People love to compare everything and always try to use some metrics. People compile the lists of best athletes, best hotels and best places for vacations. Listicles are often the most popular articles on any resource. We are used to translate qualities into numbers and sometimes we do it way too often.

With all the hype around social networks in 2010s, we started to think that quality of our online presence can be measured in numbers. The simple act of approval of someone’s content becomes less and less valuable, becoming just another “plus one”.

In real life we would appreciate when someone comes to us and says “hey, dude, you are awesome, I like your art and get inspired by what you are doing”. In the online world, all our achievements, big and small, become our status updates of similar importance. Reactions of different people seem to be equally important, even if they are not.

When it’s as easy as double tap to approve someone’s work, we start expecting more and more people doing this for our own creations. This evolution of our expectations leads to some problems:

We tend to think that number of likes reflects the quality of our content. That one article or image is better than another only because it is liked by more people. In fact this does not have anything common with reality. So much depends on the context in which your content is shown that it says absolutely nothing about the quality.

We tend to think that amount of followers reflects our importance. Way too many people dream about a career of a social media influencer. They are obsessed about converting real people into “plus ones” for the sake of getting advertising gigs from the brands.

We are getting worried when we don’t get enough likes. It starts to be physical because we don’t get the dopamine our bodies expect. We are all junkies - it’s just not alcohol or opiates what we craving. Some creators can feel great injustice in what they feel as underestimation of their efforts, and even get depressed. Just think about it: people get really ill because of lack of virtual appreciation. We already know that algorithms hide our content, that act of liking is essentially devalued, etc - but our suffering is real!

We are wasting our time on reaching false goals. We are getting into a number game like a rat race. We are chasing the goals that are based on false assumptions but we are getting our dopamine when we have success and we want to repeat it. As a game addict in a casino, we can’t stop and we waste more and more time on social networks. The time which could be used somewhere else.

Social Media is getting killed by bots. Because it’s not possible to grow all these metrics both organically and quickly, more and more people are using automation to send “attention spam” to thousands of netizens. They want to get more likes to feel appreciation of their work. They want to feel important of having a lot of followers. They want to guarantee their daily dopamine shots. It’s all understandable (we are all people after all), but resorting to bots they are killing the idea of social networking even more. Of all “plus ones” that we are talking about so much in this article, the bigger and bigger part is generated by machines. It devalues the meaning of like even more, because there’s no more act of aesthetical/emotional appreciation, but cold and quick mechanical action done by a robot.

So far, we only uncovered the problems - what about solutions?

I don’t want to be radical and propose deleting your accounts. This might work for some people, but it’s similar to treatment of a headache with decapitation.

In my opinion, the first step we all need to do in order to become happier and respectful to our own time, is to accept that numbers game is toxic.

We should stay happy and keep self esteem regardless of number of followers and likes. We should understand that algorithms of social networks are optimised for making us spending more time with them (and thus seeing more ads).

We should stand against the abuse of the idea of social networks by reporting accounts that use bots (and of course, never using them). We should refuse buying promotions for our content (it does not work as intended anyway).

We should only act as good netizens ourselves and show genuine appreciation which requires more than just pressing a heart icon. We should convert “plus ones” back into something meaningful. Only follow the content you really like and take your time to write meaningful comments to its creators.

Only connect with people who really make something good for you. Take your time to enjoy people’s feedback when they do the same for you. This is what differentiates us from machines. Stay human.

Photo by Trần Toàn on Unsplash

UPDATE 25.01.2019. I stumbled upon some great articles from other authors that in some ways extend the ideas of my article. I also encourage you to read them and get additional motivation to liberate yourself from numbers addiction:

Is it still possible to grow on Instagram in 2019 by Charles Tumiotto Jackson (Medium paywall)

Why I quit Instagram: breaking the cycle by Txus Bach

How Instagram Steals Your Soul by Cameron Watson (Medium paywall)

And a great lengthy post about FOMO (Fear of Missing out) which is one of the things that lead us to the numbers game and that is a very similar problem by itself:

The Fear of Missing Out: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Instagram by Mark Manson

It's a crazy idea that we humans are all connected to each other in some way or another. But we are. That means over 7 billion people are somehow attached to me. To be a bit more precise, it’s about 7.7 billion people. Wow, that’s more relationships than I experience in my daily life!

But is that really true? Of course it is! There is always something what I share with every single person on Mother Earth. It may be as insignificant as the preference for a certain color, or the favorite animal, my most read book, an unbearable smell, a beautiful memory and so on.

