David Jett Explains Social Media
Maybe you'll be in my Top 8 Friends!
The Jake Paul/Mike Tyson fight was made for social media, which is good, because it sure wasn’t made for boxing fans. People from all over the world streamed the most boring train-wreck in history, so much so that Netflix crashed about a gazillion times. I, myself, made jokes about the debacle on social media such as “It was like a boxing match except without the punches.” However, my two favorite jokes came from people other than me, which is unusual. One person said that since it was crashing so much, he would just have Netflix mail it to him. The other person posted “HBO: Michael Buffer. Showtime: Bruce Buffer. Netflix: Network Buffer.” (you can tell I’m old because during the fight, they cut to an aerial shot of AT&T Stadium and my first thought was “ugh, that parking lot looks like a nightmare.”)
A fun use of social media is posting during a live event. A fight, an awards show, a sports event, an election, a war. Anything that attracts millions of viewers is perfect for platforms like Twitter, where you can live tweet your thoughts and share the evening with a group of strangers. It’s like having people over to watch the Super Bowl on tv, but instead of your close friends, it’s maybe your boss’s cousin, your mailman and perhaps a dude you met in an Aldi’s parking lot.
Social media can also be a nightmare. Let’s run through social media sites, past and present, and by all means, feel free to tweet, or skeet, or threet, or plop, squish and splatter your thoughts on-line as you read.
AOL
One of my first internet experiences came on AOL, which was short for the obvious and possibly xenophobic name American Online Company. In order to use it, you had to load an AOL disc into your computer.
AOL let you visit websites, chat with total strangers, play trivia real time with people all over the country and listen to music. It was the Dave & Buster’s of the internet. Due to a mutual interest in the writings of Dorothy Parker, I regularly chatted with a woman who lived in San Francisco and was an editor for a PC magazine. I remember her chatting with me about a first date she was going on. The night of the date, she saw I was on-line and messaged me. I asked, “aren’t you supposed to be on a date?” and she replied “it didn’t go that well. I couldn’t stand him.”
AOL was fun at the time, but it was very much it’s own little world.
LIVE JOURNAL
I never really used Live Journal, which was, as the name implies, a journal. You made entries like you would in a diary. No pics as far as I remember. No music, no chats, no real interaction. People could just log on and read about your sad little life.
Back then I was a manager at a record store. One of the employees was a tall, redheaded dude who was generally a nice guy but very socially awkward. One time I was talking to a cute gal in the store. We were obviously having a conversation. The guy walked over to us, way too close. He was both lurking and looming. As soon as there was a slight pause in the conversation, he said, apropos of nothing, “who let the frogs out? Ribbit, ribbit.” Jesus Christ. Another time he put a flyer on the employee bulletin board inviting all of us to his upcoming birthday party. It was the first party invitation I ever saw that had a set of rules. He lived with his mom and she didn’t allow liquor in the house. You also had to be quiet because, again, mom. Obviously, I wasn’t going due to the no-liquor at the party rule. I quickly forgot about the whole thing. Then one day, I was standing with him and some other coworkers. He said, “nobody came.” We’re all like “what?” He said, “nobody came. Nobody came to my party.” I pictured him at the kitchen table, wearing one of those ridiculous party hats, with his mom consoling him. He, of course, had a Live Journal which some of us found. It was both funny and sad.
(Just in case you were feeling sorry for him, he soon met a really pretty woman, started dating her, married her and, although I haven’t seen or spoken to him in over a decade, I assume he’s living a very happy life.)
MY SPACE
My Space was hot shit for a while. You had your own profile page which you could customize, which meant that millions of people with no sense of design choose some hideous background that was so busy, you couldn’t read any of the text. When you went to a friend’s profile, you were greeted by some horrible, automatically-played song by probably Blink 182. You could read their posts, which were shorter than Live Journal entries but longer than Tweets. You could make comments like “you suck, dickhead! LOL”
The best thing about My Space was your top 8 friends listing. Your profile had a prominently-placed block featuring your top friends and you got to choose who they were and where they were ranked. Moving your friends in and out of your rankings provided way more entertainment than you would imagine. Try dating some gal and then move her out of your top 8 and see what kind of shit you would be in.
I miss My Space, even with all of its dumb black backgrounds with brown text you couldn’t see, and unicorns and confetti floating all around. It was your junior high notebook come to life.
Facebook was founded by some college dork who used it to rate the “hotness” of college women, the vast majority of whom he could never had gotten in the sack until he became a billionaire, and even then, it was questionable.
Facebook started as a less busy and more organized My Space. I remember, just like with social media today, when I made the change to Facebook. I had to wait for and/or cajole my friends into coming on the site. Before too long, Facebook was VHS and My Space was Betamax.
As other social media sites emerged, Facebook picked up the rep of being for grandparents. Today, if you have Facebook, it’s only because you have three out of town friends who you are too lazy to add to your phone contacts.
