Is This The Year We Quit Social Media?

- How much time do you spend on social media every day? Lauren? - Too much time. Mostly on the text-based social networks, but I've been known to get sucked into Instagram reels too. - Yeah, what about you, Zoe? - 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? But only like a couple minutes of that is actually on social media apps. I'm very like a deserve a medal of honor. - You do, actually deserve a 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. - 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 will literally sometimes go to his desk and I mean, did you see that thing I said to him? He'll say. - No way. - He'll say, no, I ran out of time. And I'm like, you're adhering to that. Check the meme. - So do you ever think about getting off of the apps? - All the time. - All the time? - I fantasize about it at this point. What would it be like to not constantly feel like you have to broadcast something? - Honestly, I'm not on them that much, but I've been on print to leave for a few months. So the answer is like, 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? - 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 it. - That's usually after I send him some terrible meme. - Yeah, or I think of a joke. - That's what he wants to write. - 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 you know, we're words people. This is Wired's Uncanny Valley, a show about the people, power, and influence of Silicon Valley. I'm Michael Colori, director of consumer tech and culture here at Wired. - And I'm Lauren Good, I'm a senior writer at Wired. - And I'm Zoe Schiffer, Wired's director of business and industry. - 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, Blue Sky. - 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. - I fully agree. So Lauren, let's start with you. Can you bring us up to speed with what's going on with Blue Sky? - Blue Sky, or Blue Ski. - Blue Ski, as I call it, yeah. So, you know, the vibes on Twitter have changed a lot since Elon Musk bought the platform. That was back in October of 2022. And, you know, 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. And then after this election season, that became much more obvious. When you log onto Twitter now, you know, 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. So, 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 and air quotes right now, new app called Blue Sky. The reason why I'm putting that in quotes is because Blue Sky is 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, but we're starting to see millions of people literally start to flock to Blue Sky in the wake of these changes at the old Twitter. Now, I'm kind of excited about Blue Sky, but just from a numbers perspective, the latest numbers that they shared is that they have 22 million users. That's like, you know, 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. But in looking at kind of the landscape of text-based social networks right now, Blue Sky is getting a lot of attention. - Yeah, for sure. And 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 over is that he played such a big role, or he was such a loud voice in the US presidential election. And you know, 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. And then 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. So yeah, the alternatives right now, as Lauren said, Blue Sky, which kind of has that chaotic vibe of old Twitter, it's weirder, and 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 Threads. So it kind of has a critical mass in the way that Blue Sky, you know, is just a bit smaller at this point. - Yeah, like in the 2010s, a lot of us, and I say us like journalists, we got 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. You know, 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, you know, maybe single digit percentage, but it felt like Twitter, despite its relatively small size and 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 like the blue check like serves a purpose in an old social media world where like it would tell people that you really were who you said you were, if you were a person who might have like fake accounts made of you, but it was also like, it was clout. - Yeah, I felt like that was one of Elon's critiques that, I mean, he called the blue check system a Lord's and peasant system, and obviously it was one of his big initiatives, right, when he bought the company to get rid of it and that created all sorts of problems, but it was true that like the way blue checks were handed out seemed kind of biased and unfair. Like you guys remember that for years and years, Twitter said that it had paused its verification system, so people couldn't get verified. But if you were a journalist and I speak from experience, if you had 10 followers and then you joined any normal newsroom, the social media manager in that newsroom would get you verified overnight. And it was like so clear that there were these back channel ways for journalists to get the coveted blue check and not felt like, yeah, I felt unfair to a lot of people. - 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, right? Like 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? - That's a good point. - Yeah, right. It's a different kind of broadcast model. - So how does threads fit into this? Because threads was built to be one of those conversational social networks, but it hasn't exactly played out that way. - Yeah, because it just doesn't thread well. - Should I really just, okay, go ahead, Zoe, please stop me. I can't like, I have kind of come around to your view on threads that I'm using it less. I'm ashamed to say after being a threads pusher for months and months, but I mean, obviously meta has purposefully stepped away from news. They've said this very clearly and they're down-ranking news. And for a text-based social platform to not dive into and put resources into real-time information, it's just such a bad call. A text-based version of Instagram. What the hell is that? No one wants that versus like an alternative to Twitter. Everyone wanted that. And that is why I think Blue Sky has popped off 