At the mercy of social media

I like Instagram as much as the next guy. I check in daily on my carefully curated feed of folks I follow and then work hard not to doomscroll the day away.

One of my favorite follows is an adorable Corgi (aren’t they all adorable?) named Parsnip. Every day Parsnip, whose owner is a friend of mine, has a mini-adventure that is described by a haiku. And every single day, to see that haiku, I have to click the dreaded “See more…” link.

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Every. Single. Day. To see a mere 17 syllables.

Without fail, Instagram takes it upon itself to hide the last 10 syllables or so behind a link. The reasons for this are mysterious to me. I never don’t want to “see more”. I always want to see everything. 

This seems to be a symptom of social media in general. Facebook and Twitter do it routinely. I have seen Facebook use the “See more…” link to hide a single word. As for Twitter, under what circumstances would I not want to read an entire tweet? They are only 280 characters to begin with. Do they need to be shortened?

A simple request

When I search for “MLB Standings” I am shown a single division. If I want to see what I asked for — you know, the standings — I have to click, you guessed it, “See more…”.

Social media seems determined to show me things I don’t want to see and not show me things I do want to see. For instance, when I’m looking at the comments on a post, I want to read all the comments. I most decidedly don’t want to read just the “relevant” comments. I always want to read all the comments. 

This morning on Facebook I was notified that a friend had replied to a comment I had made on a video of his son playing T-Ball. It took me five (!) clicks to get there from the notification. 

I get that some posts have thousands of comments, and it would take a lot of scrolling to get past them. In that case, I’d be fine with a “More comments…” link at the bottom. Or how about always showing all the comments only on posts by my friends and not group discussions? I’m never fine with the site deciding that I don’t want to see someone’s comment or that I only want to read one-third of all the comments that are shown. 

Most feeds also show me “suggested posts” of people that I haven’t subscribed to. And while I confess that I occasionally find an account that I do want to follow, most of the time I merely want to see the posts of people that I do follow.

And sure, I like to watch a video in my feed, but when I close it or scroll past it, I want it to, you know, go away. I don’t want it to shrink down to a small window at the bottom of my screen and keep playing. Close means close, right? Not “shrink and keep making noise.” 

It would be fine if I could somehow turn these “features” off as an option. Maybe I missed it, but scouring the settings doesn’t reveal any way to do so. How about letting me easily turn on and off whether I see suggested posts? How about letting me permanently say “All comments” instead of forcing me to default to “Relevant comments”? And who decides what is “relevant” anyway? Clearly not the user.

And don’t even get me started on web pages that start automatically playing videos with sound.

Annoying by design

Perhaps most irritating of all is the socials deciding whose posts I will see and whose I will not. It is a common occurrence for me to realize, “Hmmm, I haven’t seen any posts from George lately,” and then go to George’s feed, only to discover that George has been posting all along. For reasons that are mysterious and unfathomable, it was decided that George’s posts are no longer “relevant” to me.

I’ve said this many times: I would pay money to just have nothing but every single post by every single person I follow presented to me in chronological order. With all the comments. 

And I don’t mind ads. In fact, I like that most social networks endeavor to show me ads based on my interests and search history. While ads can often be intrusive and obnoxious, I actually appreciate some of the newer ways that the sites show me ads. Most social media platforms show clearly labeled ads as a normal part of the feed. That works well. I kind of admire those ads that are fixed in the browser as the article itself scrolls by. Well done, web designers.

But all this irritation is, of course, the result of the nature of the web. The not-so-subtle superpower of a web page is that it can basically do whatever it wants when you request it. Clicking on a link puts you at the mercy of the page designer. The browser can do a lot to support you here, most notably blocking the dreaded popup windows, but a browser can’t force a site not to use those aggravating user interface “features” that make your browsing experience unpleasant. 

I’m sure that the socials have their reasons for thinking features like the “See more…” link are a good idea. I can’t imagine what they are, but someone clearly thinks they are worthwhile. But ultimately, they are trying to do my thinking and choosing for me. I’m the expert on what I want to see, not some user interface designer in Silicon Valley. The choices should be mine.

I know these are all first-world problems. But for the love of Parsnip, at least let me choose how my feed comes to me.