I have never had a love/hate relationship with Facebook—more of a tolerate/hate relationship. It’s the most demanding of all the social networks I use, demanding, begging your attention to everything your friends and acquaintances are doing for the dopamine burst reward of comments and likes. All to get more information on you, to sell to advertisers and feed The Algorithm that determines what you see. Others have tried to break The Algorithm, some by liking everything they see, others by hiding everything they saw. These are fun experiments, but neither solves the problems I have with Facebook… the endless flow of information that demands my attention. There is only one solution.

A couple of weeks ago, I unfollowed everyone on Facebook. My friends, my family, the groups I belong to… they’ve been explicitly denied the right to appear in my timeline. The result is beautiful, empty silence.

When paired with Social Fixer to hide the rest of the obnoxious Facebook experience, (including my own sporadic posts), Facebook becomes just what you see above: a non-entity, pure empty state. I want to begin following the people closest to me—otherwise, Facebook becomes a huge web back-end for a messaging and event tracking service, rather than a social network. I’ve demurred, because I worry that even allowing a few, important souls into my quiet space will soon become overwhelming, not because of the people, but because of The Algorithm.

The Algorithm is optimized to keep us using Facebook. It doesn’t just show us our friends statuses any more. The Algorithm shows us the comments our friends are making on their friends statuses. The Algorithm likes they’re making on posts by brands paying for reach. The Algorithm feeds us controversy, outrage, and all the noise, noise, noise, noise of people feeding The Algorithm. If there was some way I could be sure I’m only getting the important stuff from my friends: not the events they’re going to, the likes for whatever stupid meme George Takei’s social media person is reposting… if I could be sure I was only going to get signal instead of noise, I might be tempted to follow someone again.

Might.

But, as it stands, I’ve somehow turned Facebook into a calm sea of emptiness. When every site on the web, every app on our phones, and so much else in our life makes constant screaming demands for our attention, I’ve managed to turn the most obnoxious of them all into a place of tranquility. Facebook is now a place that demands nothing of me. And, in return, I can give it nothing, guilt-free. At least until The Algorithm finds a way around it.

The longer I use social media, the clearer it becomes to me that the current crop of social media services we use are designed to reward immediacy above all else. Immediacy gets results, and Twitter’s focus on it is a large part of why it’s now entrenched in breaking news. That same focus on immediacy is also responsible for what drives so many people nuts about social media. By rewarding quick posts, particularly ones that invoke strong emotion, social media all-too-easily embroils us in the Outrage Cycle. Often multiple times a day.

Each Outrage Cycle begins like the same way. Someone, deliberately or not, posts something outrageous. It gets discovered by someone, anyone really, who responds with outrage. This raises visibility of the outrageous thing, driving more attention, and more outrage. Often, a troll or twenty will stoke the flames by defending the outrageous thing, and that will only increase the volume of outrage. Then comes the meta-outrage, as people make outraged comments about all the outrage on Twitter today, and how we should never have left App.net, etc. The more violent Outrage Cycles can even spiral into meta-meta-outrage over the outage against the outrage. For a perfect example of this pattern in action, just refresh yourself with the story of Justine Sacco. [1]

Twitter and similar services, reward this kind of behavior implicitly, though probably not intentionally. Social media’s speed allows precious little time for reflection. There’s a real, and somewhat valid fear, that by waiting to get more information, or even to figure out how you really feel, you’re going to miss out on something. What that “something” is could be anything from mere Favorites, Likes, and Retweets, to an @-reply from a famous person, or just a chance to have your say in a big conversation on equal footing with the rest of the world. We all want our chance at the spotlight, and Outrage Cycles are an effective tool to get us there.

Rewarding knee-jerk reactions, and placing them on the level of valid discourse does not benefit anyone except the platform. Which is probably why nothing has been done about it. More activity means more eyeballs to monetize, ad views to sell, and more impressive charts for investor storytime. I can’t say that the platforms were designed with this behavior in mind, but it’s to the benefit of their owners, advertisers, and investors that the implicit reward remain in place. So, it comes down to us, the people who feed the angry, gaping maw of the beast with our immediate reactions to whatever is handy to react to.

Changing this has to begin with us. It begins with “reading first and hitting the send key later”, but it has to go beyond that. We need to rethink the relationship we have with social media, and the people who use it—those we know, and those we do not. Most social media isn’t a prescriptivist technology, at least not completely. We have the ability to change how we use it, what for, and on what terms. We can uninstall the apps, and delete our accounts if it comes to it. Once we learn to engage on different terms with social media, we’ll be in a place that makes it that much easier to avoid the rewards of knee-jerk actions.

In the beginning, there were megaphones. These megaphones were expensive, and hard to use, so the only people who used them were ones who knew how, and could afford them. Over time, the megaphones got cheaper, and easier to use. So, more people got megaphones. The cheaper ones weren’t quite as loud as the expensive, fancy ones, but they were often loud enough. Not everybody could afford a megaphone, and fewer still knew how to use the cheaper ones, of course. Sure enough, though, they found a way to make cheaper, easier to use megaphones that were louder than the second batch.

And so on, and so on, and so on, until now almost everyone who wants a megaphone has one. The new megaphones are almost as loud as the fanciest, most expensive megaphones, and they’re easy enough to use that some people only ever use their megaphone to communicate. Naturally, this makes things very chaotic, loud, and bothersome. To make matters worse, not only the megaphones are pretty easy to use, but they’re easy to misuse too. And nobody’s read the damn manual, if they even came with one. And more people are getting megaphones every day.