'cause it really does provide that like real-time breaking news feeling and threads feels a little more dull. - 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 like posting about like, I would see a lot of drama. Like, it felt like a reality show transposed onto a text-based social network of like, next-door vibes. - Total next-door vibes or stuff about like, relationship drama, really messy situations. How do I deal with my in-laws? Paraminopause symptoms, weird health hacks. Like, really just kind of strange stuff. And then, but what are reporting and other people like Katie Nuttopolis is reporting as found is that the more rage-bady the topic would be, the more people were likely to respond to it. And then that would be algorithmically weighted more. So that's why you would see it more on your feet. Is that making sense? - Sounds a lot like Facebook. - Yeah, or Instagram. Yeah, the stuff that you engage with, the signals that you're giving it are going to inform more of what you say. - Mike, tell us where mastodon fits into this ecosystem because I feel like you're the only mastodon user of the group. - Harsh. - He has a mastodon plushie. - I do. - Oh, thank you. - You're welcome. - mastodon is a social network that has been around for a while and it's 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. - I love this. These are terms I understand. Tell me what. - It's a social network that no company owns. Like 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. And 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. 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. And 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 and it's people who have made a conscious decision to join this social network that stands for freedom and equality and individualism and-- - A decentralized web. - A decentralized web. All right, so 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. But what are the factors that are driving people away from social media in general that are souring them on spending time on these apps? - Hmm. I mean, I think the big one is just that it feels bad to scroll. Like I think we've all had the experience and this is why the question of like kids and technology is so heightened of like scrolling and just feeling like your soul is being drained. And of course, then you look at a small child and you're like, oh my God, what's happening to them? But 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 used to be true. - Do you really think it's optional, Zoe? I'm so intrigued by that. - I think it is. I mean, it used to feel like we lived and died by whether our story popped off on Twitter. And 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. - I love that idea that there's still a way to reach audiences that doesn't realize so much on some whimsical billionaires online platform that they, you know, they can tweak the algorithm of entity given moments. There's still just other ways to reach audiences if you are putting out a good quality work. But 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. And I think that social media was really good for traffic but maybe not cultivating actual audiences. - Okay, so what about the person who's not a journalist? - Yeah, I was just gonna say like 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, you know, feel overwhelmed by it and it leads to a lot of anxiety. You know, 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 your idea, you know, you said this about the iPhone or whatever but it was like very common focus. And then when I transitioned to becoming more of a business and culture reporter in Silicon Valley, you're sort of touching on all of these hop-up and issues and people have very strong opinions and the toxicity on platforms like Twitter became that much more apparent to me. - Did you ever get the like go back to reporting on the iPhone? - Kinda common. - I haven't received that yet from the trolls but I think I'd welcome it. - That seems tame, seems pretty tame, as far as comments go. - And you can set filters and you can unfollow people and you can block people on platforms that allow you to block people. - Not X anymore. - And you can create a space that feels a little safer but that stuff still creeps in. And I think part of that is there's just like a way of interacting on social media now that feels kind of adversarial from the start. - 100%. - 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 wanna deal with them and it just feels better just to close the app. - Yeah. - But at that, not feel true for you before because 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. Like quote tweets are literally for me usually dunking on someone. - Yeah. - And so the fact that that was kind of how you got popular you retweeted something someone else had said and you put your own spit on it or showed why they were such an idiot. Like to be it always had that kind of adversarial flavor but 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. - Yeah. - Do you guys feel that that much more keenly now? - Because 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? - And when we were talking about Sam Altman in last week's episode, you said this really interesting thing about like is what I'm getting out of AI and consumer AI apps like better than what I'm giving them or am I giving more than I'm getting? And I feel like now it does feel like we are giving more than we are getting. And a former boss of mine always used to say, are you being sold a product or are you the product? - 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 like 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 like five minutes ago and five days ago and two hours ago and 10 hours ago, all jumbled together. I really just, my eyes just glaze over and I lose interest. And to your point, Lauren, it prioritizes things that might get me angry. - Yeah, I mean, and also that time delay, it's just, it's like the delinearization of fundamentally the human experience, the passage of time. Like 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. - That's just orienting, but 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 