What I am doing about social media

Like landlines, it was good until the scammers took over

I loved social media, but now I am mostly off of it. I have my LinkedIn profile, and I sometimes post to Bluesky (@annielogue.bsky.social) or search Reddit for restaurant ideas and tech support. Substack has its Notes feature, which I use, but it’s not the same. I have killed off my Twitter, Instagram, and Threads accounts, and I am scaling back on my Facebook use dramatically.

The good times are over.

My best social media moment? Sitting in a hotel room in Nashville during a road trip home from Florida, scrolling and trying to figure out what to do next, when I discovered that a friend from high school was not only in Nashville, but also, she was at a bar a block away from our hotel.

My worst moments? Learning how many people I knew were haters. I’m okay with disagreements, but not hate, and there’s a lot of it out there.

This is not the actual Chris Rock, and it’s on Twitter/X, which is problematic. The image is a screenshot, not a link to the site.

I’m pretty sure Chris Rock actually said that Facebook is the app that tells me which of your friends are racist, but I can’t find the clip. On social media, I connected with people I hadn’t seen in ages, stayed in touch with cousins I only see at weddings and funerals, and found some great groups of people. I also had to block and unfriend a whole bunch of people who were haters.

It’s strange how social media brings out the best and worst of people. I’m fascinated by how J.K. Rowling destroyed her reputation as a beloved children’s author. The world doesn’t need to know what everyone thinks about everything, you know? Especially when those thoughts have no basis in any expertise.

Back in the 1990s, there was a marketing program that put racks of postcards in bars and restaurants, usually advertising liquor brands. I was on the road a lot for work back then, and I would keep postcard stamps in my organizer, grab postcards when I saw them, and send them at random to friends. I loved it. It was a simple way to keep in touch and kill time at airports.

Shortly afterward, we all got phones, and that crowded out other things. It added new things, of course: technologies give while they take. But I think social media has taken too much.

Like I said at the beginning, I haven’t given up social media entirely. But I have cut way, way back. I paid for the Duolingo paid tier and am practicing my Spanish whenever I’m jonesing for some dopamine. (Turn off notifications, though, because that cartoon owl can be downright annoying.) I use the Libby app to get magazines from the library, letting me read great articles that aren’t served up by an algorithm. I put my phone away to charge early every evening.

I’m very interested to see how this affects my work and publishing in general. I got on Twitter at the request of my publisher and spent a lot of time trying to build a following, which I never did. For the last 15 years or so, the model has been to write articles, blog posts, and books, then push them out through social media. But if social media dies off, which it seems to be doing, how will people find out about new things? And how will this affect the work my clients pay for?

On the other hand, I remember traveling with a paper organizer, sending postcards, and using landlines. Everything changes.

I’d love your thoughts on whether you are staying on social media, if you are doing other things instead, and what you think the world will look like now.