Why I Don't Go on Social Media So Much Any More

It's funny how it happened. I got busy in real life with various family things, and I didn't have time even for my usual check in at least twice a day to Twitter. I never got it on my phone -- I don't even keep my phone on a lot of the time, I would come read it on the website, and contribute various links and comments, usually about the fatuous social media gurus skillfully being skewered by Amanda Chapal, and those Bam-flogging Silly Valley A-listers being challenged by me, and of course SL, often from Second Lie. I had joined the good fight against "The Twitter Gone Too Far," which amounted to a Pownce exec (Twitter's competitor) bashing Twitter for not getting rid of a stalker she had had prior to Twitter, and trying to gin up attention and a stampede to nerf the TOS to enable more heavy-handed interventions against people that simply should not be followed -- and if you can't stand them popping up in your vanity feed, don't have a vanity feed.

When that was over, then Twitter stopped working and began generating its "Fail Whale"...but then I was busy at work...we were supposed to go over to FriendFeed and join Scoble and his 20,000 close personal friends over there, but I found it more cluttery than Twitter, which is dirt simple and interesting -- but time consuming. The Fail Whale doesn't bother me because the system is down -- I'm totally hardened to such scaling problems by Second Life. What bothers me is that I can't get paid on Twitter.

Twittering and following Tweets remind me of the time years ago when I played a game with the kids looking for pennies on the sidewalks, with the theory that if we looked for pennies, we'd find dimes, and if we found dimes, we'd find $10 bills. That worked...about once; we did find the $10 at Filene's Basement once. At a certain point, however, after days and months of searching, you realize that have 27 cents worth of dirty, rusty pennies just isn't worth the trouble to wrap them...

Even so, I started Twine, which I never really got finished looking at and creating. I became a...a...something at Fast Company. An innovative partner? I signed up for Small Worlds. I signed up for another world which I completely forgot about and misplaced. Time passed, I was busy at work, and it was nice outdoors, and suddenly I realized OMGOD I forgot to go on Facebook. For days. Weeks. I arrived to find C.C. Chapman absolutely plastering the place with Coke ads. He had made a little Coke widget. I got the widget and filled it with all my social effluvia. I made my own special personal "like" which was articles I liked from The Atlantic.

After Twine sent me about 30 daily digests I never opened, I realized I had forgotten to go back to Newscred. This was really a great, fun site that I hope will succeed -- it involved pos- AND neg-rating, which I always favour, and it also involved writing criticism of news sources, rating the source itself, not just the articles. Hubdub -- yet another site with a game-y aspect to rating or actually guessing the outcome of news, didn't have that ability. But somehow, labouring away on an essay on newscred about...was it the Uighurs? I realized: "I'm not getting paid. This is work."

C.C. Chapman is getting paid to be on Facebook. I'm not. Scoble is getting paid to be on Twitter or Friendfeed or Qik.TV. I'm not. The Twine people have their VC money. But not me. SmallWorlds is selling rugs and lamps for your smallhome. But I have to pay and didn't figure out the job thing yet. All of these things are fun or even immersive -- but you don't get paid.

And I want to get paid for being on social media like I get paid in Second Life -- that's all there is to it. I find myself going back to Second Life again and again to wait on my customers, of course, but also, rather than sitting and doing battle on Twitter for free speech, which seemed more important than the JIRA for a time, I think, no, I will go back to spending time on the futile JIRA where at least I get paid. I polished up my rentals, added more content -- there's a terrible business slump now with the land glut and slowing in memberships so it's a huge challenge to stay in business -- but you have the promise of compensation. The cash drawer rings -- literally, with a little kaching sound.

I can write my blog about Second Life; I can talk to friends; I can hold interesting meetings; I can explore various topics and countries and ideas and participate *and I'm paid*. That is, I can monetarize my time on line because there's an economy, there's a buy-sell interface, and I can manipulate and create stuff, or, if I'm one of those "what about the people with no talent," I can buy or commission other people's work and rearrange it. It's all good. Money comes in the door, when time goes out the door. On social media, there's just the sucking sound of all my work, all my time being co-opted by Google or YouTube or Facebook or whomever -- and I'm tired of it.

Really, several years into all these things, it's time for them to start getting paid themselves, and getting us paid, too -- for all this incredible outpouring of content creation and services and community organizing we do -- or at least, the 2 or 10 percent of us who bother to contribute time, talent, and treasure to these VC-funded start-ups.

