🆕 Never Post! Leaving Social Media Roundtable

Friends! A new Never Post, just for you!

In this one, Georgia, Hans, Jason, and Mike discuss their experiences leaving social platforms behind.

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Never Post’s producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton and The Mysterious Dr. Firstname Lastname. Our senior producer is Hans Buetow. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholtzer. The show’s host is Mike Rugnetta.

On the last evening on this earth, we sever our days
from our trees, and count the ribs we will carry along
and the ribs we will leave behind, right here . . . on the last evening
we bid nothing farewell, we don't find the time to end who we are . . .
everything remains the same, the place exchanges our dreams
and exchanges its visitors. Suddenly we are incapable of satire
since the place is ready to host the dust . . . here on the last evening
we contemplate mountains surrounding clouds: a conquest and a counterconquest
and an ancient time handing over our door keys to the new time

Excerpt of Eleven Planets At The End Of The Andalusian Scene by Mahmoud DarwishNever Post is a production of Charts & Leisure

Friends, hello and welcome to Never Post, a podcast for and about the Internet. I'm your host, Mike Rugnetta, and this intro was written on Tuesday, December 3rd at 9:0:4 AM Eastern. We have a very special show for you this week. Me and the Never Post staff sit down to discuss leaving social media platforms. Not taking breaks per se, but the experience that we have all had in many different ways as internet users of a certain age of completely abandoning, or moth social media platforms and other online social tools.

So think Friendster, Gchat, Neopets, LiveJournal. What is it like to decide to no longer use those things? And how do we come to those decisions? But before we get to that, I have just a few bits of show news. 1st, we have an audience survey.

You can find a link to it in the show notes, and we would really really appreciate it if you took a few minutes to fill it out. It helps us understand what you like, and maybe some of the things you don't like about the show, about our member ship program and whatever other feedback you wanna give us. We would love love love to hear it. There's a link in the show notes. The survey is open until the end of the year.

So if it's still 2024 when you're listening to this, go and give it a click. It works great on mobile too. There's no sign in required. You love clicking little boxes and filling out small text fields. It's just it's really it's what the Internet is when you think about it.

Anyway, survey, we would love for you to fill it out. 2nd, since it's the end of the year, our release schedule is gonna be a little bit different. We're gonna have a regular 2 segment episode out for you on Wednesday, December 18th. On January 1st, we're gonna be releasing a special year end quiz show that we have been hard at work on over the last month or so. We are very very excited for you to hear it.

I think it is gonna be a ton of fun. Then on January 15th, as we approach the show's 1 year birthday, incredible, unbelievable. We're gonna be releasing a state of the podcast episode where me, Hans and Jason as a sort of like senior producers of the show, talk about how far we've come, celebrate our birthday, talk about how never post is doing, how much money we're making, what we're spending that money on, how our listenership numbers look, we can talk about what we learned from the survey, what changes we're gonna be making to how the show is made, and how membership is run over the next year, and so on and so forth. I think it's gonna be really interesting. We're gonna try to be really open and transparent about all that stuff so that you can know how we're doing and also maybe get a little bit of insight into like how the Internet sausage is made.

And then, we're gonna be back with a regular 2 segment episode again on January 29th. So to recap, that is this episode, then a 2 segment episode, then a quiz show episode, then the state of the pod, and then another 2 segment episode. They're all really good. I'm excited for you to hear all of them and I think it's gonna make for a great end of the year slate of programming. Okay.

That's the show news that I have for you this week. Let's find out why Jason knows that he needs to leave Facebook, but he just can't bring himself to do it. Joining me in order of how long I assume the line at their local post office is during the holiday season in ascending order are Jason Oberholzer, Never Post Executive Producer.

Hello, everybody. Happy holiday season from Stockport, New York where the post office does not have people working in it most days. Is that true? Seemingly whenever I show up.

Does that mean there's no line or an extremely long line?

No line. They are correct to have left.

2nd, Hans Buto, Never Post, senior producer.

Hello from Minnesota. Roseville, Minnesota post office is probably my local, if not the Saint Paul one on Arlington. I think that's right.

I haven't been in a long time, but yeah. Georgia Hampton, never post producer.

Hello from the Windy City, Chicago, Illinois where the post office is either blissfully serene and lovely or, like,

there are blood sacrifices happening in there. And I never know which it's going to be.

And me, I'm like, I'm the show's host. I have waited in two lines in the post office, over the last 2 weeks, including one this morning and both of them were out the door. Mhmm. As you all know, our listeners, we have been conducting an audience survey and the responses have been really fascinating so far. Thank you to everybody who has, filled it out and sent us your thoughts about the show.

One thing that we've seen a few times, and I mean this literally like a few times, like maybe a dozen times at most, is that in the round tables, particularly, it seems like all of us on the show, the staff, share a specific view of the Internet. Like, our collective perspectives, and experiences are somewhat aligned, so I thought that it would be interesting. As a group of millennials, who have experienced, altogether, the Internet as roughly the rise of, and who knows now, maybe the fall of social media, that it would be interesting for us to talk about, what websites with social components. So I think that's social media, but also like blogs with comments, maybe forums, those things also count. Talking about which of these places we have left and why.

I wonder if what we can do here is develop a kind of like taxonomy of the reasons why, there might be like a mass movement off of, or just like sort of growing disinterest in, certain websites where you have social experiences. And I imagine that like, the reasons will be really varied. Right? Like our friends leave, the sites close down, they become unpleasant to use, they get crowded with ads, all this other stuff. And I think that this is more than a little inspired by recent events of just the massive exodus of people off of Twitter.

A lot of whom are moving to threads and a lot of whom are moving to blue sky, which has been skyrocketing in popularity over the last several weeks. And I'm sure eventually in this conversation, we'll get to that and we'll talk about it more in-depth. The first thing that I really wanna know is, in order, of post office busyness, so Jason Hans, Georgia, what do you reckon is the first platform that you left and why?

So I've been trying to guess when I sent my last AIM message. Mhmm. And I think it was a year or 2 into college, so that would place it at 2006 ish. There was still some functionality. I remember those 1st couple years, especially keeping up with friends from home, but at a certain point, Facebook messages superseded it as the place to reach out to folks for a quick chat, then shortly followed by g chatting in your Gmail client.

