In a post-Twitter world, text-based social media apps have taken a new shape. X, BlueSky, and Threads are home to wildly different types of discourse. So, which of these apps are actually worth our time? This week on Uncanny Valley, we talk about the state of text-based social apps and how they impact journalism. And finally, we ask: Is it time to quit?
You can follow Michael Calore on Bluesky at @snackfight, Lauren Goode on Threads and @laurengoode, and Zoë Schiffer on Threads @reporterzoe. Write to us at uncannyvalley@wired.com.
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Transcript
Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.
Michael Calore: How much time do you spend on social media every day, Lauren?
Lauren Goode: Too much time. Mostly on the text-based social networks, but I’ve been known to get sucked into Instagram Reels too.
Michael Calore: Yep.
Lauren Goode: Yeah.
Michael Calore: What about you, Zoë?
Zoë Schiffer: My total screen time. I actually looked it up before and I think it’s like three hours and 40 minutes on my phone, which honestly seems impressive to me. You’re raising your eyebrows, Mike, why are you doing that? Only a couple minutes of that is actually on social media apps. I feel like I deserve a Medal of Honor.
Michael Calore: You do actually deserve Medal of Honor. I have a timer on my phone that goes off after I’ve been on Instagram for any more than 20 minutes. I hit that timer every single day.
Lauren Goode: This is not a joke. He follows this. I’ve sent Mike memes before and then won’t get a response, and because we work across the newsroom from each other, I’ll literally sometimes go to his desk and, “Did just see that thing I sent you?”
Zoë Schiffer: It’s the thirsty.
Lauren Goode: No, I know. He’ll say, “No, I ran out of time,” and I’m like, “You’re adhering to that? Check the meme.”
Michael Calore: Do you ever think about getting off of the apps?
Lauren Goode: All the time.
Michael Calore: All the time?
Lauren Goode: I fantasize about it at this point. What would it be like to not constantly feel like you have to broadcast something?
Michael Calore: Yeah. What about you, Zoë?
Zoë Schiffer: Honestly, I’m not on them that much, but I’ve been on parental leave for a few months, so the answer is I think about getting off my phone all the time and I’m honestly amazed how much time I can spend on my phone even not using social media apps. What about you?
Michael Calore: I often get the urge to just throw the phone across the room and never look at it again, but then I always end up picking it up and getting back on.
Lauren Goode: That’s usually after I send him some terrible meme.
Michael Calore: Yeah, or I think of a joke.
Lauren Goode: Right.
Michael Calore: Must skeet now. Yeah. Well, today we’re talking about just that: Is it time to get off of social media? And because there are so many kinds of social apps and platforms out there, we’re going to focus on the platforms that we use the most, the text-based social sites, because we’re words people. This is WIRED’s Uncanny Valley, a show about the people, power, and influence of Silicon Valley. I’m Michael Calore, director of consumer tech and culture here at WIRED.
Lauren Goode: I’m Lauren Goode, I’m a senior writer at WIRED.
Zoë Schiffer: I’m Zoë Schiffer, WIRED’s director of business and industry.
Michael Calore: As we know, social platforms come and go and every time a new one arrives, we have to ask ourselves, “Should I get on it?” Since today’s show is all about whether or not it’s time to get off of social media, particularly some of the text-based platforms we love and love to hate, let’s start by talking about the one that everybody’s been talking about, Bluesky.
Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, and let’s set expectations before we start, we’re going to be talking about the platforms that we use the most and why we use them specifically, but it feels necessary to take a look at the wider social media landscape before we dive into that.
Michael Calore: I fully agree. Lauren, let’s start with you. Can you bring us up to speed with what’s going on with Bluesky?
Lauren Goode: Ah, Bluesky or Bluesky.
Michael Calore: Bluesky as I call it.
Lauren Goode: Might call it, yeah. The vibes on Twitter have changed a lot since Elon Musk bought the platform. That was back in October of 2022, and since he took it over and took it private, there’s been a change in the content and we think a change in the algorithm. After this election season, that became much more obvious. When you log onto Twitter now, you might see more of Elon’s tweets, you might see more tweets from people on the far right of the political spectrum. There’s misinformation, disinformation. It’s just become a very messy place to be. As a result of that, some people have shifted over to other text-based social networks, including Meta Threads, which launched last July, and then this new, I’m putting new in air quotes right now, new app called Bluesky. The reason why I’m putting that in quotes is because Bluesky’s not actually new. It was started as an offshoot project of Twitter, started by Jack Dorsey himself back in 2019. Now Jack Dorsey is no longer a part of it. It’s run by a woman named Jay Graber. We’re starting to see millions of people literally start to flock to Bluesky in the wake of these changes at the old Twitter. Now, I’m kind of excited about Bluesky, but just from a numbers perspective, the latest numbers that they shared is that they have 22 million users. It’s pretty good for a fledgling social network, still very small in comparison to Twitter and still very small in comparison to Meta Threads, which last numbers they shared were 275 million monthly users. In looking at the landscape of text-based social networks right now, Bluesky is getting a lot of attention.
Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, for sure. I feel like just to state it really clearly, the reason that X has experienced, I think the largest exodus of users since Elon Musk took over, is that he played such a big role, or he was such a loud voice in the US presidential election and had a very heavy hand in attempting to get Trump elected again, and people were uncomfortable with that. I really felt like X was revealed as a political operation, which it kind of has been for a while now, but that became very, very plain in the aftermath. The other reason people are leaving is just that it kind of sucks to use more and more by the day. It’s like overrun with misinformation and bots. Yeah, the alternatives right now, as Lauren said, Bluesky, which kind of has that chaotic vibe of old Twitter, it’s weirder. Then Threads, which has a little bit of an issue of feeling kind of like LinkedIn and being very polite, but then has that benefit of Meta being able to push users from Instagram to Thread. It kind of has a critical mass in the way that Bluesky is just a bit smaller at this point.
Lauren Goode: Yeah. In the 2010s, a lot of us, and I say us like journalists, we kind of high off of Twitter because it was text-based. We’re word nerds. It supported links so we could share links to our stories. Interestingly, I think if you talk to a lot of people who run newsrooms, most of them would say, we never saw that much referral traffic from Twitter, maybe single-digit percentage, but it felt like Twitter, despite its relatively small size in the social network stratosphere, had outsized influence because of the number of journalists who used it. Twitter also had a verification scheme where you would get a blue check and the blue check serves a purpose in an old social media world, where it would tell people that you really were who you said you were, if you were a person who might have fake accounts made of you, but it was also, it was clout.
Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, I felt like that was one of Elon’s critiques that, I mean, he called the blue check system a lords and peasants system, and obviously it was one of his big initiatives when he bought the company to get rid of it, and that created all sorts of problems. It was true that the way blue checks were handed out seemed kind of biased and unfair. You guys remember that for years and years, Twitter said that it had paused its verification system so people couldn’t get verified. If you were a journalist, and I speak from experience, and you had 10 followers and then you joined any normal newsroom, the social media manager in that newsroom would get you verified overnight. It was so clear that there were these back channel ways for journalists to get the blue check, and that felt like, yeah, it felt unfair to a lot of people.
Michael Calore: I feel like the real appeal of the tech space social networks, not just for journalists but for everybody, is the back and forth, the conversation. You can ask a question and get threaded responses. You can have multiple people chiming in. You can have strangers dive-bombing in and giving you answers to a question that you didn’t even ask. It’s kind of chaotic and it’s kind of fun, but there is so many people involved every time you post something. Whereas posting on TikTok and posting on Instagram can often feel like it’s a one to many instead of a many to many conversation. Do you know what I mean?
Zoë Schiffer: That’s a good point.
Lauren Goode: Yeah, right. It’s a different kind of broadcast model.
Michael Calore: How does Threads fit into this? Threads was built to be one of those conversational social networks, but it hasn’t exactly played out that way.
Lauren Goode: Yeah, because it doesn’t thread well.
Zoë Schiffer: Really?
Lauren Goode: OK, go ahead Zoë, please stop me.
Zoë Schiffer: I can’t let you. I have kind of come around to your view on Threads and I’m using it less, I’m ashamed to say after being a Threads pusher for months and months. I mean obviously Meta has purposefully stepped away from news. They’ve said this very clearly and they’re down-ranking news. For a text-based social platform to not dive into and put resources into real-time information, is just such a bad call. A text-based version of Instagram, what the hell is that? No one wants that. Versus an alternative to Twitter. Everyone wanted that. That is why I think Bluesky has popped off because it really does provide that real-time breaking news feeling and Threads feels a little more dull.
Lauren Goode: The kind of typical thing that you would see on Threads for the past few months or more has been often from an account you don’t follow because it’s the suggested stuff, it’s for you. It’s someone who’s posting about, I would see a lot of drama. It felt like a reality show transposed onto a text-based social network.
Zoë Schiffer: Kind of like Nextdoor vibes.
Lauren Goode: Total Nextdoor vibes or stuff about relationship drama, really messy situations. “How do I deal with my in-laws,” perimenopause symptoms, weird health hacks, really just kind of strange stuff. What our reporting and other people’s like Katie Notopoulo’s reporting has found is that the more rage-baity the topic would be, the more people were likely to respond to it. That would be algorithmically weighted more, so that’s why you would see it more in your feed. Is that making sense?
Michael Calore: Sounds a lot like Facebook.
Lauren Goode: Yeah. Or Instagram.
Zoë Schiffer: I think so.
