Why I prefer search over social media

The current narrative around social media does not quite capture what I think is wrong with these platforms. Social media are not just a good concept that happens to be corrupted by financial interests of platform owners. I think the whole idea of letting other people push information to you is irreparably flawed.

Networks are oppressive

Did you ever wonder why people feel uncomfortable in small towns and villages and prefer large cities instead? It's not about the jobs or access to services. It's the anonymity. In a small town, everyone knows you, watches you, and gossips about you. Inevitably, people use their extensive knowledge about you to manipulate you, to meddle in your life, and to coerce you to conform to their expectations. There is no way to avoid people you don't like. You instead end up waging little wars with local bullies. Position of power often offers decisive advantage to one or the other side and the whole community soon degenerates into rigid hierarchy, a pecking order. No wonder people associate large cities with freedom. Nobody is watching you. Nobody is meddling. Bullies can be simply bypassed. So many problems are solved with anonymity.

I feel the same disdain for social networks that I have for small towns. Connect with family, classmates, and colleagues? Small town. Find friends? Join communities? Yeah, sure, and get pressured and bullied by arrogant people. Rate and comment posts? That just invites social pressure. For me, joining the network is just asking for trouble.

You can of course try to use the social network like a big city. You can make new and varied contacts and you can change them often. The social network will however make it harder by surrounding you with your current contacts. Even if you manage to reach outside your local group, the social network will enable and encourage the small town crowd to follow you everywhere.

Everything becomes a TV

It looks like I am not the only one with disdain for social networks. Most people, it seems, have abandoned the social aspect of the platforms. They now just passively consume content there. Social networks thus became social media. They now focus on content instead of people. Social media have two kinds of users: publishers and consumers. Publishers are a small community of polished professionals posting content with prospect of monetary gain. Consumers are the silent masses scrolling through the content.

While social media could just allow users to subscribe to whatever they are interested in, that would incentivize publishers to convert every popular channel into a firehose of spam. Social media thus came up with algorithmic news feeds (timelines, channels). While algorithmic news feeds are more resilient against spam, they remove all remaining agency from consumers. All that consumers can do is to rate content and hope the algorithm will infer their taste.

What I want to say is that social media did not replace the oppressive small town networks with big city system. They instead converted the platform into some sort of a TV. Using social media is akin to sitting alone in a living room, watching whatever the TV offers at the moment. I don't know about you, but I definitely don't have time nor interest in watching some TV channel.

The smell of money is everywhere

I don't like the smell of money. That's probably the reason why I am not a billionaire yet, heh, but let's stay focused. Social media reek of money. Influencers and social media stars do it for money. They want to be popular, because it gives them larger cut of the advertising revenue. They include sponsored content in their posts. They promote their own stuff as well. They sell attention to third parties. And then the platform itself inserts its own ads on top of that.

Maybe you already understand why I don't like this, but maybe you are deep in the consumer culture and you are wondering what's wrong with money and ads. The problem is in what the money does to people. Everyone is a super professional actor, playing their role perfectly. Authentic human interaction is gone. Human nature and vulnerability are gone. Hobbyists doing niche stuff purely for fun are gone. Not entirely, of course. There are still normal people posting content on social media. But the predominant culture of social media is that of business, not civil society.

Dirty business

Publishers on social media aren't doing it to give me something or to help me. They want something from me instead, usually my money. The whole environment feels hostile. Everyone is after me, looking for an opening to grab my wallet. Or worse, in the case of political campaigns, to take my freedom or dignity or to take advantage of me to further their own agenda.

Of course, the fastest, most efficient way to earn money is to steal it. Publishers cannot physically reach into my pocket, but they can lie. And they do lie, mislead, and distract all they can. User's attention is also subject to theft as publishers have learned to game the algorithmic feeds. Click-baiting, rage-baiting, and negativity are all a consequence of the financial motive rather than a flaw of the algorithmic feed.

I would draw the line at addiction though. It's incorrect to say that social media are addictive. Addiction requires some chemical substance that physically alters the brain. Social media cannot do that. We don't want to call every bad habit an addiction, because then everything would be an addiction and the word would lose all meaning. The dopamine story is a pseudo-scientific nonsense that portrays collective economic problem as a personal medical problem. I suspect such viewpoint is actually advantageous to social media, because it directs intervention towards individual users instead of the platform itself. See the misguided minimum age policies for an example.

Content graveyards

Social media now own our cultural heritage. As if this wasn't bad enough, social media are continuously shredding old content. While I am sure the old content still exists somewhere in some internal archive, it ceases to be accessible once it falls out of people's feeds. Social media discourage internal links, especially to old content, so unless there are incoming off-platform links, old content becomes unreachable in the Internet's link graph. Even where search function is provided, old or niche content often doesn't make it into search results. Social media resist archiving by third parties (like the Internet Archive), especially now that they are trying to sell their (stolen) content to LLM vendors. When a social media platform ends operations, owners would rather bury the content than release it freely. Social media are thus like content black holes. They attract, absorb, and destroy content.

