I have generally been an early adopter. An early adopter of many things and ideas.

I could probably have been a millionaire many times over if I hadn’t got bored by the time the masses arrived to make new ideas profitable.

That has been the playbook of Silicon Valley. Fund something for free, until the masses arrive and find they can’t leave and so make the platform massively profitable.

By the time the audience are locked in and the cost of leaving is too high, everything becomes about profit and all the old mission slogans about creating a brave, new, fairer world can be dumped in the bin.

Cory Doctorow has a phrase for it: The Enshittifiation of the internet. The American Dialect Society recognised the term by selecting it as its 2023 Word of the Year

So, am I one of the early adopters of dumping social media – deplatforming? Will the masses eventually follow when they get bored and start to seek out real connection with real people again and realise that the platforms they took to their hearts have become a slow poison of reels, shorts and TikTok videos?

I’ve dumped Facebook and instagram.They have become toxic to view and have become useless as a medium for sharing.

Of course I could use them for advertising, but that would require me to become a different person, worrying about stats all day long… I’ve been there and don’t want to go back.

And what of Twitter/X? (Funny how no one can quite accept the name change!) I have my most number of followers on X – mostly to do with children’s books.

I looked up #kidlit today and it is filled with ChatGPT created bilge. #kidlit was a hashtag I used to follow in the twitter days. #kidlitart doesn’t reflect anything that I do anymore.

Then I looked up #middlegrade. This too was filled with bilge, until I blocked one writer who was posting like a bot. It seems there are still middle grade writers and reviewers posting. (See image above.)

So, I’ll carry on using and following #middlegrade and see what happens. I’m sure I’d get more interaction if I paid for a blue tick, but I’m not convinced there is still an audience.

As more and more AI generated mush pours out onto the internet, I feel that real humans will begin to seek out other real humans again. Maybe we’ll all start going down the pub again and talking nonsense to each other… irl… like the old days.

The more we hand over the best of humanity to AI and algorithms to chew up and repost as perfect-looking, but ultimately unsatisfying content and fake news, maybe we will feel the need to seek out real ideas, new ideas that come from humans in the way that only humans can do it.

Once upon a time, a long time ago, Google and other search engines found stuff for you, like enthusiastic puppies, racing around to bring you what you asked for. But they have grown up and turned into fat, over-fed slobs that only feed you what is in their best interest – they only show you what they want you to see.

When the once beautiful crystal-clear pool starts filling with sewage, maybe it’s time to at least haul-out onto the side? That’s called early adoption. The rest will keep swimming in it until they too realise something doesn’t smell right anymore.