I think I was next on the ladder. I think it's probably Myspace, which per Georgia's excellent, conversation last episode, which you haven't listened to, you should go back and listen to, about customization. It felt too young, and then all of that became Oh. Became fulfilled by Facebook, which was much cleaner, more efficient. I looked for the standardization as being a marker of a place that a 20 something belonged.

I never did MySpace. Did you all do MySpace?

Oh, yeah. Very much so.

To me, the functionality of MySpace was easily covered by LiveJournal first and then Facebook, between the 2. So I never went there. And I suppose like you, Hans, I did feel it certainly had, like, a it seemed to have a juvenile quality by the time I stared at it.

What about it made it juvenile for you?

Well, when you're holding it up against the austerity of a live journal,

you can't Has anybody's ever that might be a com a unique sentence.

We didn't. I I think yeah. I agree with Hans. It was sloppy. It was all over the place, sort of customization melting different widgets into different widgets, and I looked at it as a tangled mess that I did not feel the need to participate in.

It was also, like, gamified in weird ways. I didn't, like, understand the showiness of the top however many relationships you were allowed to have. 8. I like to listen to my music, not an odd little web embedded snippets.

Yeah.

Yeah. It's too much.

The whole the whole concept of it is not the way my brain works either. Like, choose your top book. Choose your top whatever. Like, those, I found those always incredibly sharp. Choose your top friends.

Oh, god.

All that

stuff felt

so stressful to me, and I just did not enjoy it. So when Facebook came along and you didn't have to make any of those choices, so I just felt a lot. I've always had anxiety posting, so even making something has felt too, revealed.

And And so, Mike and Georgia, I assume you've loved MySpace, and I rush into its defense.

I was that juvenile

who was on MySpace Which is great. Again.

Which is great.

Oh, yes. It was it was, like, built for me. Even though it's interesting that you say that it felt juvenile or, like, too young because when I was on Myspace, I was very aware of how young I was and that I probably was too young to be on Myspace. I mean, I had a Myspace when I was, like, 12.

I think I think legally, too too young by 1 year. Right?

Legally, I was in a dangerous place. Yeah.

You had yeah. Yes.

You should've been on Club Penguin at the time.

Listen. I was on Neopets.

Neo I was gonna say

Neopets only. I was about to ask you, Mike, if Neopets would count.

Neopets absolutely counts.

Then let's talk about Neopets. Yeah.

Because oh, yes.

So when did you leave Neopets?

When did I leave Neopets?

Is is that your first exodus?

2023. What do

you leave, buddy? I'm I have to do, like, reverse math.

That's called subtraction.

Okay. Alright. Everybody relax. Bullying on the call. I will leave.

Georgia took out an abacus. So

Wow. A green visor? Okay. Yeah. Do you.

Probably 2,004, 2005. Because I think I left Neopets to basically go on to Myspace, and then Facebook just like burst through and everyone moved there. But Neopets, my first love.

Alright, Mike. It's time to come clean.

Yeah. I've been thinking about this for a while. I tried to go back to find my Myspace, and I can't. I can't locate it.

They got rid of, like, all of them.

Did they? Okay. That makes sense.

You want me to call Justin?

Give him a call. Alright. Let's get Tom on the line.

Yeah. Where's Tom?

I would have used Myspace, I think, principally in college. There is a chance that I had just started to use it in high school, but so that puts it pretty late, I think, as far as, like, platforms that I used. I think the space that was, like, social that I left first was this like online only text adventure game that I played for a few years in high school. That was mostly Australians that a high school girlfriend of mine introduced me to that I like made friends on. That I left probably when I went to college.

But Jason, your mentioning of AOL, I think is is maybe more right because that was really behaved like a platform, as I understand it at least, in that it had sort of like multiple uses, multiple social spaces, multiple ways to like talk to people and see what was going on on the Internet, in a conversational way. That was something that definitely when I went to college, I just left behind. I I think probably the last time I signed into my AOL account, I did not think to myself, this will be the last time that I sign into my AOL account. It's just like overnight my habits changed because the my access to technology changed. I got access to, you know, what at the time we would have called high speed Internet, but would have been abysmal would be considered abysmal now.

And so I was just like I didn't need that portal anymore. I could just access things much more directly, but I think the first one that I left that, like, is of a modern group is gotta it's gotta be Myspace. It absolutely has to be. Mhmm. And I think it's a similar story where whatever it was that I was using it for, I either, like, didn't really need to do that anymore.

I remember thinking, like, oh, MySpace is where bands are. That's where you go. Like, when you do music, you're on MySpace. And like, I do music. I study that.

I make music and stuff. So, like, I got to have a MySpace. And there was a moment at which I was like, oh, no, this is something else now. This is for Georgia.

Yeah. I was gonna say, that's when I showed up.

I say, get out of here.

But I didn't think about leaving it. Yeah. I think the first one that I purposefully walked away from was Friendster. What? There was What?

What about Friendster?

Friendster, which was Hans, we went to college together, was big on Bennington campus. It really was. Really was. Thought about it. Because it also it predated Facebook by a couple years Yeah.

If I remember correctly.

Yep. Or like yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

It was available more widely. Yeah.

Yeah. And that was one where I definitely remember thinking, Facebook just does all of this now. I don't need a Friendster account.

Friendster was one of those I I completely missed Friendster. What break me up a piece of that. Like, what was the vibe?

If I remember it correctly, and again, this is, really filtered through a lot of haze of, the last 20 years or so, that it was a way for you to map your real life social graph on the Internet. And so when Facebook came along and became a way for you to do that and to also share media, which at the time the most significant idea of the most significant, like, instance or use of that was pictures from parties.

Right.

Right? Like, you know, in 2,004 or whatever that you were on, I at least, was on Facebook because it was fun to collect all of my friends, like Pokemon cards.

Mhmm.

And then, look at all of the pictures from the parties that weekend. Yeah. Be tagged in them and tag people in them and so on and so forth.

And in that pursuit, Facebook killed web shots for me.