The listing could fill pages and exactly for this reason it is impossible that there is nobody on this planet with whom I do not share at least something insignificant. The life is changing and what’s insignificant today, may become significant tomorrow. What means that every person can turn into somebody important to me.

This may sound a bit over the top. But every person is somehow a piece in the puzzle of my life. The only problem is that there is too few time, too much distraction, too many obstacles to get in touch with the right person at the right time to solve the puzzle.

Back to the starting point. So I share with every single person preferences, passions, thoughts, decisions, experiences, things, knowledge and much more. All these can be of either important or insignificant nature depending on my situation in life. However, most connections are unobtrusive and therefore hidden from me. The question is therefore, how I can make these connections visible at the right time and without a super costly analysis and research? When I think about it, then I don’t even know in many cases the connection I have with all my facebook friends, beside the fact that we’re friends.

And that’s what all the so called free applications such as Facebook and Google are taking advantage of. In reality I do and did pay more than enough to these tech giants by providing my data. How else is it possible that these companies are also the most valuable ones. They sell my data to those who want to place targeted advertisement to me. And they are doing an awesome job by matching my data to the advertisers’ requests.

But what if there would be a platform whose goal is not collecting the user data for re-selling it to buyers who are seeking for the perfect match, but rather for sharing it fully and equally within the community? What if all user data (except sensitive information like email) is accessible to the platform’s community with the primary goal to match it for its users and not for the highest bidders?

When I have the opportunity to get in contact (and exchange myself) with my matches, I am getting a huge step closer to find the right person(s) at the right time who has the missing puzzle piece to move my life forward.

Artificial Intelligence (AI for brevity from now on) is the future.

There’s no doubt here. It brings us closer to the vision that brightest minds of last centuries have predicted. We are close to the point when machines get better than us in general, not only in doing specific calculation tasks. There are different points of view whether it’s good or bad, but both enthusiasts and critics agree that it happens soon.

Thousands of engineers, entrepreneurs and visionaries around the world work in perfect unison to develop AI. Some of them are so bullish on AI that they rely on it too heavily, in my opinion. There’s a lot of buzz around the technology and sometimes AI is used prematurely in areas which are not yet ready for it.

Computers are really good in cracking numbers and it makes possible to automate whatever process that can be explained by an algorithm that works with numbers. There are methods of machine learning that make algorithms improve themselves and they work better if they are based on bigger amounts of raw data.

If you provide machine human portraits and teach it to recognise face features, it will then become capable to create portraits of people that never exists. Depending on amount of portraits that were used as a learning sample, results will vary in quality, but the more you provide, the better machine will become.

Now, if you ask real humans to choose images of people they like and provide this information to the same machine learning algorithms, the result can be adjusted to produce only the portraits that these humans find especially beautiful.

However, this sample data might not contain everything that this or another person likes. So, results will be always adjusted to the base data that was loaded at the first step of the process.

In other words, algorithms are as good as the learning base they use.

Now, imagine you are a social network with billions of users and each of them is very explicit in liking some stuff. You might think that you have enough data for your algorithms to choose what your users will like next. The ugly truth is - you will never have enough data to do it really well.

First of all, not all potentially important content gets created, so it is impossible to teach AI about it.

Second, there’s no one to one relationship between “best” and “popular”. People want to get information which is best suitable for them. AI can only take into consideration user’s demographics and likes - this is not enough for choosing the “best” content.

Third, even if “best” would equal “popular”, not all important content is really “liked” - there’s no obligation to press that thumbs-up icon and more people use option to reserve their feelings for themselves than you can imagine.

Let’s say, these are just three factors that influence the quality of the feed we get served to us. If AI would be accurate in 50% of the cases with each of this factors (I am now incredibly favourable to AI capabilities), then final result is 50% of 50% of 50% good. It’s just 12.5% good - and it’s based on extremely optimistic assumption and reality can be 10 times worse. And this was very simplified calculation, as there are way more factors involved.

Now, if AI-based feeds are just 10% good, should they be used as default? Not at all, if you ask me. But for overly AI-optimistic companies out there, it’s not just default, it’s the only option! There’s no way to control your own feed in Facebook and Instagram. AI fully decides on your behalf what might be interesting to you.

I find this inappropriate. The power of AI could (and should) be used to provide us with suggestions - this is what AI can be good at, because there’s an algorithm for that. But it should not replace our own reasoning of finding out what’s good and what’s not. In the end, that’s what still makes us human. What belongs to humans, should rest with humans.