Instagram is all pictures, all the time. Who the hell takes that many pictures? I’ll tell ya, who…women between the ages of 13 and 33. If you are a woman who grew up with Instagram, you have the selfie-taking skills of a photographic ninja. I was once talking to a co-worker on a break at the office. She took a lot of selfies. During our short conversation, she took around 8 selfies. She did it with such speed, preciseness and nonchalance, that it didn’t even interrupt our conversation. That’s some mad fucking skills.
The user breakdown of Instagram goes like this: women who like to take pictures of themselves and guys who like to look at pictures of women. It’s not hard to figure out.
Instagram is responsible for two of the most idiotic designations of our time: influencer and content creator.
An influencer is someone on Instagram who has so many followers that a brand will give her free products (or outright pay her) if she features the products in posts. That does not make her an “influencer.” We already had a word for this. It’s called being a “spokesperson.” They are saying positive things about a product, like, oh, let’s say, an advertisement. They ain’t influencing me to do jack shit. Also, an “influencer” sounds more like what I do in conversations with women I want to date.
Here’s a compilation of some of the very first “influencers.”
A ”content creator” is just someone who needs to put out pics or videos with no thought given to the quality of the actual content which is, most of the time, shit. No one with any talent calls themself a content creator. They are writers, journalists, photographers, dancers, artists, broadcasters, anchors, or one of a thousand names for someone in the arts and entertainment. A content creator is some jackoff with a camera and a greenscreen. A content creator thinks the only thing they need to be relevant is a face.
Twitter was my jam. Posts limited to a certain number of characters which made people distill their thoughts. You could quickly scroll through hundreds of posts in not that much time. Tweeting live events and following everyone else doing the same through the use of hashtags made you feel connected to the world. You could use Twitter as a news feed by following CNN, AP Newswire, the BBC, or your local news station. You could block people you didn’t want to see or didn’t want to see you. And then there were the celebrities. For the first time ever, you could interact with writers, actors and musicians. It was like you had a backstage pass.
I was once making jokes during a live event. Artie Lang, comedian most famous for his stint on the Howard Stern Show, saw one of my jokes and retweeted it. That meant that the thousands and thousands of his followers saw my joke. Other people hit the like button on it or retweeted. My phone was deluged by notifications. For about three hours, my phone beeped so much it was like I was in a casino. Notifications slowed down but were still coming 48 hours later. It was such a clear demonstration of the power of having a huge social media following (Artie, not me.)
Twitter was already becoming toxic before Elon Musk bought it, but he did the “hold my beer” thing. White supremacists posted racial slurs. Trolls existed on Twitter primarily to argue with people about anything, whether they believed their statements or not, in an attempt to boost their engagement. People jumped ship to other social media sites, and every time Elon instituted some new inane policy, more people left. The latest move was to eliminate the block feature. You could block someone, and they couldn’t comment on your posts or interact with you, but they could still see your posts. Let’s say you’re a woman with a stalker. You could block him, but he could still see your thoughts and locations. That sounds problematic at the least, and criminal at the worst.
I’ve been sampling other social media sites over the last year. None are as good as Twitter at its prior best, but all were better than Twitter is now. And, no, I’m not and have never called it X. X is for comic book heroes, skateboarders, and a fantastic, legendary punk rock band from Los Angeles who had a song called Los Angeles.
BLUESKY
The search for a new home for my dumb jokes began with Bluesky, except in the early days, you had to have an invitation or get on a waiting list. When I finally got on, not many people were there. Celebrities disenchanted with Twitter joined, made two posts, and then went back to Twitter. It was a ghost town. We’ll get back to Bluesky later.
But first, a story that I was reminded of by the name Bluesky. One time in my early 20’s, I was at a strip club with friends. I was talking to one of the strippers and she said her name was Skyla. Knowing that stripper names are fake, I asked her why she chose Skyla. She said, “Because I like the sky and I want to live in LA.”
MASTODON
Mastodon was decentralized social media. What does that mean? It means that Mastodon had the most confusing sign-up process in the history of ever. You had all of these small communities housed on different servers and run by different moderators and they all fell under the Mastodon umbrella. It was annoying and clunky and no one in their right mind thought this was a suitable replacement for Twitter.
COUNTER SOCIAL
Counter Social was an offshoot of Mastodon created by a former (I guess) hacker who is very hands on with his site. I’m not saying anything bad about him or Counter Social (I told you he’s a former hacker, right?) Seriously though, it wasn’t bad. I interacted with a lot of interesting and friendly people. One of my favorite features was the community “hose” which was a live feed of EVERYONE’S posts. Great way to find new people to follow. The reason I ultimately stopped using Counter Social was the lack of any business or celebrity presence. There was no following your favorite comic book company, or band or film news site or pro-wrestling reporter, because none of them were there. Not even Wendy’s, which has a hell of a funny person running their social media. I like my social media to be a combination of chatting with real people and a news feed. (I did follow one celebrity who came to Counter Social, and she followed me. It was Kathy Valentine of the Go-Go’s. Cool.)
