I’ve posted about this before, haven’t I? I would have sworn I had, but in the last few days I’ve hunted for it a couple of times, without success. Maybe I did in in a comment, and the search function isn’t picking it up.

Oh, well. It needs doing, so I’ll do it again.

But first, the reason why this is on my mind again at the moment….

Are you on LinkedIn? I am, although I just noticed my profile is in serious need of updating (hey, I just now changed so it no longer shows my most recent job as “Communications Director, James Smith for South Carolina”). Actually, I’m using the word “need” loosely there, because after more than a decade dealing with LinkedIn, I have yet to identify its vital function in my life.

Anyway, a couple of days ago, I got an email from LinkedIn urging me to “Congratulate Bunny Richardson for 28 years at BMW Manufacturing Co.”

Well, that’s not a thing I do. Do you send people “work anniversary” congratulations? I don’t. I can’t imagine anyone expecting me to. I don’t recall any time in my life when I expected anyone to send me such congratulations. While I’ve had jobs I loved, I didn’t set up candles on a cake or anything when my anniversary date rolled around.

But if I did do stuff like that, I’d have had no objection to sending Bunny such a message — under normal circumstances. I worked with her for years at The State when I was in the newsroom (so, pre-1994), and she was an assistant managing editor. She was a pretty nice lady for a newspaper editor, and I generally got along with her pretty well.

But these aren’t “normal circumstances,” so I still wouldn’t send her one. That’s because Bunny died of cancer back in 2015. Yep, eight years ago, God rest her.

This of course is another reminder that I need to stick something in my will, or somewhere, that provides the login info to all social media, this blog, email and accounts with various businesses so that someone can deal with them when I’m gone — post some sort of announcement, at least.

But that’s not what I’m writing about today. That incident reminds me that I do not like LinkedIn — a rather dry and unenjoyable medium that people in the business world all think they have to be on, rather in the way journalists and political professionals actually do need to be on Twitter.

It brings me to this Top Five list of Worst Social Media Platforms. Although that’s a tad misleading. They’re not necessarily the worst in the world. More like “Worst Major Social Media Platforms That I’ve Actually Used.” And this is not a ranked list. I dislike each for different reasons, which make them hard to compare to each other. The numbers are there just to make it more obvious that there are five. Anyway, here’s the list…

1. FACEBOOK — Actually, were this a ranked list, this would probably still be at the top. That’s because it’s the biggest, and the one I have to deal with the most — it’s inescapable. And therefore my feelings about it are stronger. But this is, I’ll admit, mitigated by the fact that there are some things I like about it — it’s great for easily sharing pictures with family and friends, and it’s quite valuable for finding living people when you’re building a family tree.  Otherwise, I don’t like it, and here are the Top Five reasons why: 1. The posts don’t appear in temporal order — what I should see first is the most recent posts from my “friends,” and that does not happen. One consequence of this is that I see something on the platform, and want to go back to it later (to blog about it; to show it to someone, whatever), and can’t find the blasted thing. 2. They keep messing with it; every time I think I’ve got the platform figured out, they move things around — most inconvenient. 3. It’s a lousy place to put links to my blog (which was why I initially got really involved with it — to promote blog posts), because unlike Twitter it’s a terrible place for political discussions — it’s a different, broader kind of audience (I finally stopped putting blog links there; non-political friends and family weren’t there for that, and weren’t sure how to react). 4. It’s destroying the country, because everybody’s on it, and unthoughtful people accept what other unthoughtful people post as “facts,” and so Donald Trump was elected president in 2016. 5. On my phone and iPad apps, you can’t grab a URL to link to something on FB — they want you to “share” it only within their ‘verse (you can link to it from a browser, but I’m not always on my laptop).
2. LINKEDIN — OK, I’ll be briefer from now on. I first got on LinkedIn when I started working with ADCO, on the basis of being told this was essential in the business world. It isn’t. I think I’m still waiting for it to be useful, even once.
3. INSTAGRAM — I hate to include this one, because my grandchildren love it. But that leads to one of two things I don’t like about it: I find it hard to find the things my grandchildren post, partly because of the design of the platform, and partly because they have this one way of posting things that apparently makes them disappear, like the posts on Snapchat. The other reason is bigger: You can’t right-click (when on the laptop, of course) and “save image.” To a blogger like me that makes this platform next to useless.
4. SNAPCHAT — For the reason stated above. If I take the time to write something, good or bad, the last thing I want is for it to go away. The most wonderful thing about the Web, and especially about blogs, is that you never have to include in a post the most horrible, stupid, wasteful part of news stories in the dead-tree era — background. Back in the day, many news stories, those regarding developments in ongoing, complicated stories, were often 80 percent background — just robot copy you’d already published dozens of times. Why? Because otherwise, the reader had no context for the new part. With the Web, what you wrote before is still available to the reader, and all you have to do is link to it (and oh, how I love hypertext links).
5. TIKTOK — No, I’m not talking national security issues. It’s not because it’s the social media version of a Chinese spy balloon. It’s because of the way it has promoted and standardized the most execrable esthetic and journalistic trend of our day — vertical (portrait-mode) videos. They’ve made it so popular that recently YouTube has started aping this disgusting nonsense, in a feature called “Shorts” (a misnomer if ever I’ve seen one, since they should be called “Talls”). If I were to tell you all the reasons this is awful, my TikTok paragraph would be longer than the rest of this long post. But I’ll mention the worst — a vertical image, usually concentrating on a single human being like a full-length mirror — completely shuts out all context, making it impossible to see what its happening a foot to the left or right of that image, or even where the action is occurring. At the same time, it gives you more of that person than is necessary for conveying any useful information — and more often than not, shows empty space from the top of the person’s head to the ceiling. That’s all I’ll say about this particular foolishness. I’m forcing myself to stop now…

And just so you don’t think I’m nothing but negative, there are social media I love. I love Twitter — and sincerely hope that Elon Musk, who doesn’t get it, fails in his intense efforts to destroy it. I also enjoy Pinterest, up to a point. I like looking at the pictures. I just wish they’d dial back the recommendation algorithm a bit. Just because I like one Marilyn Monroe picture doesn’t mean I want to see nothing but Marilyn Monroe pictures.

Also, I love YouTube. But I also hate its destructive power, which in some ways comes back to the Facebook problem. And again, that’s because of the recommendation algorithm. Hear about it from a guy who helped develop it, Guillaume Chaslot…

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