I’ve been thinking about the various systems of the world around me, mostly digital, and my place in them. For instance, under a different name (a username), I’m one of Google’s top 10% of reviewers for pretty much every major category they track. I have achieved this mostly by writing clear, sensible, and informative reviews of three to five sentences that touch on all salient points of the business I visited. I fill out all the information I can, answer a question or two, and move on with my life. Sure, that seems like a lot, but when you consider how few places I actually go and how infrequently I actually go anywhere (unlike most of the US, I’m still actively aware that I’m living in a pandemic and avoiding any unnecessary risks in public, indoor spaces), I am writing maybe a dozen of these reviews a year. And that’s enough to get me into the top ten percent. In a completely different direction, I went back to a pizza place for the first time in many months and then got eight emails form the business (with no repeats) in the next twenty-four hours. I got more junk email from them than I got for Black Friday sales in the same time period. It was intense and unnerving. Made me want to never go back again because they seemed to sense my return and, rather than actually offering me things, keep trying to get me to spend money on them without providing any incentive beyond the exchange of money for pizza.

There’s a lot to be said about the purpose of services like Google Reviews, but I can’t help but think about the fact that I’m providing a lot of unpaid labor for this website/web service. Sure, this kind of advice and community knowledge is a significant part of the good that can come from living in society (and is a form of fairly removed word-of-mouth advertising), but it is not lost on me that there are now advertisements on google maps that point out specific businesses when the map is more zoomed out. Many of these even now include chunks of reviews beneath the pin when you zoom in a bit. This platform is extracting money from the process in a way that is entirely reliant on users like me and that users like me will never get any benefit from. Which, you know, is how pretty much all of social media works. The users are the entirety of the content. If you’re not paying to use something on the internet, you’re what’s being sold. Which isn’t a new or groundbreaking idea, it’s just something that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately.

Endlessly, spammy advertisements, though, when the only process involved is me being sent messages by a business that I explicitly told to send me messages about offers and deals (since I like pizza and love having coupons for pizza), are incredibly unpleasant. Especially there’s nothing of value in them because none of the offers or deals actually save me money or are specific to the email I’ve been sent. Sure, I’m not being exploited by a third party attempting to harvest every ounce of attention and value out of the entire system, but I’m having stuff I don’t care about thrown in front of me constantly. I can just delete the emails of course, but getting eight in a single day is more than I ever expected to get in so short a time. Sure, I got exactly one coupon offer I briefly considered before deciding I didn’t want it (since I JUST got pizza and the coupon expired two days after I received it), but it was still a bunch of unimportant junk that I can’t even remember a couple hours later because I did my best to ignore them after the first two made me realize I was just getting junk. I know I signed up for these, at least nominally since I agreed to use their website and participate in their rewards program, but I didn’t think it would cost me so much mental energy to do that.

All of which is to say that I’m off Twitter now. I mean, my account is still there and I’ll probably poke my head in there now and again, but I’m tired of seeing horrible things be advertised to me from incredibly racist and literal nazi accounts just because I’ve been blocking everything that advertises on the platform and this seems to be all that’s left to show me. It stopped being fun a while ago and I got tired of doing anything that might drive attention or clicks to that shithole now known as X. I deleted the app off my phone just for my own sanity and that seemed to entirely break my account on any desktop web browser, so now I’m just done. I can’t recommend you go there at all. I can’t say how often I’ll look, but I even stopped posting blog updates there. I still update my Ko-fi even though the only person who has ever sent me money on it was the friend who is currently no longer speaking with me. That’s how widely I’m willing to cast the net that is sharing my blog posts and I still think I’m not willing to waste my time on Twitter anymore.

I just don’t want to be a part of that system any more. It’s too soul crushing. I’m willing to continue doing google reviews because while I don’t get any money from them, it still creates something valuable for people like myself and those in my community (be they permanent residents or just visitors). I’m willing to ignore email pizza advertisement spam because I did, ultimately, sign up for exactly that and while every email might not be something I want, I am confident that one of the eventual emails will be something I actually desire. Twitter, though, or X as it has been renamed, just seems like a bad time. I wish more people made a complete swap to one of the alternatives, since it is frustrating to know that someone is still probably posting actively on Twitter despite the week between posts on almost every major Twitter account that moved to Bluesky. I just want to go back to enjoying my time reading microblogs from people I thought were interesting rather than having to seriously consider my moral stance on doing anything that might drive traffic and even a half a penny to that violently hateful asshat who bought the company that used to be known as Twitter.