I am realizing more and more that I am never going to be provacative enough to make a bit splash on social media. But to be fair, it isn’t that I can’t be provocative, it is just that I don’t want to be. Hence the title that is a prime example.

Only the title is click bait here, this won’t be a post with no point that leads you to another post with no point to find out that I am starting a new blogging/social media company.

I really just wanted to vent a little, and of course post a blog and mention it on social media (and I doubt that changes until I can no longer type).

Background

I love social media. The good, the bad, and the ugly when done in earnest. Allen White turned me on to Twitter 18 years ago, and I have been blogging and using internet news groups since college.

I am a writer because of people I met on the internet via social outlets. I learned what the right way to build databases, write TSQL code, and lots of non-techie stuff too. I because a bigger and bigger fan of social media because of social media. A lot of it was just from people I knew writing stuff like “going on a meetup with my friends at Dillos Diz this November, if you are a fan of nostalgia, especially about Walt Disney World, check them out.”

That was a non-paid, not even known about advertisement for that site where I socialize with theme park friends. It is real, and it is something like you would read from many other bloggers and find out about stuff.

In the tech community, I met so many people first on the Internet via social outlets that it changed my life tremendously. For example, Day of Data (previously SQL Saturday is a free set of conferences that I have spoken at many times. When it first started, it isn’t like their leadership team called everyone in the community and said “hey y’all, come to our conference and check it out.” Nope, we found out about it via relationships online.

But things have changed

Money. You know the root of all evil and the primary way we feed and entertain ourselves.

I don’t blame the fact that there are people who are influencers who get paid by companies to help sell their products. Such commercials were inevitable. I was amongst the first of these as a Microsoft MVP. We helped their customers and influenced people to buy their products. We got a few cool benefits, but we couldn’t make a living at it, at least not directly.

And each company that associates with a person can very easily say “we disavow this person.” And no matter the fact that platforms started free, ads or a fee were inevitable too. I don’t mind that. Frankly we knew that Google/Twitter/Meta/etc weren’t going to keep spending money for no return.

I personally blame the point in time when anyone could become an influencer for a company without its knowledge…and make money doing it. When social media outlets started paying people for the views they got, we turned a corner. This relationship became the mess we have now because of two things:

• The different outlets favored viewers and interactions more than the value of the content.
• Incorrect/negative content is more interesting to interact with.

That second point is the real problem, and it is true for me too. I will find myself on social media This person knows nothing about Disney World. That isn’t how you write a JOIN. All of this stupidity piques my interest and prompts me to say something. But in the back of my mind, I know I am being played. Well, and I know that interacting with other content makes my content more visible. It is an ugly vicious circle. But at least I am spreading truth as I know it.

Thing is, I can’t bring myself to make content that is just there to provoke anger or negativity. I can think of that kind of content for sure sure. For a real life example, think about when someone turns on a loud video in a restaurant, I can think of many ways to retaliate (turn on my video louder, dump my dinner on them, sit next to them and ask to watch if I have to hear it, and those are the relatively nice ones).

But usually I just grumble, just like on social media when I see something stupid.

I will just keep on rolling with happy stuff

I post pictures of theme parks, write blogs and posts that tell you how to do things, not provoke you to anger. I write them myself (with the Internet’s help be it AI or a blog), and I post them myself. Sometimes I get paid if they are for a professional site, or I have posted hundreds of posts on this site in the past year.

So I will continue to make pleasant, real, hopefully educational content. You can be negative about negative things, but just looking for negativity is the biggest waste of the human mind. You and I both have knowledge to share.

And I will continue to try to send the negativity here:

New compacting trash cans at EPCOT theme park.