute news alerts in an attempt to get likes for breaking it to their followers. It's going to take some serious filtering to remove the constant News and Opinion posts on BlueSky, and I think I might have to simply avoid it completely. As it is a new service, scheduling posts isn't possible (yet?), and I'm unsure of how scriptable it is in the browser. If I can automate my (outbound) marketing messages and set it and forget it, it may still be a worthwhile avenue to pursue.

Unfortunately, all of my interactions with BlueSky have been joining in the deluge of snark and wit, pretending to get the inside jokes, and wasting hours speed-reading and falling deeply into this new echo-chamber that resonates with fury at the new Trump world we live in. Users post screencaps of banned Twitter converts who think that they can continue regurgitating hate on BlueSky, they make up lists of suspected Right-Leaning new members who might have voted for the Orange Turd, hoping others will block them all in solidarity. It's clearly liberal, and unwelcoming to the stupid. I welcome it, but loathe it too. I love the drip of dopamine, but not the wasted time to get it.

Cory Doctorow published it first and lays out the cyclic 'network effect', 'collective action problem' then 'switching costs' cycle that social media traps you in and calls out BlueSky for having no working Fire Exits (i.e. no easy way to leave quickly) as he rightfully holds off joining.

Shameful Attention Seeking Behavior

My impression of BlueSky is that much of the interactions feel like Reddit posts shuffled into the worlds longest unending card deck of opinions (filtered of any negative vibes via self-policing or silent moderators). All the reasons I dumped my decades old Reddit account were bubbling to the surface again; The people feel real, but act like they're invisible and anonymous. BlueSky's popularity has attracted the trolls, porn bots, and GoFundMe beggars. So many of the folks following me are of the variety that follow everyone they can find, hoping they'll get the same 'follow back', and bolster their unknown account to thousands of followers. It might work, but I don't condone this behavior, nor support it with the follow-back. It's just more Influencer Karaoke trying to build up a good sized audience before they do a out-of-tune solo performance singing someone else's one-hit-wonder.