Lauren Goode: Yeah. The stuff that you engage with, the signals that you’re giving it are going to inform more of what you see.
Zoë Schiffer: Mike, tell us where Mastodon fits into this ecosystem, because I feel like you are the only Mastodon user of the group.
Michael Calore: Harsh.
Lauren Goode: He has a Mastodon plushie.
Michael Calore: I do. Thank you.
Lauren Goode: You’re welcome.
Michael Calore: Mastodon is a social network that has been around for a while and its big thing is the Fediverse, it’s part of the Fediverse. You’ve probably heard this term, it’s difficult to describe, but it’s basically a social network that doesn’t have a mommy and daddy.
Zoë Schiffer: I love this. These are terms I understand. Tell me more.
Michael Calore: It’s a social network that no company owns. You can just fire up a computer, you can spin up a server somewhere and you can run your own Mastodon server and then all your friends can join. If you don’t like the way that people are behaving, you have the power to kick them off. You have the power to let new people in. You can also open up your server so that you can communicate with other servers. It’s a lot like the internet. It’s a lot like the blogosphere, right? It’s these things that we’ve had for a long time. They all follow the same model where there’s not one platform that owns everything and that controls all the levers and controls how you see things and how you interact with people. It’s really up to you as the person who runs it to decide. Now that concept, even though it is as old as the internet, is difficult for people to get their heads around these days because we’ve all been trained that when you sign up for something, you’re signing up for a service with one company and you have a very simple path towards logging in, building a profile, discovering other people. Mastodon doesn’t really have any of that. There’s not really a simple way to log in, sign up, find other people. That’s a problem that they’re trying to solve and that they’ve been trying to solve for a while. I think they’ll get there. I think they’ll eventually figure out a way to make it so that it’s a lot more user-friendly to get on, which is a long way of saying it’s a bunch of nerds right now. It’s a bunch of people who sort of grok the Fediverse. It’s people who have made a conscious decision to join this social network that stands for freedom and equality and individualism.
Lauren Goode: A decentralized web.
Michael Calore: A decentralized web. All right. We’ve talked about a lot of different options for people who are looking for a social media experience, but the one option that we haven’t really discussed seriously is no social media experience. Just getting off of social media. There are a lot of people who are making this decision. We have not made this decision. What are the factors that are driving people away from social media in general that are souring them on spending time on these apps?
Zoë Schiffer: I mean, I think the big one is just that it feels bad to scroll. I think we’ve all had the experience, and this is why the question of kids in technology is so heightened of scrolling and just feeling like your soul is being drained. Of course then you look at a small child and you’re like, “Oh my God, what’s happening to them?” I think for the first time in a long time as a journalist, it actually feels optional to be on these platforms, and that definitely didn’t use to be true.
Lauren Goode: Do you really think it’s optional, Zoë? I’m so intrigued by that.
Zoë Schiffer: I think it is. It used to feel like we lived and died by whether our story popped off on Twitter. Now it feels so difficult for any single story to break through on one of these platforms that I don’t think I would necessarily even notice if a journalist I respect stopped posting but was still writing really good stories.
Lauren Goode: I love that idea that there’s still a way to reach audiences that doesn’t realize so much on some whimsical billionaire’s online platform, that they can tweak the algorithm of at any given moment. There’s still just other ways to reach audiences if you are putting out good quality work.
Zoë Schiffer: I actually think that that’s the switch, and maybe I didn’t articulate it well. I feel like now we’re in a world where we have to cultivate audiences, not traffic. I think that’s social media was really good for traffic, but maybe not cultivating actual audiences.
Lauren Goode: Mm-hmm.
Michael Calore: OK, so what about the person who’s not a journalist?
Lauren Goode: Yeah, I was just going to say my own personal reasons for wanting to get off social media would probably have to do with just total information overload. I don’t think that any human being or human brain was really designed to deal with this level of information or the information ecosystem we’re currently living in. I personally feel overwhelmed by it, and it leads to a lot of anxiety. In the past when I was reporting on a lot of consumer products, I would get some comments from people, but a lot of times it was about the product. I mean, I’m not going to say they were always nice. Sometimes it was, “You’re an idiot. You said this about the iPhone,” or whatever. It was very comment focused. Then when I transitioned to becoming more of business and culture reporter in Silicon Valley, you’re sort of touching on all of these hot button issues and people have very strong opinions and the toxicity on platforms like Twitter became that much more apparent to me.
Zoë Schiffer: Did you ever get the, “Go back to reporting on the iPhone,” kind of comments?
Lauren Goode: I haven’t received that yet from the trolls, but I think I’d welcome it. That seems tame. It seems pretty tame as far as comments go.
Michael Calore: You can set filters and you can unfollow people and you can block people on platforms that allow you to block people.
Zoë Schiffer: Not X anymore.
