Keith's Odyssey to Planet Fitness: VERO and other social media

This post is mainly for me, noodling through what I think about social media. Maybe it will turn into a rant along the way. Maybe not. It could get long as I figure out what I think. Maybe best to go get a drink, then get stuck in.

Instagram.

My most recent post is 35 weeks ago, early August 2022. I look at it every now and then, but the notifications is filled with spam, and the images are movies. So many ads. Plus it's a terrible platform for actually looking at, and for, nice images.

LinkedIn.

Once this was a staple of my life. Contractors have to stay connected to hear about that next job. People expect to see your working highlights. At first that's exactly what it was, then it's been migrating to be more like Facebook. I just looked. Good Lord it's like Facebook. So many ads.

Once I retired I weeded out a surprising number of my contacts that were dead, or I couldn't see any conceivable reason why we'd need to contact each other. I changed the header to say retired. I decided I wasn't going to use LinkedIn to promote my photography interests. I should probably deactivate the account.

News in general

Sigh. People have been saying that the world is going to hell in a handcart ever since we started writing down the things people say. I try to be optimistic, thinking that half of all the smartest people that have ever lived are here now, with ways of communicating that were undreamed of a lifetime ago.

And yet, the smart people seem to be drowned out by the great unwashed masses. People that vote against their own self interest. People that cannot follow a simple logic chain of A to B to C, or recognize even the most obvious logical fallacies. People that are essentially 2 year olds, screaming ME ME ME!

And then there are the advertisements, some disguised as actual news articles. All the things in the news that are not actually news, like sports and celebrities, to name two obvious non-news items. Don't get me started on political propaganda. It's all bread and circuses.

I'm trying to look at the headlines in the morning, and ignore it the rest of the day, but it's hard. Humans have this morbid fascination with train wrecks, and we can't look away. I keep telling myself, under most circumstances, if the rich and powerful are permitting it to be published, then it's advertising. What they don't want you to see is more likely to be news.

Facebook.

I've been on it about 10 years, reluctantly at first. Mostly it was fun, connecting with or staying connected to people as they got on with their lives. But really, many of the people I'm 'friends' with now are strangers, since we've both moved on with our lives. Over the last while I'd only connect with people I actually knew, and could contact via other channels to verify the friend request. So many fake accounts.

But it's a terrible platform now. So many ads. So little content that I want to see. Too many movies, or whatever they're called. What I want is simple. A reverse chronological display of what people on my friends list have posted for themselves, with comments on those posts, and then what they've reposted from elsewhere, and comments on that. Notifications when new comments arrive. Emphatically no sponsored ads, no suggestions for what the algorithm thinks I ought to see, no messing with the date order. Then it's simple, you scroll down and read until you recognize a post. Then you stop and get on with something important.

Except that isn't what Facebook wants. It wants you to keep scrolling, getting outraged, posting comments, and reposting postings, and reading the ads, and responding to the click bait. No more. I'm sick of it.

It got to the point where the only thing I was actually posting was notifications that I'd blogged, but the funny thing is that I couldn't tell if it made a difference in my readership. To some extent that's an issue with blogger stats (don't get me started on statistics), but then that's the way they like it. If you can't tell what actually works, you can't stop what doesn't work. If you aren't sure you've seen the post that just below the bottom of the screen, then you'll keep scrolling.

It reminds me of the old joke where a consultant tells the ad manager that he's wasting money on his campaigns. The manager responds, of course I am, I know that half of what I spend is completely wasted, and if I could tell which half I'd stop spending it today.

So a while ago I stopped posting the blog notifications. As near as I can tell, my blog readership didn't change, which I admit might not be completely true for the photo blog page. I'd look at Facebook once in the morning, mainly to see if there were any messages or notifications. The top item would be something from my friends, then the stupid click bait movie content, then an ad. I'd do a real fast scroll down a few posts looking for names I knew, then go look at the groups I belong to. I was pretty well down to looking at Facebook once in the morning, and once in the afternoon or evening.

Starting April 1 I haven't looked at all. I'm going to see if I can make it the entire month without looking at Facebook. Let's see if anyone emails or texts me, asking if I'm ok. Let's see what else I get up to in the time freed up.

VERO

This is a new one, coming onto the scene in 2018 as a potential replacement for Instagram. It's a strictly chronological feed, and displays your photos the way they were uploaded. No messing with the aspect ratio or degrading the image to fit a size requirement.

I've started posting photos there about the time I stopped looking at Instagram, and I'm having a great time. The question I ask myself when looking at photos and deciding if I want to follow a photographer is, "Does this person post interesting photos?" They don't have to bat 1000. But if many of the photos are ones I'd have taken in that scene, or are interesting, or make me think, or inspire me, or make me exclaim out loud, then I'm going to follow that person. Almost every photo in my feed is better than anything on Instagram.

So then, what do I post? Let's take a digression. There's one guy in Antwerp that takes photos of women riding bicycles. Quite nice photos of well dressed, stylish women, in typically great light. For a while I was thinking he was finding models, putting them on a bike, and having them ride past a location where he'd know there's good light. I'm pretty sure it's a bunch of locations each used many times, but I've come to think that it's ordinary people out doing their errands. Maybe the women there dress better than most women here.

But I'm interested in many different kinds of photography, depending on the weather, my moods, what my photo buddies might be up to, and the magical aha! moment. So I want my VERO feed to reflect that. Like image of the month, I don't consider photos taken for the community association or any of my clients. I try to post the really good ones, but there's been some surprises.

So for example. This one. I've blogged it a couple times, and posted it in VERO because I was looking for a black and white film image.

I posted it, not sure what the response might be. To my surprise, it's the most popular image I've posted. More people liked it than I had followers at the time. And this one, just to satisfy your curiosity, is the next most liked image. It has about as many likes as I had followers.

Other images that I've posted are not nearly so well liked, and some of those are a surprise. I get that people like various images for various reasons, and there's an element of people that might like an image but not seeing it because they were busy that day and didn't scroll. Still, one of the fun things about VERO is that people like an image, then check out the photographer, then a bunch of likes show up.

So far I have had little success in predicting which images will be liked or commented on. I'm not bent out of shape about that since I'm not posting images to get the likes. I'm posting as part of a social group that shares photos. This way I get to see other interesting photos, and I might get to meet other interesting photographers. After all, some of the people on VERO live in Calgary.

My routine is to look at VERO in the morning and think about what to post. The idea is to post one image a day. I'll look at recent images I like a lot, and it's a chance to back over images from previous years. I've talked about my star rating system, and generally wouldn't modify a rating for older images.

But it does sometimes make me think about why I've rated an image a certain way. I look back at older images and let's just say I wouldn't rate some of them as highly as I did if I were to do it over again. I'm slowly working my way to selecting images to be printed, or to go into a book, and that's not a process to be rushed.

This morning I was browsing for images, and ended up looking at a bunch of photos of Curtis. Such a handsome photogenic kitty. Still miss him. If you want to see what I actually posted this morning, there's a link to VERO up at the top of my sidebar on the right.

Lastly, I'm guessing that many of my readers have my blog bookmarked and drop in when they have a few minutes, or there's a link to it on another blog, or you get my blog notification email. Which, if you don't get it now and want it, you can be put on it for the asking. Send an email to keith at nucleus dot com and I'll add you to the list. Or text me, or leave a comment. I'm curious though, if you don't get the email notification, how do you get here to read the blog?

Of the Day

Driftwood (NZ)