met as decision to intentionally suppress real-time information. Because on TikTok, for example, you have an algorithmic feed, but it doesn't make those same decisions. And so you do see more recent posts. And 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 like 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. Like you don't think it's an accident that you dislike the algorithmic feed and you like mastodon those seem like aligned principles to me. - I think blue sky 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 blue sky 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 blue sky 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 and as those have been, 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. So 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. So maybe we should change that relationship. Maybe we should redefine it. So 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. (upbeat music) You come to the New Yorker radio hour for conversations that go deeper. With people you really wanna hear from, whether it's Bruce Springsteen or Questlove or Olivia Rodrigo, Liz Cheney or the Godfather of Artificial Intelligence, Jeffrey Hinton, or some of my extraordinarily well-informed colleagues at the New Yorker. So join us every week on the New Yorker radio hour wherever you listen to podcasts. 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 dislive. We've also talked about some of the reasons why people would consider quitting social media. So we're gonna talk about how to redefine our relationship with social media. And Zoe, I wanna start with you. What to you is a healthy relationship with social media? What does that look like? - For me personally, I honestly do think the healthiest relationship would be no relationship. Like I think I would probably be happiest if I wasn't on social at all. But I also really like Gia Tolentino, who's a writer for the New Yorker, her framework, she says like basically does your life on the screen feel smaller than your life, not on the screen? And 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 okay place. So that's what I try and focus on day to day. - What do you think Lauren? - 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. And I guess at what point does your real life, like at what point are you touching grass so much that you're just like, this is really all I want in me that I don't, what am I really getting from Instagram? I mean, I guess that's the whole point of this conversation. - Well, we've definitely all had the experience where your life on the screen started to take over. I think any journalist who's like, how does story go viral and how do people really mad at you on the internet, like I felt very all consumed by that to the point where I couldn't be present with the people around me. And conversely, I think we all know what it's like when you're so distracted by the fun things that you're doing, the dinner parties, the friends, the people you're dating, that you don't even really look at your phone. - 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. And I think probably the best illustration of that is the experience that we've all had where you're live tweeting something, right? Like 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-exing, re-skating things. And it feels, 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. And to me, that's a good, healthy thing that social media can provide. - Totally. - 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 like really would love to get off social media. And I came up with this acronym, Q. Community Utility and Education, bear with me here. The C community is what you just described, Mike. Utility, you know, 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? And 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 like once you get into like 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 queue. You need to log off. Maybe you need to delete the app. I like that. Yeah. That's like the big, 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? That's the thing. We put so much on us as the consumers of these apps to figure out these frameworks and jump to these hoops and try to figure out ways like we feel good about ourselves and like it's healthy. And we're working against these really powerful forces of tech companies that have like literally designed these apps to suck us in. So 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. No, who would? I mean, I feel like we almost need the chips analogy. We need like a Zembek for our phones. We haven't evolved to withstand the allure of chips. It's really hard to just stop at the surfing size. It's really hard to stop scrolling after 15 minutes. We need kind of an outside force being like, you're done. 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. I'm going to start using that. 20 minutes, 25 minutes, all of a sudden it's like, nope. 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 and be like, like recently, I was realizing that I would get up in the morning and I would be nursing and kind of to make myself sit there and nurse, I would reward myself by getting to read the fashion box that I like on the subject earlier in the morning, like 4.30. But I realized I was just like online shopping for an hour before I started my day every single day. And I was just deeply unhealthy and unsustainable for my wallet. And so I had to delete that off my phone and go cold turkey all of a sudden. You can come up with all of these frameworks with the problem with the frameworks is that they're kind of lean yet. You're like, well, I mean, I thought I wasn't going to do this. Only if it felt like this, or I was learning something. But like, what am I learning? I am actually learning about how to get rid of these under eye circles from this new product, you know. Another recurring theme on our podcast to some of our other episodes. But let's get back to the, like, why it can feel bad. Because I feel like we kind of touched on moderation before. But that's a big part of this. Like the toxicity, I feel like, is part of the problem part of the allure of kind of getting off of them entirely or really limiting our usage? Yeah. So 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? I just think that the incentives are always going to be misaligned with what is pretty much best for us. Yeah. The incentives are to keep you engaged as long as possible and to grow the user base. So 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? 