Breaking up with social media, again.

For all the supposed perks of building a social media platform sold to writers, there are enough serious downsides that have lead me to leave for good. In the early days of social media prior to the injection of AI slop and comment bots, social media made it easy to make new friends and keep in touch with real life connections.

I mainly used these sites for professional purposes. I would regularly search Twitter and Facebook for leads on publication calls and open mic announcements. I would post about my upcoming appearances only to have the posts throttled, but the engagement with photos of myself or from my birding or hiking regularly tended to be about 30-50 people out of 800.

In recent years my feeds were filled with posts from pages and groups that I did not follow while I would frequently miss out on important life announcements from people I actually cared about and performers whose shows I wanted to be informed about.

The main reason I left Facebook is because of the inability to fully opt out of messenger. While I liked chatting via IRC and ICQ when I was a teenager, as an adult I have had to greatly limit my typing due to carpal tunnel syndrome.

Despite numerous posts over the years stating that I have no interest in privately chatting with people and that emailing me was how to book me for an event, I would still be deluged with daily messages containing memes, unsolicited criticisms, and solicitations from men who use these platforms like a dating site, but never bothered to read on my profile that I am married and not interested.

There's a reason why many notable people hire people to manage their social media. The sheer amount of messages, the blurring of boundaries within parasocial relationships, and the entitlement some people show towards public figures all becomes overwhelming for one person to deal with and still have the solitude necessary to create art.

Some people abused their access to me by slandering me publicly to their followers, or harassing me privately, and when I would block them on one platform, they would stalk me and angrily message me on a different site demanding to have access to me again without any reflection as to why I may not want them to contact me again. I don't owe everyone access to me 24/7. I don't owe everyone a response. Being able to find anthology calls and network with other poets wasn't worth the toll it was all taking on my mental health.

Life is quieter now. I choose what media I want to engage with. I build music playlists to listen to when I take walks, and I rewatch movies that I enjoy instead of being served irrelevant short form content. I find it easier to concentrate on writing and reading about subjects that interest me. I don't feel the need to brag about every accomplishment, post photos when I go out in real life, or come up with a witty thing to say just to stay in the spotlight. My life is filled with less arguments, less judgment, and more time to focus on what really matters.