Am I an abnormal social media user?
By Brian Clegg
I’ve used social media quite a while. As Twitter/X helpfully tells me when I joined, I’ve been on that for 18 years, and similar times on Facebook and LinkedIn – Bluesky is a recent addition. But I don’t think I’m exactly normal as a user.
In part I’m there because my literary agent at the time was an enthusiast and recommended using social media as a way of engaging with readers, which is my primary use still today, along with keeping an eye on new books coming out to review – so not how many people use it. But I also think it’s because I don’t interact with it the way many (most?) do.
The aspect that inspired this post was someone talking about hashtags and I realised I’ve never clicked on a hashtag. Not once. I’ve never seen the point, perhaps because I rarely search on social media for anything other than a person. I do use them on most of my posts, because one of my daughters who used to work for a company that specialised in social media visibility insisted I should – but it sometimes feels it makes the posts look messy.
Speaking of visibility, I know the social media algorithms give preference to posts that push any link down into the comments, but I very rarely do that because it is so hugely irritating as a reader. (It’s the same reason I turned off advertising I used to have in the middle of my blog posts – it just makes reading such a pain.)
It’s only recently too that I’ve started looking beyond the posts of people I follow, where there’s an option to stick with that (Facebook, of course, handed us all to the algorithm a while ago). For this reason I never understood the moans about being forced down rabbit holes. I do now venture into the ‘For you’ or ‘Discover’ tabs – and have seen those rabbit holes forming (fascinating how different they are on X and Bluesky) but always return to Following on a regular basis.
Perhaps we all have our own ways of handling ‘the socials’ – but I can’t help feeling I’m on the abnormal end of the spectrum.
Image from Unsplash by Anthony Hortin
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Now Appearing is the blog of science writer Brian Clegg (www.brianclegg.net), author of Inflight Science, Before the Big Bang and The God Effect.
Source: http://brianclegg.blogspot.com/2026/08/am-i-abnormal-social-media-user.html
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