Michael Calore: You can create a space that feels a little safer, but that stuff still creeps in. I think part of that is there’s just a way of interacting on social media now that feels kind of adversarial from the start.
Zoë Schiffer: 100%.
Michael Calore: Yeah. People who show up just to have a capital C conversation with you about something when you weren’t really looking for a conversation and then you’ve got all these signals coming at you and you just don’t want to deal with them and it just feels better just to close the app.
Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, but did that not feel true for you before? I always felt like the fact that the coin of the realm on Twitter was the quote tweet said so much about the platform and its incentives. Quote tweets are literally for usually dunking on someone.
Michael Calore: Yeah.
Zoë Schiffer: The fact that that was kind of how you got popular, you retweeted something someone else had said and you put your own spin on it or showed why they were such an idiot, to me it always had that kind of adversarial flavor. For the first time it’s like you can walk away and actually if you’re a journalist and you’re still on there, you are in some ways complicit with Elon Musk’s political project so you need to contend with that.
Michael Calore: Yeah.
Lauren Goode: Do you guys feel that that much more keenly now? We’ve always known that because these social networks are free, that we’re paying them with our attention. Does that equation feel that much different now?
Zoë Schiffer: When we were talking about Sam Altman in last week’s episode, you said this really interesting thing about is what I’m getting out of AI and consumer AI apps better than what I’m giving them, or am I giving more than I’m getting? I feel like now it does feel like we are giving more than we are getting. A former boss of mine always used to say, “Are you being sold a product or are you the product?”
Michael Calore: Yeah. For me, the big shift has been the trend towards algorithmic feeds being default and being the thing that a lot of the platforms are just pushing as the default experience. The reverse chronological feed, the feed that shows you the post that just the people that you follow have done most recently and then they get older as you scroll. To me, that is the ultimate reason why social media was appealing to me in the first place. When I see an algorithmically curated feed, which has a mix of things from five minutes ago and five days ago and two hours ago and 10 hours ago, all jumbled together, really just my eyes just glaze over and I lose interest. To your point, Lauren, it prioritizes things that might get me angry.
Lauren Goode: Yeah, I, and also that time delay, it’s like the delinearization of fundamentally the human experience, the passage of time. There were some jokes this summer when the presidential debates were happening where people would say on Threads, “I can’t wait to see people’s hot takes on the debates three days from now,” because of that time delay.
Zoë Schiffer: That’s disorienting. I would push back a little bit because I don’t think that that’s as much a factor of the algorithmic feed as it is Meta’s decision to intentionally suppress real-time information. On TikTok for example, you have an algorithmic feed, but it doesn’t make those same decisions. You do see more recent posts. I would say that I find TikTok in particular really compelling because it’s a lot less work for the user, the algorithm, I mean it’s disturbing for the same reason, but the algorithm is learning your preferences and serving you content that aligns with those versus you having to go out, follow someone, like their posts, unfollow them, and train an algorithm more manually. Mike, I would say you’re kind of the rare person who seems to enjoy that part of the process. I don’t think it’s an accident that you dislike the algorithmic feed and you like Mastodon. Those seem aligned principles to me.
Michael Calore: I think Bluesky really does it for me though, because that’s just where the juice is right now. That’s where all of my friends have gone and it just feels like a more healthy platform. Having the reverse chronological feed in Bluesky is the thing that is really keeping me on there. If all the posts were coming out of order, then I wouldn’t be spending so much time on it. Also, when we had Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on stage at WIRED’s Big Interview conference earlier in December, she talked about the starter packs, the fact that you can mute words, the lists of people that you can follow, all of those customization features. As people have started using them a lot more and they become more prevalent on the platform. I’ve been using them and I really like those as well. We’re all hopping mad, we’re all frustrated. Some of us are thinking about taking a break or even quitting, but the thing that we need to remember about social media is that what we put into it is what we get out of it. Maybe we should change that relationship. Maybe we should redefine it. Let’s take a break and when we come back, we’ll talk about what redefining that relationship looks like. We’ll be right back.
Michael Calore: Welcome back to Uncanny Valley. We’ve talked about the current social media landscape, including our own personal relationships with the apps and the platforms that we love and dislove. We’ve also talked about some of the reasons why people would consider quitting social media. We’re going to talk about how to redefine our relationship with social media. Zoë, I want to start with you, what to you is a healthy relationship with social media? What does that look like?
Zoë Schiffer: For me personally, I honestly do think the healthiest relationship would be no relationship. I think I would probably be happiest if I wasn’t on social at all. I also really like Jia Tolentino, who’s a writer for the New Yorker, her framework, she says basically, “Does your life on the screen feel smaller than your life not on the screen?” I think when that equation is in place, when your life on the screen feels smaller, then your real life with friends and family, then you’re in an OK place. That’s what I try and focus on day to day.
