So to find out if social media are more than incestuous circles I decided to live life offline. As a test and just for a few weeks I told myself, but once off the grid it was surprisingly difficult to get back online.
A short stop seemed in order to avoid becoming a typical ‘social media pundit’; someone mostly interested in the media itself and the attention they generate on Twitter or G+. A short period of reflection at the start of the year to ponder on questions like ‘is Syria really less important than the new Twitter layout’?
Before Google Plus launched I was quite content with my life so why would I want to share my thoughts with more people than I would ever meet in real life. And by posting and acquiring more and more ‘followers’ didn’t I become part of the inner circle of social media pundits who keep the myth of their own importance alive?
Looking from the outside in
Looking from the outside in, it’s hard to miss the G+ and Twitter dominance by users thanking each other for an ‘awesome’ post, a link to a ‘can’t miss’ hangout, a shameless referral to a ‘must read‘ blog or yet another bunch of unknowns you ‘definitely must circle’.
Not only do social media often come across as a self-congratulating community, but the topics in popular discussions tend to be incestuous as well. A slip of the tongue on Twitter, the theme or meme of the week, or – most popular of all – some change on the social media platform itself generates zillions of posts and comments while more worldly topics like civil wars, care for the elderly or the office evergreen of local house prices rarely make it to ‘what’s hot’.
On an existential level it’s difficult to justify the effort of posting, twittering, updating on a regular basis to what in the end are a bunch of strangers. When you are part of it and an active member of the G+ community you can build your own world and ignore most of the blatant self-promotion, but using a wider perspective it’s hard to miss the incestuous tendency in the more ‘broadcast’ oriented social media.
Looking from the inside out
is a completely different experience. The people reading this you are certainly not complete strangers as, from the 60.000 who honored me by subscribing to my content, I got to learn quite a lot of you. You turned out to be remarkably smart, witty and diverse group who challenged me daily by posting great content or critical comments.
There really is an enormous barrier to share thoughts, ideas, experiences or even cat pics online. Once you start asking questions like how would that enrich my life, who could possibly be interested , does this really make the world a better place or simply why bother?, you quickly run out of easy answers so it took a while to get back online. Much longer than I ever planned and on my return I still don’t have the answers, but the warmth of the G+ community is a reason in itself.
I really started to miss your daily input, the broadening of my horizons, the widening of my perspective so I’m back and listening.
I learned a few valuable lessons looking from the outside in and I hope I can convert these to a fresh approach. Having said that, chances are high that the next post will be about social media 😉 Let’s see, I make no promises to avoid raising my own bar too high and fall silent again.
I look forward to your input again; reading your posts, following your links and taking note of your comments which made this place special and defines the real social in ‘social media’.
P.S. Thanks to all people who contacted me during my absence. I pinged you on this post to let you know finally won me over ;).
P.S. II to honor +Amanda Blain I will use the hashtag #MyGooglePlusStory #SocMed
Welcome back, +Max Huijgen! I agree with your insights and outsights (a made-up word) and I'm looking forward to reading your posts again 🙂
Hiya, Max. Once you stop caring about followers, pluses, likes and clickthrough rates, social media becomes a fun place to read and post. Welcome back to the land of indulging in fun stuff to read.
Nice to see you back, Max.
Great to have you back +Max Huijgen. You may not be able to change the world of social media in general, but you can enrich the lives of a few of us strangers. I apologize in advance for the cat photos, and will try to limit them to one day per week.
Welcome back +Max Huijgen!
And thanks for sharing your story with us, probably a great experience and difficult for many of us to try that 😉
Funny… I just '+1'ed the post the moment I saw the picture, as I like that story.
After that I saw you wrote more than one line and Removed the '+1'. Before reading what you wrote.
Yep… I missed your posts and insights. But not knowing you, it is like sharing the moment that 'is'. The moment of discussion.
Very coincidental that it is you who write this, just after I had some discussions about numbers, statistics and the relevance of certain posts.
For me the value of G+ is simple… It is just the place to find the people that make you think about things, without distraction.
I think you choose exactly the only picture that shows what G+is about… It's a lot of technique, but we use it the way best fitted. It doesn't matter if you're the person, or the meerkat.
Welcome back!
Thanks for your perspective, Max. (See? I just did exactly what you were talking about. But, it's sincere!)
I really like you post. Please do more. Whenever I can, documentaries of nature are what I enjoy learning from.
Hi +Catherine Maguire Your well deserved ping was lost (and many more) as I forgot how to get a notification to a specific circle.