Of course, not everyone has a megaphone, but a lot of people do. Until fairly recently, the only people with megaphones were either big companies who could afford the biggest, loudest, and most complicated megaphones, or early-adopter type people who had the cheaper, almost-as-loud ones. There were just enough people with megaphones that it wasn’t overwhelming, but progress marches on. While those of us who have had megaphones for years are trying to figure out how to handle a noisy world with lots of echoing feedback, the people who haven’t had megaphones are anxious to jump in.

To make matters more complicated, a lot of the people picking up megaphones have seen us using ours in public view. They’re used to just hearing our amplified voices, and not being heard over the din. Now they have an even footing. Their megaphone is as loud as ours, and all the other new people with megaphones can listen to anyone, or amplify what either person says. No wonder it’s so noisy. So the old megaphone users aren’t happy with all the noise, and they aren’t happy with how the new people are using their megaphones, and fights are breaking out.

And that’s where we are today.

The thing is, none of us know how to use our megaphones. Some of us think we’ve got it all figured out, since we’ve been using them for so long. Then those upstarts come up and starting using their megaphones differently, for different reasons. Even if they’re not directing their megaphones at us, it’s annoying. Thing is, they’re going through the same learning process we did when we got megaphones. Not only are these new megaphone users learning the ins and outs of megaphone etiquette, they’re learning it in a different environment than we, the early-adopters did. There weren’t many rules when we picked up our first megaphone—we made them up as we learned, and what we made were rules that fit a world where fewer people had megaphones. As the new megaphone users learn how to use them, we’re being forced to adapt how we use our megaphones to the louder world, and that’s hard to do.

We’ll probably never agree 100% on how we should use our megaphones. Time will sort out most of it, until the next batch of people get newer, cheaper megaphones, and the cycle will begin again.

I’ve long maintained that so many of the horrors of the Internet Age are not new ones. Harassment of women, of minorities, of LGBT people, none of these are new. Even the methods are largely the same: death threats, intimidation, and revealing of personal information. What is different about harassment in the Internet Age is that awful people now have far more reach, with far less effort. By any measure, 2014’s biggest Internet hate campaign, GamerGate, has only a few hundred members, but has leveraged weaknesses in technology to amplify their voice of hate to what sounds like a mass movement.

But the same tools that extend the reach of hate, also extend the reach of love. Some of us in the technology space on Twitter roll our eyes when we see the latest sociological outrage flow past us on our timelines, but Twitter and similar online spaces are fast becoming places where the victimized can find people who are able to support them, and amplify their voices above those of their attackers. Through services like Tumblr, and even Reddit, a transgender teen can find the support they don’t get in “real life,” though often it’s not enough to save them.

When you’re not in the space occupied by marginalized voices, and they penetrate our bubble, it can be frustrating. “Why do I need to hear about people being harassed online? This isn’t what I come on Twitter/Facebook/Tumblr/Reddit for!” This is why I’m convinced that half of the volume of Internet Outrage is people being outraged over the other half of the outraged expressing their outrage. Where others see an annoyance, I see those bubbled up voices as the Conscience of the Internet: a voice poking through the mundane din of our feeds to remind us of our humanity, and our duty to others. The only way we can reduce the reach of the horrible people is to expand the reach of the victimized.

Two decades into the mainstreaming of the Internet, there’s still no shortage of eye-rolling over Internet Activism. It’s true that Internet Activism with no real life component is largely ineffective, but if there’s one thing that Internet Activism is good at, it’s amplifying the voices that would never be heard through other means. We can cultivate, mute, and prune our feeds like tending a vegetable garden, but no matter what, something uncomfortable will still bubble though. It’s what we do with those discomforting moments that creates our online social conscience.

In the United States, many people don’t understand the true, legal meaning, of their right to “freedom of speech.” It’s been shown time and time again that First Amendment protections towards speech have limits, ranging from protection against libel and defamation, controls on commercial speech, and restrictions on speech that can bring harm upon others: e.g. shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater. These limitations leave a very wide open space for someone to express their opinion, though I bring them up to contrast with a right that does not exist: the right to be heard.

Case in point: the Gamergate Block List, as created by Randi Harper, a developer, and part-time GamerGate target. The idea such a tool exists has been met with cries of “censorship” among the people it keeps out of its users Twitter timelines. Never mind that the same tool can be turned around and used to block any group of people you don’t want appearing in your timelines, even the “Social Justice Warriors” that GamerGate rails against. [1] In other words, “freedom of speech” allows you to shout someone into silence, but not for them to tune you out. Particularly if you’re sea-lioning someone.

This is patent bullshit.

Freedom of speech is not, and has never been the same as freedom to be heard. Censorship is an organized effort of a governing body to silence something they don’t like, and it can be done by a government or a corporation alike. Individuals choosing who they do not wish to hear, and collaboratively tuning them out is within their rights by any legal framework. If Twitter, or any other service, were bound to force users to see replies from any Tom, Dick, or Harassing Harry on their service, it would be akin to Fox News having the legal right to pre-empt you watching CNN on your TV. (And that analogy works if you flip the networks around.)

There’s a culture of entitlement in the Internet age. Something’s brought out a craving in people to have their opinions acknowledged, approved of, and amplified. Perhaps it’s a relic of early days of Internet life where the space was small and intimate enough that it was easy to keep up with the demands of acknowledgement from your “audience”. Or, perhaps it’s because so much of the Internet is on-demand, we assume other people must be as well. Whatever the reason, it’s not the case that anyone is entitled to a response, or an acknowledgement via Twitter, email, or even face to face. To claim otherwise is to misunderstand, often deliberately, one’s relationship to others. The Internet and social media do not change that.