You Are Reflected in Your Online Behaviour

Regular readers will not be surprised that I have always had a strong sense of self, am critical and not easily swayed once I have made up my formidably stubborn mind. I am therefore far from convinced that you become the media you consume. That's why I'm not a very hungry caterpillar. I do think online behaviour is more susceptible to influence and reflects your real self more accurately. I think there's also some evidence that people are often more honest online and show more of their real self.

This post is occasioned by me deactivating both my Twitter accounts because it has been bought by Elon Musk, and it's a bit of a housekeeping exercise.

I am probably more careful online to make my behaviour consciously match my values than in person, strangely. I haven't had an Amazon account for several years, just because of its odious practices. There is nothing you can get on Amazon that you can't get elsewhere. I am happier using odd retailers if I can pay with Paypal.

I rather randomly chose Blogger as the platform for this blog and my other one and haven't really had reason to regret it. If Blogger ever did something that made me move it would be to a couple of blogging platforms based in France.

However I haven't really found a social media that I like. I am on Facebook but only for one group and literally use it for nothing else. I don't like how Facebook works and find it quite toxic. I have been rather ambivalent about Twitter - one handle was for tarot meditations as a spin off of this blog and the other was about politics. But I found Twitter also quite toxic with LOADS of very obvious bots.

I do miss being on Yahoo groups ages ago. Now there's a golden age that won't return.

But I think my happiest time online has been on Tumblr before the purge. In case anyone doesn't know Tumblr used to be a fun place full of artists and interesting people (if you know Birmingham, it was like Moseley online) but it's gone through a number of buy outs and successive changes to make it acceptable to advertisers. The one called the purge was to stop adult content being accessible without the protection of login etc. This was obviously on the way because you could access just anything on there. Unfortunately they scared off the sex workers, made the platform unfriendly to use but bizarrely allowed a bunch of Nazis to carry on on there. Absolutely bizarre.

The many users annoyed at the purge left en masse, and managed to make traffic to the site drop so dramatically that it lost a HUGE amount in value. I think something similar is planned for Twitter although I just did it on my own.

Unfortunately Tumblr isn't there to go back to and will obviously not last because it hasn't broken even for years and has become irrational. It's largely populated by people who use it to spite whoever owns it, although obviously they would be my sort of people. I did like when they banned the hashtag #me, though. That was insane.

Despite also not liking Zucker I do have an Instagram and like it. But it doesn't represent my anti plutocracy values so if anyone has any suggestions for viable alternatives I would be grateful to hear them.

And if anyone who's regular wants to follow each other on social media leave your email in a comment which I won't publish.