Each day, my Instagram account is followed by several young and astonishingly attractive women. I’m so popular, these folks find me irresistible. Not only that, when I follow these folks back, within seconds, they send me a personalized greeting by direct message. It’s nice to be popular, ain’t it?

It’s hard to believe that at the same time as these new followers are massaging my ego, I’m seriously considering ditching more social media. Why would I do such a crazy thing? To start, greedy social media companies want to block links to Canadian journalism. Why? Because our government expects these companies to ante up to support the folks who report the news while they feel entitled to use this work however they like, without having to pay a dime. That stinks, doesn’t it?.

Let’s look at some positives and negatives. What does social media do for me? The best things about Facebook are groups and pages that connect me with people who share some of my slightly obscure interests, such as playing old time music or playing go. Of course having some kind of connection platform is welcome in itself and every now and then is even handy. I’d enjoy Facebook much more though, if it wasn’t full of memes and political jabs. I found myself commenting on a political meme I disagreed with earlier today. Later, I thought, what was the point of commenting on the post? It only gave it more attention. I guess sometimes it’s difficult not to engage.

I spend a good deal of time on YouTube. For someone like me who enjoys listening to folk musics, there is so much available, just a click away. For some time I posted videos in which I played my banjo for anyone interested (a few people are, most people aren’t), but these days I post very few videos but watch many. Maybe one day I’ll make some fiddle videos, who knows. I also follow various other Youtubers and I enjoy that quite a bit. If you want to learn how to do almost anything, there is a video on YouTube which will help you out, almost for sure. I can say with some certainty, that although there are things I dislike about YouTube, I find it indispensable these days, particularly in relation to my my folly, trying to learn fiddle.

On the negative side, the various social medias are chock full of cranks, fakers, assholes, trolls, haters and liars, not to mention truckloads of disinformation, dangerous memes and bad ideas. Not only that, they are all busy mining my data in an effort to sell me stuff I don’t really want to buy. The other big negative is that the social medias suck a tremendous amount of time that might be spent doing something more worthwhile.

I dumped Twitter, which in my experience is the nastiest of the bunch, at some point after that silly squillionaire bought the company – and I haven’t looked back. In fact, I can say I don’t even miss it a little bit. As for the others, I’m holding on for now, but don’t be surprised if one day I pack in Facebook and Instagram along the way.

What do you think? Are the big social media companies your friends? Have you considered walking away from the whole bunch of them?