I do. What's I don't know web shots. What's web shots?

Web shots was a photo album creation and sharing platform, not as slick as Flickr, which is the one that sort of lasted into the social media era because it figured out its own way to sort of develop social graph and currency, and the cool kids were there. Web Shots was the one for the masses where you could put your party pictures into an album and then share that out, And Facebook just did that and did better.

I mean, there's also something to be said about I mean, Facebook obviously being this, like, herald of a new era of social media, but specifically that it's like everything exists there. Because to your point, Mike, I also joined Myspace largely because I was like, oh, music is there.

Mhmm.

And that's why I'm joining. Whereas Facebook, I was like, I don't know. Every everybody's here Mhmm. And I can poke them.

So it seems like we might have sort of 2 different kinds of leaving in the taxonomy so far.

So I have 3

that

I have written down. They are to sort of like Hans' point of, this isn't for me anymore. Like, I don't feel welcome here. The crowd has changed. Yeah.

You know, my favorite bar has become a country bar. I gotta find somewhere else to go. Yeah. No hate for country bar in general. Just sort of, like, as a general metaphor.

Don't don't

When you're a metal head,

you're

not going. Exactly. Yeah. So I don't feel welcome here anymore. General, sort of like, change of either access technologies or habits being different.

So, like, you you go to college, you don't need to sign into AOL anymore. You just have the internet as a thing that your computer does. And then your point Jason of like, I'm here in this place for a particular feature. That feature is now done better somewhere else. And so I'm just gonna leave this behind and I'm gonna go to where the thing that does what I want it to the best is.

Mhmm. I'm curious on after Georgia sort of like talking about Facebook as this looming shadow. What is all of your relationships to Facebook at the moment? Georgia made a face, so I'm gonna call on calling you first.

I mean, I just use it for marketplace. Really? Like, it's somehow, that has just withstood the general exodus of most of my friends out of using Facebook in any meaningful way.

Hans, what about you?

I have not been on Facebook. I deleted my Facebook years ago now. Why? It had an accumulation of stuff I didn't feel connected to because there was a just a gang of photos that, like, I don't wanna be associated with. My network had gotten really big.

There was no one I was gonna add who I actually knew or was close to. I never accessed it. I never went there. And that was when we were really starting to realize how toxic Facebook at the time, Meta Now, was becoming and it felt less and less appropriate to be a part of that.

How'd that feel? It felt great.

I downloaded all of the data. I have it. I have never opened that data. I have never even desired to look at what's in it. And then I hit the delete button, went through the delete processes, and have not thought about it since.

You never feel like you're missing out.

Not ever. It's not a thing that gets mentioned to me of, like, the conversations on Facebook, you're missing it. It that that does not feel like the case.

I think about that all the time. No one ever talks about Facebook. No. Yeah. It's sort of shocking.

My mom hi, mom.

Hi, mom.

Because she listens. Hello, Kathy. Still uses it and connects with people and keeps in tabs and, like, appreciates the fact that she can still, like, literally use what it was for, which is to, like, connect with people from high school. But outside of that, I never hear it. I never hear the words except in a sort of, like, metaverse toxic sort of way.

I, I am so jealous that you were able to do that, Hans.

You you can too, Jason. You can.

You can too. I don't think I have the strength.

Why? What do you feel requires strength? So

I'm paying attention to my feelings right now, and I'm trying to see where the avoidant block comes in.

It's good. It's good.

And the avoidant block has something to do with nostalgia. Speaking of avoidance, I have a generally avoidant relationship with nostalgia. I don't like taking pictures of things. It puts me in a fearful state that I'm missing the moment and over documenting in it and that makes me feel bad and yet I really hope that there are pictures of things that I have done even though I will not do any of the work to make them myself. In Facebook, there lies right now a history of me throughout the years documented by other folks in pictures and a bit of text that I, like, avoid because I every time I go in to look at it there are fewer pieces of media because more people have logged off or gone private and the things that I've been tagged in are depleting and that causes me some deal of pain to watch that catalog of memory deplete.

And yet, I don't do, because of my avoidant nature on this, the thing that would help, which is run whatever script downloads all the pictures of me and everything I've ever been tagged in and then shut Facebook the fuck off. Instead, I just feel bad, and I close that tab and move on knowing that just somewhere out there, there's a rotting Facebook profile of my past, and so I can't walk away from it. I am not yet strong enough to face it.

You you are Dorian Gray, and Facebook is your picture.

Yes. I think so. So Facebook derives me some pain that I avoid finding closure to.

I totally get that, Jason. I think, for me, it was the I had the opposite reaction to that where I was being tagged by on photos and things. I was, like, that's a terrible photo of me, and also, I don't want to remember that moment. I don't want to be fed that moment. I did not enjoy that moment.

And now, these people who are peripherals of peripherals of peripherals are starting to tag me in things and have access, and I start to become aware of how much data was out there and how many, like, personal things I had put out over the years. I got freaked out by that rather than nostalgic for it.

See, I feel like I exist somewhere between you 2 because I feel like to me Facebook exists as like a a yearbook of my life until I just stopped using Facebook.

Way to put it, Georgia.

Yeah. Because, like, I I think there's maybe a single hands worth of people in my life who actually still use Facebook, actively engage with it regularly. But none of them are actually tagging me in anything. Like, I I'm kind of allowed to just fade into the background and I'm not bothered. I'm not involved in anything.

I'm not brought in to whatever my friends who are still using the platform are doing. So it really is just this frozen piece of media that has photos of me that go back to like 8th grade, which is kinda nice because, yeah, like, I can I remember a while ago, we were sharing pictures of ourselves from, like, high school? And when I was sending you guys those photos, they were all from Facebook because I just don't have them.

Yeah. That's fair.

And I think that's kinda nice. I mean, I feel sort of neutral about it. But, yeah, it I think I've been allowed to feel neutral because I am not continually being brought into a conversation I'm not having.

I think, for me, the other reason that I was able to give up Facebook was I sometimes hold on to social media because I have to book people and I have to reach out to people, and I have to, like, know. And it it there there was a moment where, like, I held on. There was a good, like, year or so where I held on to Facebook, so that I could have an avenue to be able to get to people. And when it became clear that it was deeply weird to get a message from someone on Facebook trying to book you for a professional thing, I was, like, I can finally let this go. I have LinkedIn.

