🌻20 years of social media
I quit social media in November. Here's how I got there
Helloooo friends I am home sick and am in the sickness-limbo where I’m not sure if I’m getting better or just have finally found the right concoction of over-the-counter medications that has allowed me to regain consciousness for the afternoon. Work-work sounds too much like work and not enough like rest, but I can certainly snuggle up on my couch with my laptop and work on a Funkyard for ya.
There’s so much we could talk about! But today I want to talk about social media, because I’ve been totally off it since November, and telling everyone that I think I have quit it for good, but I’ve changed my mind. Buckle in, this story spans 20 years.
You’ll often hear me say that I’m thankful I didn’t have social media as a teenager. The popularity contest that is the age of 13 is certainly bad enough without having a tally of “likes” keeping actual score of who has the best outfits, the most friends, and the most adoration of their peers. I am truly grateful that I was able to survive my preteen years without any of it being posted online.
For me, it all started with MySpace. It was high school, I was 16, and it keeps me up at night knowing that if I could just remember my username I could possibly use the Wayback Machine Internet Archive to look at my profile from 2005. (It was not rockysstardust, my soon-to-be screenname. I feel like it was maybe something punny about bananas? annaisbananas? ugh!) I had some sort of blog around then, too—Xanga? Geocities?—also lost to time.
MySpace was amazing. You could decorate your profile with some basic html (useful intro coding experience in an era when teaching kids to code wasn’t a thing yet), pick a song to play when friends visit your profile, and post all your best digital camera selfies and trying-to-be-artsy photos you took of your friends at the park. I’m pretty sure I had the same profile picture for the duration of my MySpace reign, which, at risk of embarrassment, I will share with you—courtesy of my backup external hard drive. Timestamp, November 10, 2005; filename, “mspc.”
Now, when it came to fostering unhealthy social interactions among its teenage users, MySpace had one glaring feature: the Top 8. Every profile had a space for you to showcase your top 8 friends. Yes, you must choose—and rank!—your 8 favorite friends, and share this ranking publicly. Keep this page updated at all times so everyone knows where they stand. And be sure to check your friends’ pages to be sure you rank where you think you rank. If not, *~*~*~dRaMa~*~*~*
Within a year or two, which is eons when you’re ages 16 to 18, we had Facebook. According to my photo archives I had joined by August 2006, when it was only freshly open to high schoolers, and someone with an account had to invite you.
Early Facebook was also amazing. It was mostly a place for inside jokes with your friends. Although this vibe is largely gone from the platform, I do recommend other Facebook old-timers walk yourself directly over to facebook.com/memories for a lovely recap of what you posted “on this day” in years past. If you were anything like me, it’s a lot of one-liners that are really only directed at your roommate or whomever you were spending the most time with that day.
If you ask me, this old way of Facebooking was terribly charming. And this was the design: The prompt for each post was “[your name] is” and you just… said what you were up to. Anna is sleeping. Anna is soo ready for Friday. Anna is sick of studying for this test. You might even prank a friend that left their laptop open: Anna is pooping the biggest poop ever! Muahaha!!!1
Also, during these early years, any time you met someone new, you would friend them on Facebook. My Facebook account holds a massive collection of truly a lifetime of friends and acquaintances. Circa 2010, your “Facebook friends” was not at all a curated group, it was everyone you had ever met. It was your entire kindergarten class from 1995 and also your barista from yesterday. I have over 1,000 Facebook friends and have met them all. If someone unfriended you, they may as well have slapped you in the face in the middle of the school cafeteria. Everyone was on Facebook, so much so that fifteen years later I can still name the two peers I knew—ever—that were not. (CP and MT I know you are not reading this, but hey, thinking of you.)
Now it’s Feb 2010 and we’re nearing the end of college, which means—you guessed it—LinkedIn has entered the chat. In those days, LinkedIn was just a glorified resume, a place to connect with your professors and your rich uncle in case someone, someday, might stumble upon your profile and want to give you a job. (OK, I guess it’s still that today.)
Although I had jumped on MySpace and Facebook (and LinkedIn) probably as soon as they were on my radar, I held out on both Instagram and Twitter for some time. Instagram was for artsy kids that thought they were photographers or poets or food critics or something, and Twitter just didn’t seem necessary—it was just Facebook again, but with fewer features.
Twitter got me first, in 2013. It was gaining a lot of popularity among ecologists at the time, and we, now grad students studying to be ecologists, were eager to follow the trends. Twitter was allegedly “important” for “networking,” and I blame my friend CZ 100% for my joining when I did.
It would turn out that I loved this next era of social media, the glory days of #ScienceTwitter. It was not a place for IRL friends, it was a place to interact with people with your shared interests. For me, this meant a little bit of people sharing their research or talking about #scicomm (science communication), but mostly it was people posting, say, memes about plant-insect interactions that they made in MS Paint, bad puns about gar, and photos of their home prairie gardens. It was garlorious. Peak social media for me, for sure.
Instagram finally got me in 2016, over a decade after its launch. I was at a friend’s bachelorette party, and everyone* was posting their photos with the weekend’s hashtag (#LastFlingfromAtoV) and I wanted to participate. My first Instagram post was that night, June 10, 2016. (*Fact check says, because social media keeps receipts: One other friend was posting. I guess HB’s peer pressure was strong that weekend.)
Apparently I was sold on it because within THREE DAYS I had made a second Instagram account to go with my blog and budding science communication career: @plantpeopleblog. It’s still there! And looking through it now… it’s actually kind of good! I kept it up through January 2018—the semester I graduated.