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, like a moral decision because I didn't want to be part of Elon's project. But I also just didn't enjoy being on it 'cause I was constantly confronted with like horrible threats and unkind speech. And I think that I like that some of the alternatives now, like Blue Sky seemed 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 like no illegal activity, but then certain communities on the platform can set ceilings depending on what those communities want. So like some could say no. Newed images, no offensive jokes, but others might be fine with those things. Yeah. It feels like when we're talking about content moderation, that decentralization can actually be a negative. Like 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. Is that am I like oversimplifying things? 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, right? 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 remove. It relies on diligence, it relies on attention. So it's not perfect. Got it. 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. OK, but we're podcasts so we just get to ask the questions. Yes, indeed. So have you ever just deleted the app? And I don't mean like logged out, but deleted it, turned off the two-factor authentication token, like made it extremely difficult for me to get back on. 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 what threads came about. And I couldn't port over a user base to threads. But I think Instagram in particular, I had been using it kind of like you were saying, might I get felt more social to me? I followed my friends and I just felt myself kind of like compulsively checking it. And so a couple of 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, you know, sources that I'm kind of tracking and following. But it has basically no social function in my life anymore. And that, to me, feels like a healthier way to interact with the app. What about you, Lauren? Have you ever just bailed? No, I have deleted Twitter from my phone. Then I re-downloaded it. And I put it into this folder on my phone called Old Social. Ooh. What else is there? Yeah, I like wanted to just demote it. I wanted to feel like it wasn't at all enticing for me to open. So it's-- That definitely feels like a demotion. It's, yeah, four-square swarm. I don't even think those two exist, like four-square-stream line. Yeah, I think it's going to be swarm now. OK, now the teens are going to come after me. Snapchat, I put Snapchat in there. Because it's the old me, I don't use it anymore. 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. I mean, the ones that are important to you. Yeah, no. Would you ever-- would you ever just stop with threads, stop with Instagram, stop with Blue Skies? I would stop with Big Blue Facebook. Yeah. Yeah, except I use it for Marketplace. OK. Yeah, have you just gone nuclear on any of your apps? 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. And 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. But 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. And I think that's the big question. Can I still be plugged in, even if I'm not feeling that? What you're getting at with your question, though, is the issue of the individual choice or the collective choice, because 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. So none of them were going to get smartphones. And 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 like really missing out. And it actually might be more harmful than helpful to make that rule. And 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. Do you feel like you could do your job, Lauren, as a writer for Wired, if you were not on Threads or on Blue Sky? 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. So 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. Okay, so which one of us is going to be the one who quits first, who absolutely just stops posting? Me. It's going to be you. It's going to be me. Nice. It's going to be me. So what would happen? I just made a Justin Timberlake joke on this podcast. I went completely over my head. Oh, it's going to be awesome to talk about. Wait, you guys. It's the Justin Timberlake song and it's a meme every May. Like the month of May, it's a meme again. You guys need to be more online. I know. I think that's what I'm arriving at here. Zoe, what about you? Like how tempted are you to just go totally offline right now? I honestly feel pretty good about my social media usage, but I did do a thing last year where I committed on the years classically to do tech-free Shabox, so starting on Friday evening into Saturday, I wouldn't turn off my phone and just not look at it. And then I would turn it on kind of Sunday morning, typically. And that was a really nice experience. It required a certain level of like forthought and coordination in order to see people and keep plans. But once everyone in my life kind of knew that I was doing it, it felt really freeing in a way. And then of course, work caught up with me and I felt like I couldn't do that anymore, but I have been toying around with the idea of committing to it again this year. That's a very good plan. I wholeheartedly endorse that. Thank you. Okay, 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. I think I'm just going to go totally offline and I'm just going to whisper to all of you now, find me. 