THREADS
Threads seemed like the app with the most potential to pose a challenge to Twitter. Until you actually use it. I’m not sure what why, but Threads is the biggest collection of engagement bait I’ve ever seen. “Do you dip your fries in ketchup or ranch?” “what’s the biggest movie from the year you were born” “do you like turtles?” Quit asking me so many goddamn questions! Being on Threads is like being on a bad date. And then there’s this Threads thing where everyone likes to argue about anything. Let’s say I made a post that The Eagles are the most overrated band ever. First, that’s a horrible post because it’s obviously engagement bait. But that post will get so many comments, and so many people arguing with me. And then there will be people doing this: “I’ve never listened to The Eagles so I don’t feel like I can comment on this.” People will comment, to SAY THEY HAVE NO COMMENT! Oh, my god, what a gigantic waste of time it was slogging through comments by randos who have nothing to add to anything.
Then the Threads moderators went all bitch-cakes crazy. During the election, they were flagging so much stuff that posts talking about saltine crackers got censored and the authors suspended. If someone posted, “I like butter on my crackers” it would get flagged because “cracker” is derogatory slang for a white person. There was no context to anything they did. Fuck them crackers at Threads!
BLUESKY, AGAIN
I’m back on Bluesky. And so are a lot of other people. It’s as if I were a dumbass and showed up at 6pm to a party that started at 8pm. It’s now 10pm and the perfect time to show up on Bluesky. If you want to find me here, it’s @davidjett.bsky.social
Lots of writers, artists, journalists and news sites are showing up on Bluesky. And their moderation tools are very helpful. You create your own algorithm. You can follow feeds on a specific topic. You can block sexual content if you wish. One of the best features is block lists. Someone will go in and create a list, for example, of people who have Nazi symbolism or explicitly Nazi content. You can hit the “subscribe” button for the list, and then block the entire list. Anyone else added to this list becomes immediately blocked on your account. This is a great feature due to my disliking of Nazis.
Some people have complained about this “block list” feature, and in doing so, use the term “echo chamber.” Echo chamber is a term used by assholes that you and your friends don’t want to hang out with. “Hey, I’m throwing a party. Should I just invite my good friends, or should I also invite those dudes we know who may have raped women or committed hate crimes? Do you think they bring something to the table?”
Someone recently made a post (skeeted. Yeah, that’s their term for it. I refuse to use skeet in any way unless it’s in reference to a Lil Jon song or I’m particularly drunk during sex.) The post was describing Bluesky as “the energy of 2013 Twitter but everybody’s back and knees hurt more.”
ONLY FANS
Not really a social media site but more of a “I want to look at this lady’s boobs” site, but you can interact with some famous people. Celebs, as well as some relatively unknown women, charge a monthly subscription fee for you to see their “private” photos. English singer Lily Allen recently said that she makes more money from posting pics of her feet on Only Fans than she does from her music streaming royalties. This is either a condemnation of the current music streaming situation or she has some fucking incredible feet.
CAMEO
Again, not a traditional social media site, but you can pay to interact with a celebrity. Cameo’s main service is providing personalized videos from C-list celebrities. Most of the videos are around a minute and a half long and are things like “Hey, Grandma Helen! This is Kenny G! Your grandkid Bobby wants me to wish you a happy birthday! Keep it smooth, Granny!”
The celebrities video these things from their computer or phone and often don’t even bother to properly frame the shot. But it is kind of cool, I suppose. Most of the celebs are B, C, and D-list, but I’m sure someone would get a kick out of Shooter McGavin from Happy Gilmore wishing them a happy anniversary.
One of the most expensive people on the site is Caitlyn Jenner, which will set you back $2500. Those operations aren’t cheap. Legendary pro-wrestler Ric Flair charges $500. Woooo!! James Marsters, Spike on Buffy The Vampire Slayer, is $60. That’s very reasonable. Brett Favre is $285, which is a very random and specific figure. Go to the Cameo site. You’ll go down a wormhole that will last hours.
And to wrap things up, I was planning a big surprise. I decided to get a Cameo. I wanted to have someone funny (on purpose or by default) send me a video “roasting” me. David Jett sucks, David Jett can’t write, etc. If the Hawk Tuah Girl had been on Cameo, I would have done that in a heartbeat. She’s sadly not. So I decided to go with former Saturday Night Live cast member Jon Lovitz. I figured he would be really funny running me down. He cost $150 plus tax and services fees. The deal was he had up to 7 days to do the Cameo. At 6 and half days, I get an email from Cameo that read “Although Jon Lovitz tries to deliver 100% of requests, they are unable to do this request at this time.”
I didn’t need this Cameo for anything other than comedy, but if I had bought a video for someone’s birthday, I would have been shit out of luck. If you do use Cameo, I would suggest you start the process around 1973. I read a lot of reviews of the site, and there are a LOT of people who never got their video, even after trying multiple times. Now there may be people on Cameo who do their videos in a timely manner, but I’m assuming that a lot of these barely working celebs do it for extra money but only if they don’t have a gig at the time. It’s like they think “oh, I guess I’ll pick up some extra money from these saps if I’m not doing anything, but if I’m the least bit busy, fuck ‘em.” Hey, what did I expect, after all, Jon Lovitz is best known for his SNL character “the Pathological Liar.”
Since I couldn’t end with a Jon Lovitz video, I decided I would show you what Cameo people look like when they are doing their videos.