Thinking about noise to signal… yes, social media has a tendency to be more self-congradulatory than other offline platforms. I suspect part of this behaviour is based on the fact that online discussions are saved forever – and being the person congradulating someone doesn't harm reputation, but voicing an alternate opinion could. This potentially creates an inherent bias towards positive encouragement interactions in the digital system.
Another thought: one particular presentation that struck me recently was one of +Esra'a Al Shafeis sites, presenting collated trending 'trouble spots' around the world along with citizen news contributions to each trend, across media sources and across languages in one central place. I'm not sure if this is curated or automated; either way I think this sort of tooling is going to become quite a lot more popular as social media 'matures'. Ideally a more interactive curation and interaction platform built on top of a platform with that type of cross-media analysis. Anyway, I digress; I'm sure we'll cross paths again online!
+Max Huijgen I looked you up a couple weeks ago when it dawned on me that I hadn't seen you here in months. I wanted to post out to the Plus universe and ask if you were okay, but I was afraid to hear that something tragic had happened.
I'm relieved to see you are okay.
I understand the need to evaluate and reevaluate. I'm using my time here very differently than I used to and find that's okay.
Good to see you back.
Big competition >>>>>
Who can see so far ………….
+Max Huijgen Humans are compulsive communicators, we have found ways to store and disseminate that ability and use it for the better of humanity. The "net" is just an update of the printing press, the press change the world, we are still evolving.
+100 +Max Huijgen … 🙂 Good to see that you're around nonetheless…
Also compare: "My First and Last Tweet of 2014"
medium.com/p/f478225d4982
C'est un grand plaisir de vous revoir +Max Huijgen 🙂
J'ai lu avec attention votre longue réflexion à propos de notre vie numérique multiforme et votre témoignage me fait encore plus apprécier votre personnalité équilibrée et votre esprit libre et généreux.
Je suis sincèrement heureux de vous connaitre.
Une très belle journée à vous Max.
Nice seeing you again +Max Huijgen!
So you're the one that made it a 'ghost town' 😉 welcome back!
yeah, I was wondering too what happened, since there weren't any posts from your on my wall for a significant period.
Having said that, I believe that social media (if you strip all the blaring and marketing away) has indeed its use for an amazing ideas exchange. As much as we're all biologically the same (minus minor differences as skin color or eye color – although some groups think different about that) we – as humans/humanity – have developed a variety of cultures, perceptions and point of views.
IMHO this allows us (as a whole) to see things from different angles. The key is just to keep an open mind about things.
The internet and social media in itself gives us the back-end/medium for this kind of exchange. On a global scale even. On top of that, there's the ever increasing vertical integration of mobile technologies.
We become more informed and aware of others out there how they feel, how they think, who they are
hey there! Mr prodigal son :))
What strikes me is that 'conversion' seems to be a priority on various social media. Not so on G+, where contributors measure success in terms of eachother's attention. No links with effects in the 'real' World.
: )
+Max Huijgen Céad mile fáilte back again, I’ve really missed your posts. I didn’t get my ping either (!) but G+ knew you were important to me and I spotted one of your +1’s in the stream a while ago!
Not sure if you know but there were mad rumours flying around last week that G+ was going to vanish forever. Anyway they’ve stopped for the moment and let’s enjoy this very special platform where yes, we have the social back in social media again.
Wonderful words +George Cohn +Paul Schoonhoven +Jean-Marc Luna
and much appreciated +James Barraford and of course my Irish soul mate on G+ +Eileen O'Duffy
Next post will as predicted probably about social media so thanks +Anton Theunissen +Sophie Wrobel +Otto Normalverbraucher +David Maclean +Lars Fosdal as i will use your input and yes +Eve A 'outsights' is a great word 🙂
And of course thanks to all the other commenters and plussers. You all made me feel welcome again so let's see if I can live up to expectations.
Meanwhile I'm trying to catch up…. G+ closing down, view counters (I have over 10 million views, what does it mean???)
Yes +Lars Fosdal stats are best ignored unless you want to benchmark like +Anton Theunissen (and know what you want to achieve, but what IS 10 million views?
'Views' are funny.. 😉
The other day I was in a discussion about the top viewers on +CircleCount. It turned out that the nr 1 is a guy with not much engagement, who was himself very surprised to be the nr1. But it was logical: one of his pictures is many times used on chromecast as background.
Google adds all the views of you together. I think it is no coincidence Google is using this number, as it sees all different 'products' as part of the same game.
