On a regular basis I am faced with things that make me question what goes on in other people’s minds while scrolling any one of my social feeds. I, like most social media users, subscribe to and participate on several platforms. For me personally, I work my way from Facebook to Instagram to LinkedIn, before I get info the crypto and stock market apps. These platforms fill my mind with info while passing the time. If the info is good, useful, informative, bossy, boring, useless or something else, is entirely up to the person sharing. As for Snapchat, Tic Tok and Clubhouse, I’ve decided to ‘turn-the-other-cheek’ on those because they are filled with super extra curricular nonsense in my humble opinion, and besides the exposure to bouncy body parts, old school cars that bounce, and everyone doing 15-30 second snippets of malarkey, I get little to no useful information when interacting with them. Let me put it this way. I too got a cute face small waist with a big bank, but way better and more fulfilling things to do my time with than login to those platforms.

But back to the platforms I do use and interact with. I wrote about the Digital Wild Wild West as a whole in a past article, but this article is solely about the Wild Wild West of Social Media, and a solid rant from yours truly. So buckle-up and get ready for some smack-talkin, because I feel like calling out some of the hocus-pocus that makes me question what goes on in other people’s minds.

Let’s start with the people that like to tag hella other people in a post, but indeed aren’t with those 96 other people. When it happens to me, I remove the tag and feel bad for the person who feels like they need to get my attention with a fake tag. When I see it happening in my feed, typically by the promoter types or business owners who are really trying to seem popular, it makes me feel bad for those people because it looks desperate. If in order to feel like people are listening, you need to force tag them in a post, trust me, they aren’t listening, they are instead tuning you out. And in my humble opinion it’s gross when it happens to me, and when I see it….and I don’t think I’m alone on this one.

Another thing that is so obviously unnecessary is when I’m scrolling Instagram and someone’s message tells people to ‘Link in Bio’. First, don’t tell me what to do, no one likes that. Second, no duh. Since Instagram is dumb and does not allow active website links in posts, we all know that you should have a link in your bio for all the info. Stop telling us to ‘link in bio’. No likes to be told what to do, especially when we already know what to do. And oh yeah, this new Link Tree jive is laziness at its best. Everyone knows that the best place to have links to all of you own stuff is on your own website. Not a lazy one-pager of buttons on someone else’s website. Don’t be lazy, and don’t be bossy.

Cross-platform regurgitation happens so much. How much does it happen?! It happens so much that I eventually choose to unfollow and sometimes ignore those who do it. What is cross platform regurgitation you ask? It’s when someone, or some place, posts and shares the same info, all at the same time, on all outlets (Fb post, FB Story, IG post, IG Story, Snap, TikTok, etc), and then shares all posts as their personal pages and other business pages they manage too. It’s lazy and crazy. Lazy because it pushes little value to each audience on each platform via each outlet. Crazy because when you force-feed the same info six times within the same one minute, you are showing your audiences that you care little about them, and that all you care about is pushing your own agenda. Also, the share from IG to FB is too clunky, especially with the @ tagging. The user experience is poor and jumps users back and forth from FB to IG in a confusing way. Nonetheless, the regurgitation needs to stop. It’s time folks show love and respect for their audiences feeds.

I’ve written about all types of hash tagging issues that people have, but a couple of the biggest issues I wish would stop quickly, are the issues of over hash tagging, and why porn needs to be part of every trendy term used. Stop it. We’re better than that. Let me put it this way, over hash tagging is spam. If your post has more hashtags than readable message, your message is worthless and your post is spam. If your post only uses hashtags, and the image (or video) you are sharing does not match the context of the hashtags you’re posting, it’s spam. When your cloud of irrelevant hash tags includes any version of a foodporn, or photoporn, or anything porn as a hashtag, its spam. We know sex sells, but for some reason the schmucks that always use the porn hash tags don’t understand that spam kills all sales. I can go-in on bad hash tag practices, but for this rant, it’s all about over hash tagging and stuffing our feeds with spam. Stop it. It’s nasty and trashy.

Look, I’m glad that I wrote this rant article. I’m glad that I got these topics off my chest and onto my website. It pleases me to know that this article might someday reach someone who could use some of these tips. Yeah, this article may hurt some feelings. And yes, I understand that my opinion isn’t the end-all-be-all. But for those of you who have made it this far in the article, and potentially agree with a few of the rants I shared, know that I wrote this for us, in efforts to finally put a a stop to the nonsense. So feel free to share this article with someone who could use to hear it. Let me be the bad guy who shares the good info.

Written by Carl Foisy