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It has been a tumultuous couple of months in the social media landscape, to say the least. Changes to some of the internet's most beloved platforms are happening on an hour-by-hour basis, causing many of us to question our patterns of social media use and make some adjustments—on both a personal and a professional level. It's been a little destabilizing, but also kind of exciting, right?
So, devs: who are your favorite DEV community members thinking out loud about social media?
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Join in on the #FollowFriday fun by @mentioning your favorite author to follow on the topic of social media (and letting us know why you love their posts!) ⤵️
Top comments (6)
I also appreciated this thoughtful comment from @crowdozer in an October conversation about our social media intakes:
Oddly enough, Discord is the social platform I spend the most time on. Me and many of my close friends and their close friends spend a lot of time talking, posting, chatting there. Collectively there's maybe 20 heavily active users with plenty more slightly active or inactive. For us it works because we all spend a lot of time at our computers, so we're pretty much always available to just chill in a voice channel, talk, stream, play, etc. I like it because it's a relaxed and semi-private space. It's like a virtual living room, more or less. Usually everybody is bringing in the content they like most from other platforms too, like twitter, tiktok, etc
I used to spend a LOT of time on facebook but over the past few years, I noticed my posts are few and far between. I think my last FB post was over two months ago, and it was just a re-share from the "your memories" thing. I don't even use the messenger except for one group chat to keep in touch with some people outside of the aforementioned group.
The closest second for me is twitter, but I only use that to scroll through memes to repost into our discord or follow updates from people of interest I'm interested in (usually gamedev or softdev studios).
For the most part I really don't like being on facebook or twitter. Too much of it is ads, attention bait, or clout/snark farming. Particularly I can't stand facebook's "laugh react anything I don't understand" culture (twitter has the same thing more or less, just in different form). It's something that seems to bleed into most open social "zones"; discord is no exception, but it's easier to avoid them when you can join and leave those "zones" rather than being algorithmically placed into them. Or you can just restrict them to your friends.
Over the past few years, discord has done a good job catering towards this type of "virtual hangout" approach at creating social zones. I can think of a million imaginary horribles they could implement ruin their platform, but I couldn't tell you which would have the biggest impact on me.
Gotta shout out @nfrankel for this very cool Twitter-to-Mastodon solution that one-ups the functionality of moa.party:
Preparing to move away from Twitter
Nicolas Frankel ・ Dec 14 ・ 7 min read
Thanks a lot @erinposting 🙇♂️
This will come as no surprise to longtime DEV users, but you can always count on @ben for thoughtful insights around social media and its evolution:
Will Instagram kill photography?
Ben Halpern ・ Dec 15 ・ 2 min read
The origin of anything unique won't be destroyed anytime soon. We might be bored watching the same type of photos but unique thing always blow our minds.
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