Michael Calore: What do you think, Lauren?
Lauren Goode: I think that’s really profound. I’m thinking about it right now and I’m thinking about moments when maybe life has felt smaller than it did on social media, which is a scary prospect. I guess at what point does your real life, at what point are you touching grass so much that you’re just like, “This is really all I want and need? What am I really getting from Instagram?” I mean, I guess that’s the whole point of this conversation.
Zoë Schiffer: Well, we’ve definitely all had the experience where your life on the screen started to take over.
Lauren Goode: Yeah.
Zoë Schiffer: I think any journalist who’s like had a story go viral and had people really mad at you on the internet, I felt very all-consumed by that to the point where I couldn’t be present with the people around me. Conversely, I think we all know what it’s like when you’re so distracted by the fun things you’re doing, the dinner parties, the friends, the people you’re dating, that you don’t even really look at your phone.
Michael Calore: Yeah. Yeah. For me, I really feel like the community aspect is the thing that makes it healthy. When I know that I can open an app and find all of my people, that makes me happy and it makes me want to open the app. I think probably the best illustration of that is the experience that we’ve all had where you’re live tweeting something, right? You’re watching a television show, or you’re watching some event happening and you have your phone in your hand and you are posting and you’re replying to other people’s posts, and you’re faving things and you’re reposting re-xing, re-skeeting things, and it adds to the experience. It enhances the experience. It makes it feel like you’re hanging out with your friends while you’re doing this thing together, even if you’re all alone. To me, that’s a good, healthy thing that social media can provide.
Zoë Schiffer: Totally.
Lauren Goode: Yeah, that’s fair. I have been toying with this idea of a framework for a while as I’ve thought about social media and how to manage it and how I actually really would love to get off social media. I came up with this acronym, CUE, community, utility and education. Bear with me here. The C, community, is what you just described, Mike. Utility, it could be something like messaging, which is also a part of community too, but it could be something kind of simple like you’re messaging to get an address or you’re checking the weather, that’s a utility, right? Then there’s education. You’re actually using the apps to learn something real and true and valid that you would not have learned otherwise. I think once you get into the, “I’m not using this as a utility or for education, it’s not serving me in any way, it’s not a tool, it’s not building community, it’s fraying community, and I’m just doom scrolling,” then you’re outside of the CUE. You need to log off.
Michael Calore: Right.
Lauren Goode: Maybe you need to delete the app.
Zoë Schiffer: I like that. Yeah.
Michael Calore: That’s the big important thing for you is that if you don’t feel like you’re getting these things from the experience, then it’s time to end the experience. How often do you stop and ask yourself that?
Lauren Goode: That’s the thing. We put so much onus on us as the consumers of these apps to figure out these frameworks and jump through these hoops and try to figure out ways we feel good about ourselves and it’s healthy. We’re working against these really powerful forces of tech companies that have literally designed these apps to suck us in. It’s hard. I don’t always think about it. When I’m down the rabbit hole on Instagram some night watching Reels, I don’t think about it. I completely lose track of time.
Zoë Schiffer: No, who would? I mean, I feel like we almost need the, it’s like the chips analogy, we need Ozempic for our phones. We haven’t evolved to withstand the allure of chips. It’s really hard to just stop at the serving size. It’s really hard to stop scrolling after 15 minutes. We need kind of an outside force being like, “Your full.”
Michael Calore: You have an outside force. You have the timer built into your phone that turns off the app after whatever time you tell it to.
Zoë Schiffer: I’m going to start using that.
Michael Calore: 20 minutes, 25 minutes.
Zoë Schiffer: Yeah.
Michael Calore: All of a sudden it’s like, “Nope.”
Zoë Schiffer: I mean, honestly, I’m impressed it works for you. For me, it takes kind of going off the deep end to come up for air. Recently I was realizing that I would get up in the morning and I would be nursing and to make myself sit there and nurse, I would reward myself by getting to read the fashion blogs that I like on Substack early in the morning, like 4:30. I realized I was just online shopping for an hour before I started my day every single day. I was like, this is deeply unhealthy and unsustainable for my wallet. I had to delete the app off my phone and go cold turkey all of a sudden.
Lauren Goode: You can come up with all of these frameworks, but the problem with the frameworks is that they’re kind of lenient.
Michael Calore: Yeah.
Lauren Goode: You’re like, “Oh, well, I mean, I thought I wasn’t going to do this only if it felt like this or I was learning something, but what am I learning? I am actually learning about how to get rid of these under eye circles from this new product.”
Zoë Schiffer: Another recurring theme on our podcast is under eye circles. Wait, but let’s get back to the why it can feel bad because I feel like we kind of touched on moderation before, but that’s a big part of this. The toxicity, I feel like is part of the problem and part of the allure of getting off of them entirely or really limiting our usage.