I have Twitter. I have other spaces that I can make connections that are actually gonna be regarded professionally.

I have a I can finally let this go story with Facebook too. Because are you

on it? Did you delete yours? Are you on it yet?

I don't tend, at this point, to delete social media. I usually park it. So, like, I will sort of get rid of everything and do as much locking down of it as I can and then just never log into it again or only log into it, like, once or twice a year to kind of maintain like the security checks and all that other stuff. Facebook is roughly that for me. I had to use it, every week when I was making YouTube shows, to post about the shows on the show's Facebook pages because this would have been in the era of the internet when doing that was an important thing.

Like having a Facebook page for your piece of media that people could go and follow and like or whatever, and have conversation on was like part of part of what it was. And the one of the shows that I made, like we would even take comments from it and talk about them on the show. So it was like part of it. And that was also during the time where Facebook became, I think, for a lot of people there, including mine, awakening to the idea of privacy as it relates to the Internet. That if you put some portion of your actual self online, then it is then monetized and exploited by, companies including Facebook and to all of their partners.

And that that is for multiple reasons, something that you should try to prevent as much as possible.

Big thumbs up.

And so when that show finished, I was like, holy shit. I don't ever have to post on Facebook ever again. And then the pivot to video happened. And my client, like, gangbusters, and I made, like, maybe hundreds of videos for them over those years. I didn't have to post any of them, but I did have to like AB thumbnails and titles and do like media tests and so I'm just interfacing with the Facebook machine and it just made me feel so insane.

Especially in the wake of all of the political stuff around Donald Trump. And like, misinformation, political advertising on Facebook being a thing that just hijacked so many people's brains and I was using those tools. Right? Like, I'm using the exact tools that are being, discussed in mis and disinformation research. And it makes me feel I'm like looking at my hands and I'm shouting out damn spot.

Yeah.

You were in the sausage factory making sausage.

The pivot to video ended. In my mind, it's like the week. The week that this client was like, okay. We're done. We're not gonna do this anymore.

And I was like, great. On to the next thing. I went to a party. One of the best parties I've ever been to. An illegal scavenger hunt, in the Waldorf Astoria.

Multiple people nearly arrested. Great. Yeah. People who were there are listening to this and I just wanna say, I'm not gonna say anymore. And I met someone.

I do not remember their name. I met someone at the end of this party. We had a great conversation. We, like, became friends. We were, like, friendly a little bit, and we were like, oh, like I'll find you on Facebook or whatever, like we can we'll catch up, like we'll go and get a coffee sometime.

And I signed into Facebook, like, maybe 3 weeks later, there was a friend request from them and then a message from them being like, well, what the fuck is your problem? Like, you were so nice and so ready to be friends and what? Like, fucking chopped liver over here. You can't accept a friend request? And that's the moment where I was like, I don't need this.

Gotta go.

I do not need any version of this. And I have only signed into Facebook when absolutely, positively required by my life for some reason or another since then. And I think it's been like 2 times. Horrible. So excited to leave it behind.

But that's that's such an interesting example you give because I do genuinely feel like Facebook was uniquely brutal in regards to that kind of friendship politics in a way I've I've never seen matched on any other social platform since then.

It's like the the the MySpace top 8 is, like, kind of passive aggressive. Yes. Facebook really gave a lot of avenues for, like, aggressive aggressive. Pure violence.

Yeah. So, by way of example there, I probably log into Facebook 1 or 2 times a year, just because it feels like it's been a while. And like I said, I have not closed it down. And there are lingering friend requests there occasionally from very well meaning people. And the conundrum that I feel myself running into is I don't want to portray that I am on Facebook because I am not and I don't want people to think that I am reachable here or try to communicate with me here and if I accept these friend requests it will show up that I have accepted friend requests and I've logged on and some people might think that I exist.

Not that, you know, they're terrible people. I just don't want to be giving that expectation to Facebook such that someone might reach out, but I also do not wanna leave these people hanging because these are, like, people I, like, knew in middle school who are there and they saw my name and, like, I wonder what he's up to and I want to give him the satisfaction of knowing, of being able to get across the wall and look at all those, the fading museum of tag pictures of me and, I don't know, hopefully have a nice memory of, oh, that's what happened to the kid I knew in middle school or whatever, and not give them perhaps the lingering doubt of, oh, he doesn't want anything to do with me now. I'm on the outside looking in, and I don't feel that way on any other platform. I do not feel this sense of pressure.

I have a question for you, Jason.

Yeah.

So when this happens, if you find someone from middle school who wants to friend you on Facebook

Yeah.

Has there ever been a moment where you will try to find them on another platform?

Absolutely not.

See, that's that's so interesting to me because

I don't think there's gonna be a relationship here. This is really I I look at it like letting them into the museum of my twenties or something. I mean, you can see what I look like and what I'm up to now, and hopefully that is fulfilling for you.

But it doesn't, you know, slake that curiosity to see them on Instagram or something else?

No. Wow. Instagram's not real. I mean, Facebook's not real. But, like, Instagram is, like, super not.

Like, I get that. I guess is what I'm saying. Like, I understand the difference between those 2.

I think that's I think there's just something interesting that we're identifying that could be part of our taxonomy, which is this, this mismatch of user expectations, which to me is often related with size where Facebook got to 5, 6, 700 plus, quote unquote, friends, and then people stopped opening their sentences. Did you did you see what I posted to Facebook? Like, no one says that to me anymore. So, like, I'm free and I can actually invest in relationships that are going to be meaningful for me, not tourism expectations, which are mismatched to me from sometimes exactly like you're describing. So, like, I think a mismatch of user is maybe a way we could think about this.

But I I really believe in nostalgia tourism as a feature of some of these things. I believe it is valuable to have access to people from your past in the way they want to be presented and have a non conversational relationship to seeing what they are doing and seeing how that makes you feel. I have likened the diminishment of what Facebook could have been to, effectively creating memory deaths of whole humans. I think that is true and I don't think that needed to happen. There are people who have fled the site, I will never get to see again meaningfully, like they have killed those people for me.

