Media personalities are better follows on most social media platforms because they are generating content in a specific area for a living. I am not just following a person I trust, but that person is likely to spend 80-90% of their time writing about an interest I share.
Individual users on social media tend to post about 2-4 subjects in equal measure to cover that same 80-90% of their posts. The result is I have far less overlap between their posts and my interests.
Over time, social feeds become some combination of noisy and toxic when following people I like which dilutes the amount of my feed that is about interests I have.
This is similar, but distinct from so-called filter bubbles.
I remember forums fondly because although they were not 100% on topic, there was a community constructed around common interests. I knew what kind of stuff I’d read when I popped on a forum, and even off-topic posts tended to share baseline common knowledge and references built off those interests.
It’s in this spirit that I’ve started to explore Reddit seriously for the first time in a while. Twitter is not a happy place. Facebook is not a happy place. Instagram is nice, but I find discovery to be difficult. Reddit offers an opportunity to curate an interest-driven internet, focused on areas that don’t make me feel bad.
I still use an RSS reader. If there were more original blogs I could follow, it would build the same thing I’d like to see on Reddit. But blogging is not as popular as it once was. It’s discovery and social layer is broken. I’m hoping efforts like Micro.blog could turn that around over time.
Until then I’ll continue to try and find ways to read about things that make me think and make me smile and make me laugh. I want my experience with the internet to be a lot more like my experience with podcasts.