Michael Calore: Yeah. Do you feel like if there was better moderation on these platforms, that you would spend less time there or that you would have a healthier relationship overall?
Lauren Goode: I just think that the incentives are always going to be misaligned with what is pretty much best for us.
Michael Calore: Yeah.
Lauren Goode: Yeah. The incentives are to keep you engaged as long as possible and to grow the user base.
Michael Calore: Right.
Zoë Schiffer: Yeah.
Lauren Goode: Even if there’s moderation that works well, which would be commendable, and then other companies should replicate that if something is working well. At the end of the experience is still, how can we keep this user on our app?
Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, I feel like the lack of moderation on X made it easier for me personally to get off of it, which ultimately I did basically a moral decision because I didn’t want to be part of the Elon’s project, but I also just didn’t enjoy being on it. I was constantly confronted with horrible threats and unkind speech. I think that I like that some of the alternatives now, like Bluesky seem to be adopting more of the Reddit model where there’s kind of the platform as a whole sets a floor for content moderation, so no illegal activity, but then certain communities on the platform can set ceilings depending on what those communities want. Some could say no nude images, no offensive jokes, but others might be fine with those things.
Michael Calore: Yeah.
Zoë Schiffer: It feels like when we’re talking about content moderation, that decentralization can actually be a negative. I know Mastodon has had some issues with child sexual abuse imagery, and it’s harder to moderate that stuff when there’s no central authority whose job it is to moderate. Am I oversimplifying things?
Michael Calore: No, that’s basically true. If the job of moderation falls in the community, then you rely on the people in the community being attentive and active in their moderation tasks. If there’s not somebody who knows how to properly administer the server, then you can’t block people, you can’t kick people out properly. Those people can continue posting until they’re removed. It relies on diligence. It relies on attention, so it’s not perfect.
Zoë Schiffer: Got it. OK.
Michael Calore: I don’t know whether it’s more or less imperfect than any other type of moderation that happens on other large centralized social media platforms.
Zoë Schiffer: OK, fair. We’re podcast hosts so we just get to ask the questions.
Michael Calore: Yes, indeed. Have you ever just deleted the app, and I don’t mean logged out, but deleted it, turned off the two-factor authentication token, made it extremely difficult for you to get back on?
Zoë Schiffer: I did the full delete with Instagram. I deleted my profile and then asked Instagram to permanently delete it forever, which ended up being an ill-advised decision when Threads came about, and I couldn’t port over a user base to Threads. I think Instagram in particular, I had been using it kind of like you were saying, Mike, it felt more social to me. I followed my friends and I just felt myself kind of compulsively checking it. A couple years ago, I deleted it. I have a lurker account that I use probably every day to check a couple accounts, like some style accounts that I like, sources that I’m kind of tracking and following, but it has basically no social function in my life anymore. That to me feels like a healthier way to interact with the app.
Michael Calore: What about you, Lauren? Have you ever just bailed?
Lauren Goode: No. I have deleted Twitter from my phone.
Michael Calore: Mm-hmm.
Lauren Goode: Then I redownloaded it and I put it into this folder on my phone called Old Social.
Michael Calore: What else is there?
Lauren Goode: Yeah, I wanted to just demote it. I want it to feel like it wasn’t at all enticing for me to open.
Michael Calore: That definitely feels like a demotion.
Lauren Goode: Yeah, Foursquare, Swarm. I don’t even think those two exist, like Foursquare streamlined.
Michael Calore: Yeah, I think it’s going to be Swarm now.
Lauren Goode: OK. Now the teens are going to come after me, Snapchat. I put Snapchat in there because it’s old to me, I don’t use it anymore.
Zoë Schiffer: I’m impressed that you had Snapchat. I feel like I wouldn’t know a single person who was using it, so I would have no use for it.
Michael Calore: I mean, the ones that are important to you.
Lauren Goode: Yeah, no.
Michael Calore: Would you ever just stop with Threads? Stop with Instagram, stop with Bluesky?
Lauren Goode: I would stop with Big Blue Facebook.
Michael Calore: Yeah.
Lauren Goode: Yeah. Except I use it for Marketplace.
Michael Calore: OK.
Lauren Goode: Yeah. Have you just gone nuclear on any of your apps?
Michael Calore: I have gone completely offline for a couple of weeks here and there. I do it about once every four or five months, and it feels great. Honestly, I really don’t feel like I’m missing it. It’s when I log back on and I see that I have a bunch of DMs and I see that a bunch of people are asking me questions and people are sending me things, and then all of a sudden I feel like, “Oh, I have been missing out.” Until that moment when I log back on, I don’t feel like I’m missing anything. I don’t feel that urge to check my social media feeds. I don’t feel that urge that I have to see what’s going on in the world. I think that’s the big question, can I still be plugged in even if I’m not feeling that?
