In Response to “I'm Bowing Out” - Hack & Slash

I engage in social media less. I read it, but now the only time I actually engage is to talk to artists or other creators. I’m tired of being sick to my stomach over stupid discussions online about shit people don’t have the first clue over anyway. I’m tired of the never ending rant of just a few people who desperately want someone else to take their side or back their cause. Have you noticed I’m more quiet on social media? It’s because I’m bowing out of the arguments online. That’s not the fight. That’s people trying to profit from the fight. I win the fight when I vote, volunteer, and fulfill my role to my community, family, and planet. Not when I’m pushing an agenda.

A fantastic conclusion to a tender and genuine blog post; I echo these sentiments. I also recommend reading 3 Toadstools Publishin follow-up. And Twisted Cities followed up with More Bowing Out, drawing attention to predecessors posts from Mateo and David McGrogan

I have relatives across a wide-political spectrum. Facebook has made it easy to stay in-touch and raise your ire. When you log onto social media, their application dictates your experience; How they will shock and awe you into interacting with their “services”. A social media company is in the business of selling your engagement and interaction to others

Snap responses fuel the engine.

Things happen quickly on social media. When I login, my lizard brain demands that I connect posts I saw in my last “session” to the top-most current posts of this “session”. Time spent just catching up on a mixed bag of content, curated and selected by the social media’s algorithm. A waste of time. I am reminded of the following by Henry David Thoreau: “As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.” Much of my experiences with social media is about "catching up" in idle moments. Facebook curate’s my experience, the very order of each post I see as well as what posts just don’t show up. In other words, I’m letting Facebook decide my experiences and I’m killing time engaging with their decisions

The Pivot

I’m focusing my energy on the physical world: Conversations around a dinner table, face to face role-playing games, conversations at our local farmer’s market, supporting my partner’s small business, and supporting my family as my children gear up for college.

In the twilight of Google+ My go to social media site for the gaming hobby, I find myself more and more focusing on blogs. As I wrote earlier, I want to find those committed to publishing in a standards-based system; A format available beyond the gatekeeping of a social media platform.

For now, I’ll focus my online effort in writing blog posts and responding via my own blog posts to others. I’ll link to my blog posts on various social media platforms, with a goal of drawing people into conversations happening outside of those walled gardens.

Postscript

I continue to work on migrating my website from takeonrules.wordpress.com to a static site version at takeonrules.com.

I am planning to omit a public comment system for my blog. I’ll provide a Contact Me form, and if that proves untenable, I’ll provide an email address. Two considerations factor into this decision; First a comment system requires another dependency; Second a comment system has analogues to the worst aspects of social media. Yes, a comment system provides a mechanism for conversations, but I’m looking to have those conversations in a more deliberate manner.

In addition, I spent Sunday implementing a minimum-viable AMP version of my site (see takeonrules.com/amp). The non-Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP 📖) static site remains wicked fast, but being part of the AMP ecosystem provides another vector for people to stumble upon my blog and the larger wilderness of online blogging.