As an elder millennial, my first real experience with social media platforms was Myspace in 2003. This was back in the day of AOL Instant Messenger, or AIM as we called it, where we would set elaborate Away Messages for when we were AFK, usually involving cringe-worthy song lyrics and Ascii art. We were all friends with Tom from Myspace. Facebook and Twitter were still distant dots on the horizon at this point. Those my age were more concerned with learning how to customize our Myspace profiles with autoplaying music and flashing banners, along other basic HTML tricks. This legacy led to a whole generation of web developers my age, who initially learned the ins and outs of CSS and HTML as a way of feather ruffling among our peers.
This was a unique in-between time in history. Social media was just in its infancy, and we didn’t have the continually connected world we have now. Popular smartphone tech was still dominated by camera flip phones such as the Motorola RAZR, with many still using the indestructible and ubiquitous Nokia 1100 and 1110’s. Instagram was to be one of the first major social media platform to be designed around phones in 2010. In the early aughts, though, being on social media still meant sitting at a computer. Often a shared family computer using a dial-up connection, leading to many a sibling argument over tying up the home phone line.
I signed up for a Facebook account around 2006 when accounts were made available to those without a .edu email address. Like everyone else my age at the time, I became obsessed with it for a while. I updated my profile frequently, “poked” my friends when they weren’t paying enough attention to me, posted photos that are now lost to time forever (or sitting on Facebook servers somewhere). It wasn’t the same though. Profiles were whitewashed and boring. There was no custom CSS or autoplaying music. This was right around the beginning of the social media revolution, and things were about to change dramatically in the coming years.
Fortunately, I checked out of the ride pretty quickly. I recognized that Facebook was making me miserable. Instead of the fun I had with Myspace focusing on how I presented myself to the world, and the self-expression that came along with that, Facebook forced you to focus on everyone else. Comparison being the thief of joy, I realized I was becoming envious of my friends and family’s posted lives. After maybe a year or two of being on Facebook, I ended up deleting my account. I’ve never spent any great deal of time on any traditional social media since then, except LinkedIn for professional reasons, and Reddit because of its pseudonymity and irreplacability for practical advice on niche topics.
My feelings from back then were to become backed up by science in the modern day. A meta study from 2024 on the impact of social media use on well-being found that “interactive, entertainment content, self-expression, and presentation” led to better well-being than passively consuming content. Most social media platforms have generally disincentivized creators in favor of content consumers though.
Meanwhile, doomscrolling platforms like TikTok and Reddit has become the new national pastime. Admittedly, I’ve had to cut back on my Reddit time, which at times in my life felt quite all-consuming, especially in the depths of depression, where lack of interest in other conventional forms of entertainment became the norm. And you could make an argument that Reddit has many of the downsides of other social media platforms. But I limit my use of Reddit to small, niche subreddits dedicated to my interests rather than consuming from the firehose of the algorithm.
Over the years, my absence from social media hasn’t really impacted me very much at all. I’m sure that may come as a surprise to some, but aside from some awkwardness when someone asks for my Insta and I have to tell them I don’t have one, I’ve been largely unaffected. I suppose I may have lost contact with some people over the years, but that’s only natural for anyone who makes it to my age. By contrast, what I’ve given up by largely avoiding the traps of modern social media is just increased noise in an already noisy life. I’ve found my own forms of self-expression online. The outsider approach has always felt more natural to me.
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