Zoë Schiffer: What you’re getting at with your question though is the issue of the individual choice or the collective choice. I was talking to a mom in the town where I live recently, a mom of a middle schooler, and she was saying that she and the other moms at this public school got together and decided to only allow their seventh graders to get dumb phones. None of them were going to get smartphones. They were like, “We all have to make this decision together because if we as an individual family say, you’re not allowed to be on Snapchat, but every single one of your classmates is, then you’re really missing out. It actually might be more harmful than helpful to make that rule.” I feel like there’s something similar going on with journalists and media. It’s like if everyone else is there having a conversation, if editors are there paying attention to whose story is going viral, then it feels like there’s a bigger cost to opting out than if many, many people are deciding to get off all at once.
Michael Calore: Do you feel like you could do your job, Lauren, as a writer for WIRED if you were not on Threads or on Bluesky?
Lauren Goode: I think I could from the perspective of not being on there to amplify my own stories, but I would still continue to use it as a utility. Going back to the utility framework for messaging people, because I’ll often look for new ideas or new sources on the social platforms and then use it to reach out to people if I just want to hear more from them.
Michael Calore: OK, so which one of us is going to be the one who quits first, who absolutely just stops posting?
Lauren Goode: Me?
Michael Calore: It’s going to be you?
Lauren Goode: It’s going to be me.
Michael Calore: Nice.
Lauren Goode: It’s going to be me.
Michael Calore: What would happen?
Lauren Goode: I just made a Justin Timberlake joke on this podcast.
Michael Calore: It went completely over my head.
Zoë Schiffer: Oh my god.
Lauren Goode: Wait, you guys. It’s the Justin Timberlake song, and it’s a meme every May, the month of May, it’s a meme again. You guys need to be more online.
Zoë Schiffer: I know.
Lauren Goode: I think that’s what I’m arriving at here. Zoë, what about you? How tempted are you to just go totally offline right now?
Zoë Schiffer: I honestly feel pretty good about my social media usage, but I did do a thing last year where I committed on New Year’s classically, to do tech-free Shabbats. Starting on Friday evening into Saturday, I would turn off my phone and just not look at it, and then I would turn it on Sunday morning typically. That was a really nice experience. It required a certain level of forethought and coordination in order to see people and keep plans. Once everyone in my life kind of knew that I was doing it, it felt really freeing in a way. Of course, work caught up with me and I felt like I couldn’t do that anymore. I have been toying around with the idea of committing to it again this new year.
Michael Calore: That’s a very good plan. I wholeheartedly endorse that.
Zoë Schiffer: Thank you.
Michael Calore: OK. It doesn’t sound like any of us are going to quit social media anytime soon. Although it does sound like we are all ready to redefine our relationship with social media by taking a little bit of a break every now and then, by quitting the apps that don’t work for us anymore, and by strengthening the relationships that we have formed there in other ways.
Lauren Goode: I think I’m going to go totally offline and I’m just going to whisper to all of you now. Find me.
Michael Calore: Before you leave Lauren, you have to stick around because we’re going to take a break and we’re going to come right back.
Lauren Goode: OK.
Michael Calore: OK. Welcome back. We’re going to play a little game now. We are going to talk about our very first experiences with social media. Zoë, what was your first social profile online?
Zoë Schiffer: Gosh, does AIM count?
Michael Calore: I think it does. Yeah.
Zoë Schiffer: OK.
Michael Calore: It was a social network for sure.
Zoë Schiffer: That was my first one that I remember. I used it exclusively to try and seduce boys at Hebrew school. My username when I was, I think 12 years old, was Surfergirl17. When my mom found out about that, she was like, “No, no, no, no, no, no. I don’t know a lot about the internet, but I know that that’s very bad for you.” I had to change it, and I changed it to AFI, A Fire Inside, 17.
Michael Calore: Nice.
Lauren Goode: A fire inside.
Michael Calore: That’s very emo.
Zoë Schiffer: I was very influenced by my brother’s music taste. Anyway, Mike, what was yours?
Lauren Goode: Wait, wait, wait. Hold on. 17. What was that? Was that a birthday?
Zoë Schiffer: Honestly, it was my lucky number, but I’m sure somewhere in the back of my mind, I was like, “That’s a cool, sexy age. I want to be 17.”
Lauren Goode: Amazing.
Michael Calore: My first real social profile was probably my plan page on Unix.
Zoë Schiffer: What words are you saying right now? You’re like, I wrote on a papyrus scroll, and then we distributed it with carrier pigeons.
Michael Calore: Pretty much. It’s like pre-web internet. You were on a Unix system, right? You check your email with Pine, you would go for into other servers.
Zoë Schiffer: He must be trolling me, Lauren.