I feel that loss pretty deeply even though I'm not contributing to that site.

I really wish the social pressure to join and upload, especially photographic evidence of your life to Facebook, had been instead placed on something like GeoCities.

Go on.

Like a an individually maintained website for a person that you can that, like, is theirs in some way and is free of, the social infrastructure, of things like, you know, friends, fall following, liking, etcetera, etcetera. Because I agree with you, Jason. Like, I think there's a lot of power in that. Like, I wanna know what people are up to and I'm interested, but I don't I don't enjoy the binary of Mike is online. No.

I'm not. I am not. Like, no. I'm not. I'm lurking.

Jason, I wanna ask you not to continue to put you on the spot, but, like, I wanna ask you about your relationship to Tumblr at this point. Like, do you think of yourself as having left Tumblr?

Yes. I do. And I've been trying to think about how that happened as well. For for the folks who are not familiar, I was a preeminent member of Tumblr for many years.

Not bragging. It's true. Not bragging. It's true.

Yeah. I had a relationship with the staff after some time and was sort of put up as a an example, user in pieces of media. And so I had sort of a deep relationship with Tumblr, both in the platform and in the world. I'm now realizing how many of my decisions are just motivated by, like, sadness and pain. And this is a similar Oh, Jason.

I I know how long it

is for you, miss.

Thank you. Is there a chart that we could use to maybe try? No.

I was just feeling sad when I was logging on because the things that I liked on Tumblr, the people that I liked were leaving, and participating in the space without the things that I liked about the space was increasingly painful, and I feel guilty that I then participated in that loss by removing the things that I did from Tumblr. I think another variable there is that I was genuinely burned out from posting online as much, and so I could not continue the cadence of posting I had been doing for, like, a half a decade plus, and I needed to be less online, and that happened to correspond with what was happening with Tumblr at the time. But no, I do not consider myself a Tumblr user and I will similarly log on a couple times a year just to see what's happening and see how unrecognizable my feed is and feel sad. And I feel way more sad about Tumblr because it is an important place for a lot of folks that should not harbor the risk of evaporating. It is deeply important as a platform and I feel guilty that I'm not doing anything to help its continued existence.

I recently and this was in, like, the last maybe 2 years or so, deleted all of my Tumblr posts. I I just got, you know, got rid of all of them.

Wow.

And someone recently was looking. They messaged me and they were like, hey, you there was a Tumblr post you had. It looks like it's gone, like, do you have a backup of that? And I was like, no. I don't.

I deleted it all. So, sorry. And they were like, they were legitimately confused, because it seems like that's not a norm on Tumblr, deleting everything and then leaving in the way that it is on, say, like, Twitter.

I don't know. It's hard. I'm trying to think of examples of the folks I know who have left Tumblr and if they maintained a presence, and I think most of them have. Yeah. I think that's part of the sad journey available to me is I can still see the footprint and when it ended for most of the things that I was interested in.

I still have a Tumblr, but I don't use it. I certainly don't consider myself a Tumblr user anymore, and I kinda just faded away from it. That seemed to be my experience with a lot of social platforms. Like, I just kind of was like, I think I'm done. I think I'm done with this.

But I have never had the urge to then go back and, like, erase myself.

Now, Georgia, we both have old parents.

Yes. Sorry. Thanks. Right on. Hi, dad.

Hi, mom.

I wonder and I I this is a good thing to be. Old parents rule. I wonder if your parents had similar advice about the digital footprint as mine did. They were originally very frightened by the existence of a digital footprint, and I had to convince them that it would be fine to have one. It seems like you do not care that you have a digital footprint out there across platforms, and you're not trying to tidy it up.

Is that an inaccurate portrayal of what you're doing here?

No. That's kind of that is accurate, and I I worry that I should be more worried

about it.

I do feel like they were also concerned about the kinds of dangers that can come from having a presence online and what you're posting online and who can see what you're posting online. I mean, my dad famously like does not have a Gmail, is like very has never had a Facebook, does not engage.

Clean brain.

Clean brain. And, yeah, I don't know. It was interesting because that didn't really rub off on me in a in this particular way.

Okay. So you do seem truly not worried about this, like, at all. I'm not suggesting you should be. But

I I'm getting nervous.

Okay. I'm becoming scared.

Yeah. I mean, again, I think my relationship to my old profiles, whether that be it's really just Tumblr and Facebook.

Right. Because MySpace took care of itself.

Yeah. MySpace took care of itself. I don't even remember my username.

Of MySpace, really. Like, just think about it, like True.

But I also I mean,

god, I would have loved to be able to see what I was doing because

I don't remember. Like, again, I was I was very young. I was

too young as we have all agreed.

I I think a lot about, like, there are a bunch of forums that I used to post on that, like, I was pseudonymous. So, like, you know, I always used the same name, but it was not my name and it is not a name I currently use anywhere else. So, like, it would you would be hard pressed to find to figure out it was me who is posting, and I think, whoo, dodged a bullet. Like, whoo, that's it's good. That's good that I did that.

I grew up in the pseudonymous era of the Internet. Not that I said anything regrettable, but it's just ice you know, surely said a bunch of stuff that's just incredibly embarrassing. Yeah.

But I mean, that also comes back to privacy in another form. Like, not privacy in terms of surveillance, but privacy in terms of person to person. Where like I mean, god, I I was like in high school when I was using Facebook a lot and then also when like Twitter debuted and then Instagram. And the sort of the culture around stalking someone, like finding your crush and whatever in in whatever way they existed online and finding everything about it. I remember having friends who were, like, especially good at that and would find, like, that person's username and the username they use for all these other things, and then you'd, like, hunt them down.

And like, again, I feel like I

should be more worried thinking about that kind of not.

I mean, if you're not if there's no reason for you to worry, and this actually gets to something that I wanna talk about, like, you know, next. But I think, like, if you if you don't feel like there's a reason to worry, then, like, maybe there's no reason to worry. I delete, like, I deleted all my I delete all my tweets on a schedule, and I'm not using Twitter anymore. And when I left, I deleted all but 2 of them. And I deleted all my Tumblr posts.