So that means they have to start charging some subscription money, and putting ads on their site, and making customized versions of their thingies, and selling licenses to their software for schools, and doing whatever it is they need to do to make a buck -- and then figure out how to cut us in on it, too.

That means they have to have Google Ad Sense stuff, they have to have even the old Coke Paint the Town Red sort of stuff, or whatever it is that can work. Micropayments. Participation in affiliate programs. Something. Seriously, they need to work on this. I'm not going to go on working for free.

There's this received wisdom that everyone stampeded off their blogs to Twitter, off Twitter to Friendfeed, off Friendfeed to Brightkite or Twine or wherever the next big thing is. But that was artificially induced by people paid to be on these sites and keep them going when they sag -- fluffers. What real people are going to be doing with them still isn't clear.

There's another fake meme that these services lead to jobs -- but we all realize they only lead to jobs for phony social media gurus, whose business model works like this: pay $695 or $495 or $1195 if you aren't an early bird to come to my conference. Then, afterwords, pay me $195 for the guidebook with the super secret tips for search engine and social media optimalization. Then come to my special Leaders Seminar. Etc. It's all a shill, and it's like diet powders or those late-night get-rich schemes that involve taking other people's foreclosed homes and flipping them.

I seldom see any real jobs happening, though I realize that the churn of all these VC-funded and government or foundation-funded projects with widgets makes a sort of world where there are jobs. It all seems pretty fragile.

Once you realize that some of this social media stuff was basically cooked up, welded, and deployed to raise money for Obama -- and shitloads of it -- you're left with a kind of bad taste in your mouth, even if you are basically for Obama becoming president, as I am. Why? Because it just feels like *too much* money that is only going to things like cynical YouTubes like the one passed around Sluniverse.com "Why I'm Voting Republican" filled with tendentious and wacky stereotypes rather than persuasive argumentation. It's like the Youtubizing is just something to bind and keep entertained all those $25 donators to Obama on Facebook, and hold their ADHD attention until November to make them vote. There's a hollow feeling to it all; it's lacking in substance. Obama's victory seems like such an inevitability, you wonder why these folks are pointing and laughing and ridiculing and harassing "Republicans" and "SUV drivers" and "born agains" who are likely to lose.

At some point, even those companies will start to feel a recession -- something like the failure and crash and burn of Yahoo's executive structure and perhaps the entire company itself could start to have a knock-on effect. Then we'll only be left with a few giants like Google, and all these start-ups that live in a mirage that they are feisty and independent, whereas all they are, in fact, are cheap R&D outlets for Google to watch and take over eventually.

Meanwhile, I want to get paid. Even $5. Even in the form of some knowledge or insight that really helps me in something that I really do to get paid -- and there is precious little of that on the Twitters and the Facebooks.

Comments

[Ann Otoole]

I guess if you can't get a job anywhere else because you are basically unemployable for whatever reason then there is good money coming out of George Soros' pockets. I doubt a lot of these paid site operators really care who wins. They just write what they are told to write and they get paid for writing it. A job like any other.

Too bad the US citizens have devolved intellectually to the point the gobble up whatever they want to hear. Oh wait.. it has always been like that. It is simply more profitable now that the population density has increased.

Don't cross the DNC. They will come after you and hurt you in many ways.

[Prokofy Neva]

I'm hardly unemployable, as I've been employed steadily my whole life since I was 15 and am employed at a number of jobs now in a field unrelated to all this. As are most people who aren't geeks and not in Silicon Valley. My point is this: that social media, for all the work and content it asks us to create, is not monetarizing our time online like Second Life does.

For all the writing, linking, connecting, education, bug-hunting, etc. that we all do, there should be more compensation.

If I want to socialize with real-life friends and family, I just don't need any of these things *really* because I have email or telephone that I don't have to bat through a thousand networking geeks to get at.

If I feel the overwhelming need to socialize with strangers on topics like Obama or global warming or virtual worlds, they are all fine up to a point, but blogs and forums in that particular niche seem more rewarding than the widgety places.

