Networking Nausea: The Lost Charm of Social Media
A shallow dive into the recent past to look at what got me into social media and why it has become uninteresting.
Most 90s kids will remember their teenage years as the time when they started using social networking sites. I was 14 when I created my first email address, and just a few months I discovered the first social networking site that I would ever join.
Orkut
I remember entering a fake birth year on the registration page when I joined Orkut in early 2009. Orkut was meant to be used to connect with strangers, but I ended up sending friend requests to my real-life friends itself. Orkut also helped me discover Character Map, which helps to enter characters not present on the keyboard. As teenagers we thought some of those characters to be decorative versions of letters from the English alphabet, and used them to write our names. Apparently, it was also meant to make it difficult for others to find us and helped to keep unnecessary friend requests away. However, Orkut's charm faded away pretty soon and so did the site three years later, as it made way for a social networking site which would go on to become a conglomerate of sorts.
Facebook had been around for a few years already, but I discovered it only in August 2009. Initially we did the same things we did on Orkut like writing the name using non-English characters etc. Facebook definitely had a lot more to offer than Orkut. We could exchange "pokes" with friends (don't know what purpose they serve). And remember how addictive games like Farmville were?! We could post status updates to our Facebook profile directly through SMS, and that led to a lot of cringeworthy content which I cleaned up for the most part during the first wave of the pandemic when all of us had enough time to discover embarrassing stuff from our friends' social media profiles.
I still have a Facebook account and I do check it now and then, but I don't actively use it to interact with people my age. Funnily enough my mother is pretty active on Facebook these days, and that might be because a lot of people my parents' age I know seem to have now taken over Facebook while my generation has moved on to other sites or have become dormant on social media.
Quora
Back in 2014, Quora was the place to be read amazing content in a Q and A format. Balaji Viswanathan had already created a categorised collection of his in-depth analytical answers to a decent range of questions. It acted as a great medium for me to share experiences and express opinions about the topics I followed at the time. Over the next couple of years I discovered IIMA alumni Aviral Bhatnagar and Rohan Jain who might have indirectly inspired me to prepare for CAT and get into IIMA. My batchmates at IIMA, Chhavi Gupta and Shweta Arora also started their content creation journey on Quora and now have their own websites and YouTube channels.
I was inspired by all of them to write good answers and get the Top Writer badge like all of them had. However, things took a turn for the worse pretty soon. Quora's monetisation efforts brought about a lot of adverse changes. Most old initiatives were replaced by new ones which promote quantity over quality. There were also changes to the anonymity policies which made it easy for people to post extremely low-quality questions and answers. Content moderation issues also persisted. Introduction of regional languages seemed great initially but all the aforementioned issues crept into these regional language sections pretty soon.
I started using Instagram in 2013, way before it became a part of the Meta conglomerate. More than a content sharing site, I have used it as a photo-editing tool because of the ease with which you can make your not-so-good photos pretty amazing. This drove me to click and post a lot of photos, especially photos of skies, cats and babies. In the last couple of years, Reels have become the anchor of Instagram and helped them acquire users in India especially after TikTok was banned by the Government. I can shamelessly agree that I watch Reels a lot, but only if they have babies or cats!
I spend most of my social media time on Reddit these days, and I just love it! Reddit definitely isn't like it originally was when it was originally created, but I don't have any complaints with its current form. The communities I have joined have all types of content - questions, discussions and memes. Of course it is going to evolve with time and might not be as interesting and cool as it is right now.