Should we return to blogging?

 I've been reading a number of posts about changes to social media platforms that will, in effect, make them more media and less social.  There's a good summary of the changes on this blog:  The End of Social Media: Why friend graphs can't compete in an algorithmic world.

I've noticed that it's more and more difficult to connect with friends on Social Media.  It's why I left Twitter which always felt to me like shouting into the void.  When I had my "Tweetdeck" on my laptop, I could do a lot of filtering. Now? Not so much, so I ditched it for Instagram, where I could take photos and share instantly with friends and family... kind of "wish you were here" moments, but they weren't really in depth.  

I was a fairly early adopter when it came to social media.  I was on a number of early platforms before settling on (and falling in love with) Yahoo!360.  I resisted Facebook for a long time, moving to Multiply, which had an almost Yahoo!360 feel to it.  Both platforms allowed a great deal of customization, which was appealing, and no intrusive ads in the feeds.  The best part is, you could always find and read your friends, and there was a lot of interaction.

Now social media platforms are making it harder and harder to read your friends and boosting "creator" posts and advertising.  That's not what I come to social media for.  And I've noticed that sometimes it taks a few days before my friends see a post if at all, and comments are much fewer and discussions less in depth.  Some of that is the echo chamber, some of it the algorithm. 

In all fairness, I've noticed so called News pages on other sites (including MSN, Google, and Yahoo) no longer distinguish between ads, sponsored content, and option pieces but jumble them all together in "top news".  They do have small notations to tell you what articles are in paid for spaces, but they aren't terribly good at identifying all the non-journalistic content. 

I almost long for the days when social media was flooded with cat memes, because now it's flooded with crap passing as information.  And that flood has spilled over into the spaces where I talk to friends and relatives.  It's kinda like if I were on a phone call with my sister and a voice cut in to tell me that I could reuse toilet paper rolls to make cute planters, or to extoll the virtues of coffee enemas. 

Younger people seem to be abandoning social media in favor of smaller, tighter platforms which each cater to a different dimension of their social lives.  TikTok: entertainment, Snapchat: photoshare, Discord: private chat groups. 

I'm thinking about Discord now, which seems to have some interesting possibilities for even the older crowd, where it originated as a way to enhance online gaming experiences by allowing players to communicate outside the game. 

And I'm thinking of returning to blogging more.  Really, having a good blogroll of friends and interesting people, and keeping up on blogging seems to be the only way right now to have meaningful conversations online.  The problem is that so many people have abandoned it, that there are few left to have these conversations with.