Why I cut myself off from social media and enjoying it !!!

So I was this a typical high skilled immigrant from India to USA and social media was a vehicle for me to tell my friends back home on how clean and wide the roads were or how cool was the long drive that I was taking.

In this madness to attract attention to my greatness, I found a very interesting trend in social media.

I started off with Orkut to find old friends and upload my greatest pic of the beach vacation. Friends commented on it and I felt on seventh heaven to clarify how the sunset from that particular angle was so awesome which lesser mortals may not be blessed to see.  I wished my secret crush from high school felt a tad jealous about what she missed in not saying yes to me by looking at those posts.

Features and more features

I learned about MVP (minimally viable product engineering) and really liked the concept from usage and business standpoint. I always used to wonder why do apps in Android appstore always had to update and add features but Microsoft Outlook (majority of earthlings spend their working life on this) had the same features for last 20 years.

A software product is like a tool similar to a hammer or a knife. However you also have so many other common requirements that a knife can be engineered - to an extent that - it stops looking like a knife. The question is whether we want to do that over-engineering.

Resource utilization

Most of the successful software companies hire engineers and after the product is built and MVP is met, tries to figure out what needs to be done with the large talent pool. That is when the feature addition or backlog from the Sprints start impacting the identity of the product itself.

I have so many examples of tools that I was so happy to use on my smartphone which became bloated with each release and more features that it started  bothering me and I had to ultimately uninstall it.

So what does a product company do after a MVP engineering standards are met? They add more features to keep the resources at optimal utilization.

Videos sharing and Auto-play

In the last couple of years we saw an interesting trend of ability to share videos in social media and how they auto-played when you are scrolling through the feeds.

Over a period of time, I realized that I am seeing less of personal posts on social media and more of junk video sharing and pollution.

I am so interested to read posts from friends on how they are progressing in their life or how their daughters sang in a school competition or how they are spending time with their loved ones. I can relate to these posts as we grow in a virtual community and share each other's life story.

However what I don't enjoy is junk video shares on how an elephant was chasing a tourist in a Jeep or how an unknown guy was performing a motorcycle stunt. The forwarded messages in social media with no direct relevance to me or my friends started becoming  all-pervasive that I now started seeing less and less of personal posts and more of shared junk.

No personal story

At one point in this observation, I realized most of the posts in WhatsApp, Facebook or other social media was a running list of unknown funny, scary or attention-seeking videos and had no personal story to tell.

I had groups in WhatsApp where folks would not communicate personally for months but every day I would receive hundreds of forwarded messages and pictures. 

Logging in to Facebook or being a part of a WhatsApp group become so much taxing with spam shares and running videos that I slowed down on checking for updates a few years ago, and then gave up altogether logging in to Facebook and uninstalled WhatsApp.

I do make sure to call my contacts (at least two of them) in a month and feel that is better medium to be personal and stay in touch.

I do wish someone builds a Facebook or WhatsApp with a Unix style blue text-only mode - in which folks can chat and interact without forwarding junk to each other. 

I also wonder the cost of lost labor and productivity in GDP - due to the interruptions caused by these features and time spent on seeing these videos with no relevance to the sender or the receiver. 

Am I alone here ?