Lauren Goode: This is real. This is real. You would type everything into the terminal.
Michael Calore: Yeah. You open a command line and then you give commands to go around the internet. There was no browser. Everything was text-based. You would log on and if you want to find out information about another user, you type the word finger.
Zoë Schiffer: What are you talking about? Stop it.
Michael Calore: This is true. This is true. By default, when you would type finger and you could search somebody’s name and it would tell you what their phone number and their email address was, and sometimes it would tell you what location they were in, like they’re in the lab or they’re in room 31 in this building. It was very different for every system, but by default it would tell you what their phone number and what their email address was. If you were like, “I was having that conversation with that person, Roberto, what was his last name? I don’t really know.” You could find him in the student directory. You could then type finger and then his email address and it would tell you his phone number. It would tell you how to get in touch with him. If he had set up a plan or a project file, it would show that when you fingered the user.
Lauren Goode: You actually used it as a verb.
Zoë Schiffer: No.
Lauren Goode: It was a verb.
Michael Calore: Yes.
Zoë Schiffer: No.
Michael Calore: Yes. Yes.
Zoë Schiffer: That is, Mike, the crazy, you told me yesterday that you ate most of your protein in the form of beans, and this was the craziest thing by far, bean protein notwithstanding, that you have ever said out loud.
Michael Calore: It’s true. I had Jane’s Addiction lyrics on mine, and maybe I had a poem or something, maybe a couple links to things that I was reading or things that I was enjoying at the time. Yeah, it was my project file on Unix that you could read by typing finger and then my email address.
Zoë Schiffer: OK, Lauren, tell us yours.
Lauren Goode: I was also going to say AOL Instant Messenger, because that really was my first social experience. Smile because it happened, don’t cry because it’s over. That’s a reference to the away messages that we used to put up that let people, you could customize the away messages.
Zoë Schiffer: Mm-hmm.
Lauren Goode: You guys, do you remember this? OK.
Zoë Schiffer: Oh yeah, absolutely.
Lauren Goode: Just for a little variation on what Zoë shared, I’ll say that my first real feed-based social media experience was MySpace.
Michael Calore: MySpace, top eight.
Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. Oh my gosh.
Lauren Goode: My MySpace profile, I think was the first time that I ever attempted a selfie. This was with a digital camera, and so I had to prop it up on a bookshelf and then create a good angle for myself, set the timer, jump back, take a moment to look emo, hair falling in the face, and then pose. I remember one of my best friends said, “Saw your new profile pic. Who took that?” I was too embarrassed to say that I had set up this whole selfie apparatus, so I was like, “My brother took it of me.” She was like, “Why is your brother taking photos of you?” Which in retrospect, it is a super weird thing to say.
Zoë Schiffer: That is so funny.
Lauren Goode: Yeah.
Michael Calore: Not necessarily. I mean, it just depends on your relationship.
Lauren Goode: Yeah. My brother was in the habit of taking photos of me in sundresses with my hair falling in my face and looking emo. Yeah, no, no. Yeah, no, it was a selfie I set up on a bookshelf. I don’t know. It was real weird guys. MySpace was weird. I just want to say that shortly before we taped this, you and me and Zoë were actually all together in the same space together here in San Francisco for the WIRED Big Interview event, which you mentioned. I got home really late that night because we all went out afterwards. I looked at my phone and I still had three quarters of my battery left because I wasn’t on my phone all day. I was present with everyone there. I mean, I did have to check it for some logistic stuff, and I called Waymo at some point, I know that’s so San Francisco, I had to call my self-driving car to get us to the karaoke party, of course. It was so nice. It felt so real, and it was really nice seeing both of you in person.
Michael Calore: Oh, that was a fun day.
Zoë Schiffer: I completely agree. I really, really liked, it’s nice that we can record remotely, but I really liked female together. It was so fun.
Lauren Goode: Maybe we should try to do that more.
Zoë Schiffer: Yeah.
Lauren Goode: Maybe that’s the antidote. We don’t need to delete the apps from our phones if we can manage to do the thing that Zoë described earlier, of making our real lives even fuller.
Michael Calore: Yeah. Maybe we can coordinate by getting a DM thread going on Bluesky.
Lauren Goode: I think Mike might’ve missed the point of this episode. Thank you, Mike.
Michael Calore: Well, that’s our show for today. We will be back with a new episode next week. Thanks for listening to Uncanny Valley. If you liked what you heard today, make sure to follow our show and rate it on your podcast app of choice. If you’d like to get in touch with any of us, with any questions, comments, or show suggestions, write to us at uncannyvalley@wired.com. Today’s show is produced by Kyana Moghadam, Amar Lal at Macro Sound mixed this episode, Jordan Bell is our executive producer. Condé Nast’s Head of Global Audio is Chris Bannon.
