I deleted my 118k-follower, verified Instagram account

Agreed that ain't it. I built up my account relatively quickly to a modest 11k followers and found nothing but emptiness there. Superficial interactions with people I don't know. Meaningless. I never post now. I spend more time thinking about the future, layout out a plan for my life and reading books. ROI of that time spent is much, much higher both in terms of moving my career forward and overall happiness.

It's interesting to read a blog post that I guess caters to some audience that is "in the know" with whatever this guy is doing because all I got was the message "Being an influencer is not the answer" where I am still left with "..to what?"

I am pretty sure I agree with the sentiment that he is reaching for but I have no idea what he was trying to achieve with his profile. But if he did indeed spend over $100k building it up, I guess it's a good thing that he finally decided to stop if it wasn't working!

> i have seen many people spill their guts on-line, and i did so myself until, at last, i began to see that i had commodified myself. commodification means that you turn something into a product which has a money-value. in the nineteenth century, commodities were made in factories, which karl marx called “the means of production.” capitalists were people who owned the means of production, and the commodities were made by workers who were mostly exploited. i created my interior thoughts as a means of production for the corporation that owned the board i was posting to, and that commodity was being sold to other commodity/consumer entities as entertainment. that means that i sold my soul like a tennis shoe and i derived no profit from the sale of my soul. people who post frequently on boards appear to know that they are factory equipment and tennis shoes, and sometimes trade sends and email about how their contributions are not appreciated by management.

https://gist.github.com/kolber/2131643 (1994)

I feel the same every time I get into Twitter, it's like everyone is trying to sell me something, their brand, an idea conveyed in the most twitter like superficial way, it's just empty.

I curated it a great deal and ended up with various accounts that focus on various interests where I follow accounts that provide real data.... but almost all of it I would just go to their website to find anyway and I found that even with those accounts I was just filtering a great deal of stuff that I wouldn't read on their site too, but now I have to scroll past each item individually.

The end result was a larger time sink, and even emptier experience than most social media sites.

Dear lord this is cringe-worthy.