I did, ultra briefly, consider TikTok. It never stuck. I joined October 23, 2020, posted six whole videos including this gem, and had probably deleted the app by the end of the year. By this time, Instagram had already added reels, so perhaps it felt redundant. Facebook was losing steam among my closest friends (but still the platform of choice for a few important people, keeping me there), and Twitter was alive and well.
It was probably 2021 when things finally started to shift, because that’s when I started to pick up work in the content marketing sector—some of which involved creating social content. Sounds fun, no?
Although I’d threatened to quit social media countless times before, this brought my first real glimmers that maybe social media wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. It wasn’t that getting paid to do your hobbies ruins them (although that can happen)—rather, the more I had to actually participate in wannabe-influencer* culture, the further social media got from what I actually liked about it: the social part. The friends part.
(*Not calling any clients “wannabe influencers” in a negative way, that’s just the game you play when you’re trying to do social media marketing.)
Suddenly, I’m writing posts for other people and having conversations about brand voice, splitting hairs trying to be relatable but professional, funny sometimes but never unserious. I’m tracking engagement and seeing hard numbers that show that putting more effort into a post doesn’t lead to more engagement, and that more engagement on a post doesn’t lead to actual action. I’m creating spreadsheets of which posts get the most likes and clicks and trying to figure out what it was about those posts that I can use to write new posts that will get more likes—not just for my clients, but also for myself, to get more business as a freelancer. I hate it.
All the while I keep thinking, you know what would REALLY get engagement? “Anna is pooping the biggest poop ever! Muahaha!!!1” But no, somewhere along the way we decided that’s not what we’re doing here anymore.
Meanwhile many of my actual friends have become lurkers—they’re scrolling TikTok but not posting anywhere—and the few that have continued to post are sharing beautiful, highly-curated photo streams to Instagram that I could never emulate. My Facebook algorithm now only shows me a handful of folks, with preference given to, it seems, whoever has spilled the most ink in their frustrated rant about current events.
Everywhere else I look is influencers: strangers who have, bafflingly, quit their day jobs, turned their living rooms into studios, and now spend their days churning out videos that look natural and effortless but are actually huge amounts of effort to produce. How am I supposed to grow my own business, and help other organizations grow, without a video production team? Even if I could, would it even work?
By this point, I am grumpy about social media in general. Perhaps my age is showing. Kids these days! This place isn't what it used to be! I’m posting less and less for fun, on any platform, with the occasional burst of self-promotion because I feel like I have to.
By 2022, Elon Musk has taken over Twitter, renamed it X, and changed the algorithm so that my #ScienceTwitter friends and I never see each others’ posts ever again. That community left the site in droves, trying out other platforms like Mastodon and eventually landing on Bluesky. I joined these, too, but my heart was never in it. The fall of Twitter seemed like such a clean break, and I had already been seeing the cracks in the system. Why rebuild?
Finally it’s 2024, and I am ready for a professional change, hoping to return more to my #plantpeopleblog roots after years of drifting away. I spent about six months launching my new “content marketing for conservation” consulting business, Ampliflora. I worked through all sorts of grow-your-business professional development opportunities, and everyone seemed to agree: Use social media to grow your brand. It’s simply how it’s done.
Being in marketing, this, on its surface, made perfect sense.
For the first time, I started to intentionally use LinkedIn. I drafted posts in advance, planned out my content calendar, tracked engagement—by this time, I knew the drill.
But also by this time, I had an increasing suspicion that these social media efforts would accomplish approximately nothing. But I’m A MaRkEtEr don’t I BeLiEvE iN mArKeTiNg??
I stayed at it for a couple of months. But 100% of my engagement on LinkedIn seemed to be coming from other writers, other freelancers, other communications consultants. Other people who had also been told that they needed to be on LinkedIn if they wanted to get work. Hmmm. Meanwhile, the people that might actually hire me? They’re not even on LinkedIn. I’m talking, profile doesn’t exist, or exists but with 10 connections and a gray silhouette where the profile photo should be. Executive director of a small conservation organization is not really the LinkedIn type.
I’ve been yelling into the void.
So, real talk, as a marketing tool, I’ve never seen results from social media. Not for myself, and not for clients I’ve worked with, either. It seems to me that unless you’ve got a huge advertising budget and/or an ultra-creative 23-year-old working full time making TikToks, social media is just not going to accomplish much of anything. At least not directly.
Successful influencers post a video that looks like they’re alone in their house, taking a selfie, but in reality they have a production crew just off camera. Meanwhile Barbara is mad that two tweets to her disengaged followers didn’t sell 1,000 tickets to her event. Why did anyone ever think that would work! I feel like I’m taking crazy pills!
Social media marketing is like if I walked outside and started shouting in my street about Ampliflora. Maybe a couple neighbors would come see what the noise is. Maybe some would come chat for a while, maybe some would even become my friend—but these are my neighbors. None of them are potential clients. They don’t even know anyone who is a potential client. I may as well be trying to sell rocket ships. HEY! ANYONE ON MY STREET WORK FOR NASA??!? HEY! HERE’S FIVE THINGS YOU DIDN'T KNOW ABOUT ROCKETS! HEY! HEY!
Then, finally, last November, as election season ended, I got the kick I needed to throw in the towel. I’d already been in a rather anti-politics season of life (that could be a whole other post), and this last year, I was on a major quest to not let election rhetoric phase me. I was largely successful, even through election day.
But in the days that followed, I could not believe the nasty posts, the vitriol, the hate people were posting. “If you didn’t vote like I voted, don’t speak to me ever again, don’t even look at me, you’re evil!” Yeah, no, I’m out.
I deleted all my apps and didn’t look back.
…The plot continues in part II: 🌻 In defense of social media