I like the definition of +Paul Schoonhoven: views are funny 😉
+Max Huijgen the views looked like an April Fools Joke ( https://plus.google.com/+CircleCount/posts/Z1t8J9wKnwi) but it wasn't a joke.
Every view of a profile, a post or a Google+ image is counted. Public or private. Shown on Google+, on blogger or on Chromecast. The number doesn't really tell much about the Google+ activity of someone. It's more a metric to check only on your own profile and not compare it with others.
Thanks +Paul Schoonhoven +CircleCount So photographers, sharers of what's hot content and the likes of them will be in a different class from the rest of us?
Yep, many different classes here.
The highest class are the Chromecast contributers, than the blogger-users using their Google+ photos on the blog and then the what's hot guys. Probably many more groups, but no way to identify these groups.
+Max Huijgen will ping you into a few private threads on this… tl;dr it's pretty much useless, and while trying to point to "some big number usage" (Views = Impressions, essentially), Google has unwittingly revealed a lot more of G+'s Ghost Town-ish tendencies than most understand… 🙂
+Max Huijgen I have some 10 million views as well, but only a third of your followers. I don't believe I have any ChromeCast images, but I comment and interact a bit, and I have an active Delphi community.
To me, these numbers are not important, and I believe that if you need actual stats, you'll need to use f.x. Blogger articles and Google Analytics to measure the traffic and referral sources.
The most important bit is to decide what gives you value from a social network, and for me that surely is not numbers, but meaningful dialog and things that puts a smile on my face or makes me curious.
P. S. That Ghost Town theme is getting real old. I never could keep up with my stream, and it isn't getting any easier.
P. P. S. For some time now, I have been pruning those that follow me, specifically blocking Pages and profiles that appear only to be linking content for exposure. I can't say for sure what kind of effect it has, if any, but my stream is pretty much free from link spam.
+Catherine Maguire +Lars Fosdal Sorry to be somewhat off-topic. Different types of people must be flocking around the various platforms. It would be great to see a meta-analysis of G+, Tw and FB-databases, comparing demographics.
The impression I have is that G+-ers seem to appreciate warmth, eachother's attention, interaction, getting to know eachother, putting a smile on their faces etc. Cynics could argue that this is what +Max Huijgen calls "incestuous".
Tw and FB seem to have more activity targeted at conversion – and I mean in the economical sense, I don't mean shaking physical hands with friends who once started as virtual acquaintances. (I'm deliberately cutting out the stream of non-contentual blahblah/posts/pictures).
I guess that's what sets G+ apart.
Incestuous in the #some context is that you risk having a relatively small circle (a few hundred individuals) that feed on the back patting of each other. This is not limited to SEO people, but it does seem to be more prevalent among people who are their own product or brand.
I may have insulted some of them by writing this, but I think it is possible to use #some for self-realization and verification, and if that is what they need, they are welcome to it.
I don't think it will be rewarding for them in the long run, though, especially if they only rehash their own gospel in a long-drawn circle jerk. Those that actually create or unearth original content or ideas, they are the ones to follow.
I admit I tend to post relatively light stuff, but that is because #some is a way to relax and research for me. I am not selling anything, but my own opinions, and I don't post for attention, but I am pleased when others appear to enjoy what I post.
I enjoy the dialog that can occur here, but you can most likely find the same quality dialog elsewhere as well. G+ does make it easy to rid yourself of people you don't want to hang around, and without any drama, which I believe leads to a culture where it is easier to speak your mind with great candor, as you know that those who hate your stand, can chose to ignore you, as you can them.
The purpose of debate is not to agree, but learn about the views of others. If you find yourself among people that clearly don't share your views, and which you find arguing out of their rear, you can put up with them, or virtually walk away.
I keep adding and removing active people all the time. Those that I remove tend to focus on stuff that doesn't interest me, or they are selling something I don't need, and they often appear to run in the same, incestuous circles.
Actual content matters way more than methods for spreading content.
remember all the fuss about your real name became a social network preference now goes by the spam channel posts
Yes, +Max Huijgen , too many social media users waste energy trying to impress others with their self-assumed notoriety in nothing!
Good to have another smart person back +Max Huijgen . People like you make the difference for me, participating on social media. Would love to hear your thoughts about the current #F1 season. And all the other brilliant posts too, of course 😉
Welcome back my friend +Max Huijgen to the show that never ends.
G'day Max. I can see from that other thread that the fox is already in the henhouse. 🙂
I love chicken +Jim Munro 😉
But yes, a bit more of a splash than anticipated.
🙂