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. Okay. When I listen to the news, here's what I want to know. Why this story matters? Who's at the center of it and how the reporters uncovered it? And as a journalist, I want to make sure that's what you get to. I'm Eva Haye-Zadi, co-host of the podcast post reports. Every weekday, my colleagues and I at the Washington Post give you the context you need on the biggest stories. Healthcare, tariffs, artificial intelligence. We've got you covered. Look for post reports wherever you listen to podcasts. Okay, welcome back. We're going to play a little game now. We are going to talk about our very first experiences with social media. Zoe, what was your first social profile online? Oh, gosh. Does AIM count? I think it does, yeah, it was a social network, for sure. I was my first one that I remember. I used it exclusively to try and seduce boys at Hebrew school. And my username, when I was 12 years old, was Surfer Girl 17. And when my mom thought about that, she was like, "No, no, no, no, 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." So I had to change it and I changed it to AFI, a fire inside 17. Nice. That's very, you know. I love it. I love it. I love it. I love it. That's my brother's music taste. Anyway, Mike, what was yours? Wait, wait, wait, hold on. 17. What was that? Was that a birthday? 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. My first real social profile was probably my plan page on UNIX, or what are you saying right now? You're like, I wrote on a papyrus scroll, and then we distributed it with carrier pigeons. Pretty much. It's like pre-web internet. You were on a UNIX system, right? So, you know, you check your email with pine, you would gofer into other servers and read things. I am absolutely. This is real, and you would type everything into the terminal. Yeah. So, you open a command line, and then you give commands to go around the internet. There was no browser. So, you just said everything was text-based. So, you would log on, and if you want to find out information about another user, you type the word finger, and then you-- What? Are you talking about? Stop it. This is true. This is true. So, 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. You know, it was very different for every system, but by default, it would tell you what their phone number and what their email address was. So, if you were like, you know, it's 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. And if he had set up a plan or a project file, it would show that when you fingered the user. You actually used it as a verb. Oh! It was a verb. Yes. Yes. It would be 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 it, that you have ever set out loud. It's true. So, like, I had like Jane's addiction lyrics on mine, you know, and I think I maybe I had like a poem or something. Maybe a couple links to things that I was reading or things that I was enjoying at the time. So yeah, it was my project file on Unix that you could read by typing finger. And then my email address. Okay, Lauren. That was yours. 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 know, you could like customize the away messages. Do you guys remember this? Okay. Yeah, absolutely. But just for a little variation on what Zoe shared, I'll say that my first real, like, feed-based social media experience was my space. My space. Top eight. Yeah. Oh my gosh. My my space profile, I think, was the first time that I ever attempted a selfie. And this was with a digital camera. And so I had to, like, prop it up on a bookshelf and then create like a, you know, a good angle for myself, set the timer, jump back, take a moment to look, email, hair falling in the face. And then, like, and then pose. And then I remember one of my best friends said, like, saw your new profile pic, like, who took that? And I was too embarrassed to say that I had set up this whole selfie apparatus. So I was like, my brother took it off me. And she was like, why is your brother taking photos of you? Which in retrospect is a super weird thing to say, like, yeah, but I mean, you know, depends on your relationship. Yeah, my brother was in the habit of taking photos of me in sunglasses with my hair falling in my face and looking at you, oh, yeah, no, no, um, but yeah, no, it was the selfie I set up on a bookshelf. I don't know. It was real weird, guys. My space was weird. I just want to say that shortly before we taped this, you and me and Zoe were actually all together in the same space together here in San Francisco for the wired big interview event, which you mentioned. And I got home really late that night because we all went out afterwards, and I looked at my phone and I still had like three quarters of my battery left because I wasn't on my phone all day. I was with, I was present with everyone there. I mean, I did have to check it for some logistics stuff. And I like, you know, called Waymo at some point. But like, but I know it's so San Francisco call myself driving car to get us to the karaoke party. Of course. It was so nice, it felt so real, and it was just, it was really nice seeing both of you and person. Oh. That was a fun day. I completely agree. I really, really like, it's nice that we can record remotely, but I really liked being all together. It was so fun. And if we should try to do that more, maybe that's the antidote. Like, we don't need to delete the apps from our phones. If we can manage to do, like, the thing that Zoe described earlier of making our real lives even fuller. Yeah, so maybe we can coordinate by getting like a DM thread going on Blue Sky. I think Mike might have missed the point of this episode. Thank you, Mike. 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 Choice. If you'd like to get in touch with any of us with any questions, comments, or show suggestions, write to us at [email protected]. Today's show is produced by Keana Mogadam, a Mar-a-Lal at Macar-a-Sound mixed this episode. Jordan Bell is our executive producer. Kondin asks, "Head of Global Audio is Chris Bannon." This week on the political scene from The New Yorker, a bracing conversation about the risks of Donald Trump's new world order. I think that what you're seeing both abroad and at home are completely optional conflicts created by the character of the president. The die is cast by who he is and he sees himself as without any kind of restraints on his power. Join me, Evan Osnos, and my colleagues, Jane Mayer, and Susan Glasser every Friday on the political scene, available wherever you get your podcasts.