And for me, that's just like, I don't want anything that I posted to start a conversation that I'm not going to be able to monitor. The Internet is a machine that destroys context. So I'm not interested in me having my name attached to a post that can be taken out of context, and then shared widely to inspire a conversation that I'm not gonna see because I'm not looking at Tumblr or Twitter every single day. So it's just like, why why leave those things around for someone to come and use for their own purposes? I can just get rid of them.

So I wanna go through our taxonomy and I wanna I wanna make a I wanna announce at the end of it what I see as a notable absence, and then talk about that notable absence. So right now we have, I don't feel welcome here anymore, Access or habits or technologies change. You just stop, stop accessing certain, platforms. Features are better elsewhere. That's not me anymore.

So like you feel as though the artifact that is you that is represented by this place is just you feel disconnected from it. What I have termed, don't perceive me here, this is the like, I want if I need to use this, I will, but I do not want to be perceived as a user of this in such a way that builds an expectation that I am associated with this technology. And then, it's just things that are just hard to use, hard to access, or when you access them, getting what you want from them is too difficult. Which is maybe I think a kind of combination of a bunch of these other ones or like a second order effect, but it feels like it could be its own thing. The one that we've kind of talked about but not said outright is this place is unethically run.

Yeah. Which brings us to Twitter. I mean, and and Facebook.

Well, of course. Yes.

I wonder just how much you all think about this. And what what for you does unethically run look like?

I might have to see this conversation to you 3 because I famously do not have a Twitter and never have.

Well, but I mean, you, just on any social media. You know what

I mean?

You're on Instagram. Yeah. Yeah. You're on Instagram, which is like, you know, amongst the worst.

That reaction that you just had, Georgia. Oh, God. I am. Like

Yeah. I mean, very well said. Yeah. I mean

Adam Messeri recently did a an announcement where he was, like, we're gonna stop doing the bait and switch. We're gonna stop doing the thing where we show you a post we know you're gonna like and then refresh the feed and bury it so that you have to go look for it. We're gonna stop doing it. And and we're gonna take an engagement hit from it. We're this is a sacrifice that we're making, but we're gonna stop doing it anyway.

Get in the fucking bin. Get in the bin.

I know. It's like Fuck. We're gonna stop being evil, and it's gonna suck for us.

You're welcome.

But, yeah, I feel like the the reaction I had of of being like, oh, god. I am on Instagram is I think of a feeling that certainly a lot of my friends, and I'd say a lot of people feel, which is kind of this like, oh, god. It's so evil, but here I am anyway, and, like, the walls have been built around me. And now I'm like, we have all watched these social platforms form from nothing. Instagram really was that girl for me where I remember the day I got one.

I was a freshman in college, and I was like, oh, this is fun. I'm gonna post a photo on Instagram, and like time continued to pass. All of these changes happened sort of around me as I was also settling into my experience on Instagram. And, yeah, it does it does feel like being the frog that's being boiled to be like, wait. Wait wait a second.

You're putting a lot of carrots

in this stew and oh, no. I'm here. Oh, no.

I think this question, what really keeps people like, the bystander effect is real. That we're all kind of looking at each other to notice the moment that the tide turns because there's this narrative arc that happens of like, oh, this might not be good. Oh. And then we all kind of look at each other be like, did you notice it's not good? Yep.

Yep. And then the common narrative becomes, oh, this is this place is good not good. What are you gonna do? But I need to.

Twitter was the hell site for, like, a solid decade.

Yeah. But everybody stayed until the moment they didn't and everybody was, like, well, but I guess if everyone else is here, like, yeah, it's terrible, but everyone else is here. And that narrative has changed for a certain group of people within Twitter as an example, where now the narrative is like, get out get out get out get out get out. It's on fire. It has it has been it is more on fire than it has been, but it has not not been burning And I think that's what we see in politics, that's what we see in social networks, it's what we see in all these places, this bystander effect of us looking at each other to normalize and make it okay to still be there even though we know.

I

think the comparison between Twitter and Instagram is actually really instructive in this way because both of them are bad. Like, sort of existentially. Like, they're bad for you. They're run by bad companies. The people who run them are bad.

They're not good for privacy. You know, they're not good for your mental health. Like, they're just they're just not good. The main difference between the two is that Twitter is now very recently for more people, for a critical mass of people, I think is fair to say, very unpleasant to use. Instagram remains fun to use.

Yeah. Which sucks.

And I think that that's the thing of, like, leaving something because it's unethically run is hard to do when it's useful.

Yep. And

easy to do when it's when it sucks, like Twitter does. So there was a moment at which the the ads, the Nazis, the algorithm, the needing to give Elon money in order to be seen, the suppressing of links, like all of these things make using Twitter as it existed for the previous, what, like 20 years or whatever, just made it not work. Just made it be a it would have became a different service and so then people got to be like, well, this guy sucks. This sucks. This it's gonna they're gonna start scraping all your stuff for AI.

There's all kinds of, like, ethical reasons on top of the fact that it's just not fun, so we're gonna go. Instagram, I still I can still look at pretty pictures of synthesizers. Discord complies with subpoenas, which should be the single thing that stops me from using Discord, but I have it open on my computer all day every day. Yeah. Like, that's not good, and that should be a big deal to me.

But my friends are in there.

Yes. Oh, and not just that. But, like, on Instagram, there's a 1,000,000 small businesses that use Instagram as basically their storefront. Like, I find out if tattoo artists have free spots on Instagram. Like, it's basically events.

Books open. Books open queen. Books open tonight queen. Books open

tonight queen. Well, it

is kind of like Instagram is holding us hostage by doing social media. There's one place it's like, we're still gonna do social media, that thing you've wanted websites to do for 20 years. We're gonna do it, but there's gonna be a cost.

Well, I mean, that's also why it took, I remember, my friends and I kind of a long time to leave Facebook, which is like, how else am I gonna organize an event? Because Facebook events

Sure.

Had a pretty, like, solid way of organizing things, and it actually was pretty easy to be like, it's my birthday. Full on

stranglehold, I think. Like, absolute just yeah. Death grip.

