Welcome back to The Angle 👋 My new baseball cap arrived this weekend, which is apt because it encapsulates my status for most of May. I will probably only write one newsletter this month as I am OOO — unless I decide at the last minute to write a fun travel one.
There isn’t ever really a consistent theme to this newsletter.
Sometimes I write about startups. Sometimes I write about the media industry. And sometimes I write about my desire to nap all the time.
Writing about social media appears to be one of the few consistencies in my short newsletter writing career.
This time last year, I was complaining about being sick and tired of Twitter, while begging to try out decentralized social network BlueSky. (Btw whatever happened to BlueSky…?)
Some things never change.
I am now even more sick and tired of Twitter and I’ve just tried out a new decentralized social network called Farcaster.
Farcaster is a cross between Reddit and Twitter (X) with a Web 3 twist. Crypto publication Unchained asked me to look into the differences between Farcaster and “Crypto Twitter” and this is what I delivered.
The tldr? I liked Farcaster a lot.
And I can’t say that for most of my social media experiences this year.
I spend a lot of time working at home, alone. I like it that way, mostly.
Social media offers a brief reprieve from the loneliness of working alone. And boy has it been lonely this year.
Freelancing has required a lot more pitching than last year. Most of the pitches have been unsuccessful, which means more pitch writing and reworking (yay!).
Pitch writing is slow, tedious and I could cry when I am doing it — mostly because I know the endless hours of pitching will never result in an actual response.
It’s isolating because it’s just you, your creativity, your thoughts and your doubts.
To break up the monotony of pitch writing, I seek a lil dopamine hit every now and then; And usually that comes in the form of a refresh of Twitter or LinkedIn.
When I was staff reporter, I didn’t need this dopamine hit. I was too busy —there was always another source to chase or another story write.
But, as a freelancer, if no one commissions my work then there isn’t another story to write. Instead there’s just more pitches to write and we’ve established how soul sucking that process is.
So you wait, write pitch, send pitch, refresh social media and repeat.
Refreshing social media might not be so bad if it was useful like the good ol’ days.
But the algorithms now only want to reward highly engaged users, while all I want to be is a distantly engaged user.
I made the fatal mistake, a few months ago, of switching from the “following” feed to the “for you” feed — something Twitter continually nudges you to do.
And I’ve been on a binge ever since.
Twitter has fed me endless amounts of junk — a mixture of Taylor Swift discourse, sports news and media industry career change porn — and I’ve ate it up.
I know it isn’t healthy, but I still stuff my face with it. I turn a 10 second screen break into a five minute doomscroll. And even with guardrails in place, I still find my way back to the personally curated feed.
Only when I logged into Farcaster did I realize it was time to log out of Twitter.
Farcaster reminded me of what it is like to enjoy social media again.
It has a similar feeling to when I used Substack Notes for the first time. I felt free to post without consequence. I stumbled upon genuinely interesting and useful links, blog posts and discourses again (Twitter’s algo deprioritizes links, so you stay on the platform). And I even wanted to leverage my coding skills again and start experimenting with Farcaster frames.
A similar reckoning happened, years ago, when I decided to quit both Instagram and Facebook. I compared Instagram to Facebook and in Marie Kondo style asked which was bringing me more joy. I soon left Facebook. Years later, I compared Instagram to Twitter and asked which was bringing me joy. I soon left Instagram.
My relationship with social media is cyclical, fraught and complicated. I am sure what caused me to tire of Twitter will inevitably cause me to tire of Farcaster and Substack Notes.
Last year, LinkedIn sat in pole position as my favorite social network. Now Reddit has taken its place.
Social media networks want you to spend as much time as possible on them, while I just want to find a healthy relationship with them. And I am not sure if we will ever meet in the middle.
Decentralized networks give me hope that we might.
A decentralized social network, such as Farcaster, is interesting because no single individual or company is in control of its destiny.
The social graph is permissionless. If you don’t like how one app serves you content then you can opt to use another or create your own. Will that make our relationships with social media healthier or just divide us further?
Even if we view the content through different lenses, at least in theory, we also have access to the raw data, which is an improvement on the Web2 social world.
And there’s also mechanisms being built into Farcaster to reward creators for their content and time. Maybe social media would feel healthier if we were compensated fairly for our time and energy rather than exploited purely for a small, fleeting and artificially-created dopamine hit.
It’s scary to have logged out of Twitter. I’ve signed out on desktop. Hidden the app on my home screen (still partly accessible for work reasons).
I know that by actively not using Facebook and Instagram over the years, it’s been harder for me to build new relationships or maintain old ones. I worry that by logging out of Twitter people will forget about me when I am not present virtually. I worry that people won’t know me. I worry that I won’t find new story ideas or build my brand enough or hear about other freelance opportunities. I worry people will think I don’t care about their big wins because I haven’t liked their post or sent a congratulations message.
But I worry even more about how much time I am spending mindlessly doomscrolling on the app.
So I am logging out of Twitter for now.
— Kari
Image source: (George Pagan III/Unsplash)