1 [[!meta date="2018-01-08 21:04:09 +0800"]]
2 [[!tag social_media blogging meta_thinking open_web]]
3 Dries Buytaert [wrote last week](https://dri.es/more-blogging-and-less-social-media) about intending to use social media less in 2018. As an entrepreneur developing a CMS, he has a vested interest in preventing the world moving to see the internet as being either Facebook, Instagram or Twitter (or reversing that current-state maybe). Still, I believe he is genuinely concerned about the effect of using social media on our thinking. This partly because I share the observation. Despite having been an early adopter, I disabled my Facebook account a year or two ago already. I'm currently in doubt whether I should not do the same with Twitter. I notice it actually is not as good a source of news as classic news sites - headlines simply get repeated numerous times when major events happen, and other news is equally easily noticed browsing a traditional website. Fringe and mainstream thinkers alike in the space of [management](http://tompeters.com/), [R](http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/) [stats](http://www.brodrigues.co/), [computing hardware](https://www.olimex.com/) etc are a different matter. While, as Dries notices, their micro-messages are typically not well worked out, they do make me aware of what they have blogged about - for those that actually still blog. So is it a matter of trying to increase my Nexcloud newsreader use, maybe during dedicated reading time, and no longer opening the Twitter homepage on my phone at random times throughout the day, and conceding short statements without a more worked out bit of content behind it are not all that useful?
5 The above focuses on consuming content of others. To foster conversations, which arguably is the intent of social media too, we might need something like [webmentions](https://www.w3.org/TR/webmention/) to pick up steam too.