Relocating effort

 

Surely, in late 2025, more than enough keypresses have been actuated in pursuit of the philosophy of how normal people have ceased to have a positive experience on social media. I had originally intended to start a long, rambling post about how my experiences seeing things people I like or know, or at least follow, have been replaced with Zucksites attempting to find exactly what fetish content I want to see.

It's funny to think of how much negative attention Facebook specifically has gotten off using personal information to build scary-accurate profiles of everyone to market things and to increase negative emotion to keep eyes on its pages. It seems to me that all they actually know about me, despite having been on the site for 19 years, is that that I'm a cishet male. They don't even seem to have an age range down, and they seem to have concluded the single most important thing about me is the 'het' part of their profile for me. I suppose it's possible their users are paying to boost their content? I don't know how reels work, but I do know the algorithm as a whole clearly doesn't get me, and it seems clearer to me that nobody is actually creating anything to post on that site anymore anyway.

At least it's not universally like that. On Instagram, I have accumulated a small group of people, both photographers and appreciators of photography, who see and note my work, and I've managed to curate a group of people who have no interest in algorithmic content generation or short-form video content who do at least see my work, and that makes me happy. This is so clearly contrary to Mark's wishes... I recently "got what I asked for" in the form of an iPad-native version of the IG app, which dumps directly into a video-first, autoplaying-with-sound-on-by-default experience that shows nothing but content from accounts I don't follow. Personally, I don't go to social networks to discover new people, but whatever... I have my sharing workflow figured out, and I can do that song and dance for the foreseeable.

So anyway, the plan: I've written this post probably seven or eight times over the history of this site. I intend to come back, then I forget about it after a month. That's why it's called the content vortex. What I'd like to start doing is just writing about my photography outings. I want to stick with something I'll be good at, and I like talking about my experiences out and about. I have, to date, primarily done photography with the old adage in mind, using my photographs to tell a story about where I go. I have no idea if the tens (or sometimes hundreds!) of thousands of words from each outing have actually made any impact, but I also know I've not done any discourse on my process or thinking, and I don't tend to talk about my actual experience being out and about... and hopefully that changes going forward.

In the short term, I will probably go back to a few select outings from the last few years and get at them. In the long term, the focus will stay more on more recent work, though I have about two decades of activity I can go back over, and most of that is a relatively unexamined body of work and experience.

Hopefully I keep some inertia behind this go!