Yeah. That was like the thing

for

me that kept me on there well after I was really using it in any way that was real. Because I was like, oh, that they have the feature to do events.

And I think it's like it's unfortunately, this is a tension we are extremely comfortable with because it's Yeah. Everything. Yeah. It's my car. It's my doctor.

It's my grocery store. Like, everything The clothes you wear? It's the clothes I wear. It's all bad. It's every single every single thing I have to make an an ethical bargain in order to acquire.

It and I'm tired. I'd like it sucks. It sucks and I'm tired, and it's like, well, at least at least my friends are here.

Yeah. At least we're here together.

Which I think contributes to the pain that I feel when they aren't. And when they leave Yeah. Like, the one thing you were supposed to do and all the bargains I had made to continue hanging around so that you would do that, and now you won't even do

that. Not to bring it full circle. It's why the post the clarity of the post office is great. Yeah. Like, I like I like the post office.

It's a little bad. I know I'm gonna wait in line for 40 minutes.

Yep.

Right? Like, but I'm gonna I know exactly what I'm gonna get because they've told me. They sent me an email telling me, like, here's where it is and come here and get your package and it cost it'll cost the same amount. And it's, like, it's one of the few things where unlike all of this, it's like I know I know what's happening. I just I wish that clarity existed in other places.

Well, where can the listeners find everyone online?

To finish us off, I would love to hear from everybody just a quick rapid fire list of all of the places on the Internet you have left. And I'm gonna go first. This is in no order. This is just in the order that I that I thought of them. Friendster.

Mhmm. Myspace. Mhmm. Tumblr as discussed. Twitter, recently.

Like, I still sort of open it up and look at it when I have to for work, but my intention is to like meaningfully leave. Vimeo. Oh, wow. BeReal, which I joined, like, a month before having Clem. Oh, yeah.

And then every day the the notification would come in and I would be, like, no one wants to see what my life is like right now. Like, at this particular moment No one should see that. Which is not something anyone wants to see. Foursquare. Oh.

Forgot Foursquare. I forgot Foursquare. 4 Chan. Oh. I am of a certain age.

Listen. Listen.

Also a white guy.

I was gonna say Yeah. There's a difference here.

Yay Hooray, which I don't know if any It was a design blog that I don't even know if it runs I don't even know if it exists anymore. Something Awful, a bunch of a bunch of people in our audience just did the Leo point at Something Awful. And the Telnet text only adventure game that I've discussed, the forest.

Top of mind, obviously, Neopets.

Rip.

Where is my Tyranian loop now? She's probably dead. Aim per Jason's point.

Right.

The Apple Messenger aim replacement that existed before it was text messaging. There was a version that Apple made that was basically aim. It was not text messages.

I don't remember what it was called.

I need

you to do a media archaeology segment about this.

I tried to figure out what it was called on this call, and I can't figure it out. Please, someone write in. Tell me what I'm

thinking of. I remember it so vividly. Anyway, Myspace, Snapchat

Oh, yeah.

Which we did not cover. Twitter, I'm putting in

just because I feel like I opened

the door and was like,

oh my god, and then closed the door.

Facebook and Tumblr.

Myspace, Friendster, yes. Facebook,

I don't know if you heard.

I'm not on Facebook anymore. No big deal. Tumblr, multiple Tumblrs. Yep. I haven't logged in a long Foursquare, yes.

Good. Mike, Pinterest. Oh. Oh.

Google plus. Oh.

What's cheating? Woah.

Yeah.

Remember that one?

Remember Google Buzz? Oh. Yeah. Google reader. We I left Google Reader, but it was a forced exit.

Forced exit. Like, a lot of these Google ones are forced exits. Yeah.

Now, I'm mad again. Yep. Google Wave? Come on.

Where's my wavers on Google Buzz?

You guys are scared.

Georgia, I want I want you to believe us. We are not making these up. I

don't believe you.

I also have Marco Polo, which I was on for a while. Wow. Really enjoyed. Oh, god.

I just have a flood of memories of, like, yo and Ello and Peach. There you go.

There you go. Oh my

god. Just levitating.

Yeah. Right?

World of Warcraft? Oh, sure. Yeah. Wow. MMORPGs.

Yeah. Yeah. Flicker, that was another one in there. I mean, I mean, like, just like you're saying though, like, like, all of these that I have signed up for poked around for a half an hour and then, like, just abandoned. Right?

Yeah. Just out. So, like,

I think dozens like yeah. Peach and Yo and, Yik Yak are ones that, like, don't like that because it's like Georgia's, like, you step in, you're, like, and then step out.

Flicker is such a huge one. I also I briefly was, like, I'm gonna be a Tumblr girly, and

I'm gonna get on Flickr, and this is how I'm going

to get famous. And then I was like, no. I'll just I'll just go. I'll I'll I'll leave.

Jason, what about you?

The speed at which I am accumulating a headache as this continues is incredible.

Yep. The, the brand mentions per second here has just skyrocketed. Yeah.

You can see the vowels leaving my body. Okay. So, yeah, last FM. Tumblr, we talked about Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Snapchat, web shots. We talked about LiveJournal.

I did a reading at Housing Works of my old LiveJournal entries the week before they all got deleted. Did not know this was coming, I don't think. And so I got out at the last minute. So somewhere I have the Word document of all my LiveJournal posts.

That is poetic. That rules. Yeah.

I was writing, like, Danielle Karmes esque flash fiction as a 12 year old's

LiveJournal. Anyway Of course.

AIM, like I mentioned, but also Gchat and Google Hangout and all the Google products that took that space. No one uses that shit anymore.

No.

Yeah.

And then the last one in here, the Apple Music Ecosystem.

Wait. Oh, I guess, yeah, you

could share this Apple Music, the attendance, social functions, that whole humongous part of my digital life, gone. Mhmm. Now now the last question I have, conspicuous in its absence here, Georgia, it is now maybe the 6 month or so anniversary of you getting kicked off the Match family of dating applications.

That's exactly right.

I think our listeners would love to hear you forgot. This seems good.

That's true.

I mean,

okay. I

I love this for you, Georgia.