Even the current content is accessible only in limited ways. Many platforms hide content or its substantial parts behind login. This makes the content inaccessible to search engines, LLMs, and archives. Registering and logging in can be quite an ordeal, not to mention the actual content can be wrapped in a frustrating user interface, because there's money to be made by dragging users through mud. Many people, including me, just avoid this entirely and the content is as good as dead to us.

Video

In the above context, this might seem like a nitpick, but we are all short of time and media format thus matters a lot. Since social media became a sort of personalized TV, publishers increasingly favor videos to deliver their content. This is true even for fundamentally textual content. There are videos where a guy talks like he is reading an article and sometimes shows a picture or a short video sequence that could have been embedded in the article.

I seriously don't have time for that. I used to quickly skim headings, highlighted text, and figures in articles. These days, I just paste the whole article into LLM prompt and ask for a summary. Sometimes I ask followup questions or check relevant parts of the article, but I never read anything top-down. Videos force me to watch everything from the beginning to the end, including ads, which I can filter or skip in textual articles.

Serious news sites are now the same

Some people still think that "serious" media are an alternative. But in my experience, traditional media have all the downsides of social media. Depending on publisher, you get propaganda, advertising, tracking, paywalls or login walls, click-bait and other attention stealing, and content locked in videos. Serious media are just a more expensive, less varied, and politics-focused version of social media.

Regarding RSS and Mastodon

I have been recently reminded of RSS. It's very old-school. You have to manually subscribe to blogs or other sources. You then get unfiltered aggregate feed in chronological order. Mastodon is a more convenient version of the same workflow, but you are limited to content from other Mastodon users. Both are purely chronological, manually curated, mostly textual, and non-commercial. RSS is completely anonymous. Mastodon requires an account, but it is much lighter on tracking and stalking than most social media. RSS is designed to support arbitrary off-platform content sources, which usually get archived by the Internet Archive.

RSS and Mastodon look like they have most of the benefits of social media without any of the drawbacks. So why am I not using them? This is the point in this article where I shift my attention from implementation flaws to fundamental flaws of the news feed concept.

Information diffusion

So how do I get news and discover content and new information without news feeds? I have a very simple routine for that. I just stumble upon new content and information. I start by being proactive. I search, ask LLMs, and follow links. This of course requires me to know what questions to ask. But I see enough content this way to make it probable that any noteworthy information reaches me one way or another even if I don't ask for it directly. This unexpected content shows up everywhere: search results, LLM responses, random articles I read, and opensource code. We can call this process "information diffusion" or "information osmosis".

Trading speed for quality

Information of course spreads much more slowly via search, LLMs, links, mentions, and other diffusive channels. It can take months for important news to reach me. For example, I have learned about ChatGPT only after everyone else already knew about it.

The upside is that information that does reach me has been reviewed and curated by a lot of people, possibly millions already. And it's not like the shallow reposting on social media that generates irrational manias, scares, and fads. If someone has taken the time to integrate something into their workflow or content, it is bound to be something important, useful, and functional. Any initial issues have been already discussed and resolved. In case I encounter any issues myself, there's going to be a lot of related articles on the topic that I can use.

Organic relevance

Another upside is that the content I discover via diffusion is highly relevant even for niche topics. Since I tend to search for and read content that is relevant to me, I also stumble upon relevant new information. New information that reaches me via diffusion naturally matches my interests. No need for a fancy algorithmic feed. I get long-tail content advantage of social media combined with reliability of old-fashioned news.

Resilience

Information diffusion is immune to many ills of news feeds. It's anonymous and yet personalized and decentralized. If numerous people integrate something in their lives or work, it's unlikely to be propaganda or advertising. Negativity is largely filtered out. All important content is duplicated by numerous authors on diverse platforms, continuously reproduced, and likely archived, which makes it very durable. Content formats are varied, allowing everyone to pick what they like. Compared to information diffusion, news feeds are remarkably fragile.

When speed still matters

News feeds are still useful where timeliness is important. I mostly use news as an early warning radar. If Russian military is on its way to my town, I sure want to know about it before they arrive. If there's going to be a regression into autocracy in Slovakia, I want to know before the borders are closed. Governments love to make sudden, unpredictable changes in laws that can bomb out a business or personal life. I need to know about them before I get fined or jailed for breaking them. Aside from threat monitoring, I currently use news to follow developments in LLMs, because these have high impact and need to be integrated quickly. I am going to continue to use news feeds in these exceptional cases, at least until LLMs mature enough to be able to monitor primary sources per my instructions.