Replacing Social Media with Blogging
I was never a heavy user of social media, but over the past year or so I have been making a conscious effort to wean myself off it completely. By now, I don't need to reiterate all the downsides of using those apps, that would be beating a dead horse. I'll just say that I only used Facebook for remembering birthdays, and Instagram for comparing my life to acquaintances from high school and college that I will never see again.
I don't like the concept of a post feed. I don't want content shoved down my throat and I don't want to doomscroll. I don't want to curate a list of posts that show up when I open an app. I prefer to access content on demand. I want to deliberately think of what material I want to view and then navigate to it. Because of this, I have no desire for a news feed or subscribe/follow functionality. I just want to be able to bookmark users or pages so I don't forget them, and so I can quickly access them whenever I desire.
For those reasons, social media platform designs do not mesh with my consumption habits. I much prefer to just surf the internet in a web browser and bookmark things that I want to remember. I don't use RSS. I wait until I think about something I want to revisit. Or, if nothing comes to mind, I can at least start by checking in on the high-quality sources that I have saved rather than having to traverse a feed of varying quality.
But how will I discover new content? By surfing community-curated platforms like Bear Blog's Discover, HN, lobsters, etc.
But isn't that a content feed? Yes. The goal is to spend as little time as possible on the platforms and skip over anything uninteresting. When I stumble upon something worthwhile, I spend more time engaging with it and create a bookmark. As I build up my bookmarks, I have less need to visit the content aggregators at all. Then I only go there occasionally when I am out of fresh material.
Another important consideration is that blogging generally leads to a greater quality and variety of content than social media. Blogging does not suffer from artificial restrictions like character limits or customization constraints. Bloggers have greater creative control of their canvas. Sure, there is still plenty of shitposting and other low-quality stuff on blogs. Yes, bloggers still fall into the same trends like "here are my vacation photos" and "let me tell you about my New Year's resolutions." I'm not arguing that blogging is on the scale of scientific journalism or anything like that, but I think the median effort that goes into a blog post is greater than the median effort involved in posting a Tweet.
I'm not saying that social media and blogging are completely interchangeable. I'm not trying to virtue signal or act holier-than-thou. I know blogging is not for everybody and has plenty of drawbacks as well. I'm just writing about a change that I'm making in my life, and perhaps it can spur on some introspection about your own media consumption too.