Well, eagle eared listeners will recall that

Classically good listeners.

I journalismed too close to the sun and got banned from Hinge for

the rest of my life.

I do have an update, which is that turns out I was not banned from the entire world of those apps. I am still allowed on, Tinder. Nobody tell on me

Or do, actually. Get me out of there.

Come, some come get me.

Come get me.

Come get me.

I'm done.

I'm waiting for you. You have the chance to do the funniest thing right now. I do not have a Tinder right now, but, like

You could if you wanted

to. But I could?

Well, I'm glad this is not causing you, ongoing pain. Check that out.

Oh, it feels incredible. I wear it like a badge of honor. I think it's hilarious. I did once try to because I was like, I wonder, like, how does this work? And I tried to, like, download Hinge again, and it was like, we remember you.

Get out of here. Alright. And I was like, fair enough.

Okay. To finish us off, to round us out, to get us out the door, I wanna ask one final quick question, which is all of our experiences of social media up to this point, I think have been informed, heavily influenced by what has been a relatively unstable playing field. There has been a lot of technological change in the last 20 to 25 years. And so I'm curious how everybody feels about the way things are now and do you feel like the environment as it stands is relatively calcified? By which I mean, do you expect in the next 25 years to leave or have to leave as many things as you've left in the last 25 years?

I think, no. We will not have to leave as many things because I don't think there will be as many things to leave. I think certain things will go away. I have a lot of eyes on, the synergy of government to Big Tech. Who's gonna get reified, what things become required for us to have.

There are a couple of doomsday scenarios that could play out where competition gets snuffed and there's only a few players and those have deep government contracts and, you know, I don't think that's tinfoil hat area anymore. So I just I don't think competition is gonna be the name of the game for

a while.

So I just don't think there's gonna be that much to leave.

I will be curious to see how, like, the Fediverse and, like, the variations of something like Blue Sky, people who are looking for small Internet, sort of bespoke Internet, less ads, not owned by a giant horrible corporation, like, what platforms come out of that? Because I do think there is a very big possibility that there will be kind of almost another renaissance of a 1000000 platforms being made and then falling apart and then a few continuing as people are kind of trying that out and seeing what works and what people like and what is not wanted.

I'm generally, like, really tired, and I don't want more platforms. I don't want to do more things on the Internet, and I have felt that way intermittently for the past 10 years. And yet, every couple years, when I say I don't want a new platform anymore, I just wanna log out of more things, a Vine comes along. And then there's a golden age of Vine, and boy, is it fun. And then it gets bad.

And then I'm like, you know what? That was fun. I'm done. I just don't want more Internet. And then a TikTok comes along.

And seeing the way people create a golden age on that platform, I'm back in. Tumblr had a golden age. All these platforms that let you interact with them in some way where the material becomes idiomatic to that platform will have golden ages, and that will suck me back in. But, generally, I don't want more things. I don't care which one of these micro blogging platforms wins.

I don't want any of them. I just want to log out of increasingly more things as I continue in life. And yet, the beauty of the Internet is somehow, so far, they keep getting me back in.

Mike.

I think there's gonna be a lot of consolidation, even even more. I think that Facebook is going to be basically unshakable for the foreseeable future unless the government does something to it. I think that, for the most part, the environment feels pretty calcified to me and that we're we're not gonna see a lot of change in what's available except, like Georgia said, around stuff like the fediverse. Mhmm. And I think that probably within the next 5 to 10 years, there is going to be an explosion of small services that, in some way, take advantage of, the sort of syndicated technology of the fediverse.

Whether or not that will lead to, like, large scale, sort of like, activation and then deactivation. I'm not sure. But I think what Jason says is also true. I think people are tired. I think people are really, really tired.

And I think a lot of the most I think the people that have the heart of a poster, which is like the people that you need to make a social network work. Right? Like the people who are just they're gonna post. They need to post. I think that they are really tired and they wanna they wanna have a home and I feel like that's gonna lead to even more calcification, but in a different way.

Where it's like people will find places that are comfortable, that they trust, and then they're gonna not they're not gonna wanna move. And I think the next big thing that we'll see is the thing that replaces discord. And my hope is that that thing persists for a long time and that it's federated. So we'll see. Friends, this was a great conversation.

Thank you for sharing all of your deepest, most emotional reactions to, all of the social networks that you have had to leave behind. Jason, thank you for telling us that you have a Dorian Gray picture of yourself in your attic.

It turns out I don't need these platforms to stay in touch with my friends. I just need to schedule Riverside recordings.

That's it.

So this is Right. Great. I love this.

Here you go. Yeah.

I got some friends in middle school I got lined up after this, so you know that it off

the wall. Our next new sideshow. Yes.

Jason talks middle school with middle school.

That is the show we have for you this week. We're gonna be back here in the main feed on Wednesday, December 18th. Neverpost is an independent and fully listener funded podcast. For $7 a month, you can get an ad free version of the show. For $12 a month, you can get access to extended segments, bonus segments, side shows, and more with discounts if you sign up for a year.

Is that as expensive as a Netflix membership? It's close. Do you get as many hours of entertainment as you would from Netflix? I might argue that you get as many hours of entertainment as you actually use on Netflix, and also fully scored in sound design. Jason, swell the strings.

Swell beautiful. Become a member at neverpo.st. String sections do not come cheap. Never post producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton and the mysterious doctor first name, last name. Our senior producer is Hans Buto.

Our executive producer is Jason Oberholtzer and the show's host, that's me, is Mike Rugnetta. On the last evening on this earth, we sever our days from our trees, and count the ribs we will carry along, and the ribs we will leave behind right here. On the last evening, we bid nothing of farewell. We don't find the time to end who we are. Everything remains the same.

The place exchanges our dreams and exchanges its visitors. Suddenly, we are incapable of satire, since the place is ready to host the dust. Here, on the last evening, we contemplate mountains surrounding clouds. A conquest and a counter conquest. And an ancient time handing over our door keys to the new time.

From 11 planets at the end of the Andalusian scene, on the last evening on this Earth, by Mahmood Darwish, translated by Fadi Jouda. Neverpost is a production of charts and leisure.