I put a lot of work into all of them, and for a time did all the Facebook things you were supposed to do -- I joined groups, sent fish to people's aquariums, changed my status daily in witty and thought-provoking waves, tried to beat a friend I hadn't seen in 25 years at movie quizzes, sent Scrabulous offers that never got played, bit people, knighted them, put up photos, wrote graffiti on their wall, sent them love, hugs, drinks, links, put up my favourite books but didn't have time to review them -- and so on. And the net effect is that I have, oh, I dunno, 100 friends, 20 of them whom I know in real life and see some other way most of the time, and the rest of whom are actually acute strangers with whom I have little in common except some narrow thing like "Tibet" or "Virtual Worlds" or whatever.

Marshall McLuhan said the newspaper was the warm bath you climbed into every day, predictable, all-surrounding, etc. Now this warm bath has moved to the social media sphere.

[John Lopez]

I have been puzzled by the social media obsession for accumulating vast numbers for friends, most of whom wouldn't cross the street to say hello in the real world. It really seems like obsessive compulsive collecting that is totally unrelated to the concept of "friend".

I notice this in SL as well. When I give a talk I always get a flurry of friend requests. I don't mind accepting them, but them seem a blunt instrument to apply. When I see someone who says and does interesting things, I far prefer to toss that fact (along with the supporting blogs, research papers or whatever) into my research notebook rather than pretend we are buddies somehow.

A real world "friends list" is far my useful in my book, both for personal and business purposes.

As far as monetization goes, social networks pretty much are forced to resort to advertising. Nothing wrong with that, but there are far too many networks and far too few advertising dollars at the moment.

As far as *personal* monetization goes, most individuals use social networks as loss leaders to generate interest in themselves. I'm not seeing an easy way for someone to make much direct cash, except in the case of business leads trading services (which pay per valid contact and use subscription fees not advertising dollars).

I did find your idea that you don't work for free amusing, considering the amount of free content you have put out there in the past. I found this especially precious after you threw a fit that the IEEE had the nerve to charge for peer reviewed research.

[Prokofy Neva]

I put out lots of free content and will go on putting it out on my chosen venues because for me, it's a vocation -- or an avocation. I'm pointing out a generic problem that isn't just "my" problem or "failing" but an inherent difficulty in expecting everybody to play on these things endlessly, for free, endlessly filling them with content, working hard to write essays, beta-test, link up and connect people, etc. and watch how only a very tiny handful of people can monetarize it. It sort of pokes a big hole in its theory of equality and democratization.

Remind me what this IEEE issue was again, with links to you claim? In fact, I think there is an awful lot of overcharging in this field. Like, someone will have some really obvious marketing paper or some survey that hardly has anybody in it, and they'll want $2000 US for it. It's how they monetarize THEIR time, and I respect that, but they price out many people.

It's often the same people who go around saying "information wants to be free," which is why I came up with my adage, "Your information wants to be free, mine is available only for a consulting fee, however."

[Maggie Darwin]

Um...Obama is inevitable? I thought it was Hilary that was inevitable?

Not to worry; people who spend their lives immersed in liberal echo-chamber space, whether be it "progressive" social media (DailyKos? HuffPost?) or the local urban Starbucks are always shocked to discover that flyover country (i.e. anyplace that doesn't have a huge Democrat-controlled "social services" infrastructure...like maybe Bay City?) hasn't voted the way all their 20,000 closest friends did.

That's how they can tell there was massive fraud at the polls... :-)

[John Lopez]

The article was $15; probably not out of most peoples price range. (The IEEE services world wide audiences, and so keeps prices quite reasonable by US standards).

I am a member of the IEEE simply because, while it is fun to watch the blogs roll by, for correct information one needs gatekeepers and fact checking. Most importantly, verification is done in subsequent research. One of the things often missed about science is that initial results are suspect until reproduced.

[Gigs Taggart]

I think that this is the point that most SL-alikes miss. No one except 14 year olds with no money cares about a VW with no economy. The economy is why most of us are still in SL.

I know I'd probably not have logged back on a second time if SL had no economy or money system.

[GeekMommy]

I was wondering why we had seen less of you on Twitter... and have to say, it's a damn good reason.

There is something to be said for questioning why creators of the socmed sites are getting millions in funding while we are providing their content for free.

But why buy the cow... yes?

Still, it always amuses me when people say things like "you get the service for free, why are you complaining?" because the truth is, without our use, they don't have a product.

[Fleep Tuque]

This is a great post and came at a perfect time when I was just thinking about these issues myself. The economics of social media is a big question mark in all kinds of respects, but definitely in a personal economic sense.

Thanks for posting.