Again, not Ron, but this made me reflect on my own social media experience.
I got fed up with Facebook and stopped using it about three years ago. Most people on my timeline seemed to use it to brag or draw attention to themselves. It breeds narcissism and I got fed up with that. I also think it’s a bit weird using it to ‘keep in touch’ with family and friends. I can, and should, do that in real life. Too many people still say to me, ‘Oh didn’t you know [important life event]? I put it on Facebook.’
Having discovered Twitter around the same time, I get on much better with that. As most people I follow aren’t my family/real life friends, and most of my connections are as a result of similar interests, it’s much more rewarding and much less self-obsessive. I feel like people actually have interesting things to say, and I’ve been introduced to lots of new things I might not have discovered otherwise. The exchanges are so short that I rarely get embroiled in an argument - only the odd one where a troll has sucked me in.
And Twitter is the only place I’ve been able to have actual exchanges with people/celebs who have inspired me, which is amazing
I can see how Twitter can become painful for people in the public eye, and perhaps that’s why a lot of those people quit. It must be irritating having to justify and explain things to arrogant people who think they know everything about how developers, inventors, producers, writers, etc work and why they make certain decisions.
I agree with Milan that it leaves you alone a lot more than other platforms (with a little tweaking of the settings).
I guess this forum counts as social media, too. I like the ongoing conversations on here, and it suits me that I can dip in and out of small, light topics and also get well into bigger, in-depth ones. And the community is way more mature than anything I’ve found on Facebook. That’s not to say there haven’t been a few times I thought about leaving, but in the end the things that brought me here in the first place, and the people that have become important to me, prevailed.