Facebook Reels is Terrible, I Hate It and I Can't Stop Watching!

I’m at the stage in my life where I can dismiss new forms of technology and communication as nonsense for young people. That’s how I felt about Vine. Youtube and Youtubers were/are bad enough. The idea of shrinking the length of videos to six seconds seemed borderline insane. 

I did not fuck with Vine. It was not for me. As a middle-aged dude, I was not the target demographic. Instead it was laser-focussed on attracting the only people in capitalism who matter: attractive young people with disposable income. 

TikTok seemed like Vine under a different name, with an even greater emphasis on appealing to the kids. Like Vine and Snapchat and Tinder and Whisper, it most assuredly was not for a curmudgeonly married man like myself. 

The same is true of a feature on Facebook called Reels that is pretty much the same goddamn same thing as Vine and TikTok, only shoved down everyone’s throat as a core component of the Facebook MetaVerse .

My first impression of Reels was not positive. It was more silly bullshit for children and wildly derivative and opportunistic to boot. 

It seems like many, if not most, of the mega-popular videos on Reels are of thin, conventionally attractive women in their thirties blowing the minds of viewers that even though the Reels star is a mother she’s nevertheless hip and knowledgable enough to be able to lip-sync and dance along a Nelly song from the late 1990s. 

There’s a default smirk shared by Reels stars that silently but persistently and annoyingly brags, “Can you wrap your head around the fact that I, a mother of two young children, have a passing familiarity with rap music, of all things? How jiggy and dope is that? I’m practically the white suburban version of DMX!” 

I don’t recall ever signing up for Reels. It’s not something I’ve ever actively chosen but I also don’t seem to have any choice in the matter. Facebook decided that Reels will be the next TikTok only bigger because it’s a part of one of the world’s largest and most powerful corporations. 

Even though I did not choose to watch Reels, and find them overwhelmingly annoying, I end up watching them all the same. I’ll see a Reel and hate-watch it for the weird thrill that comes with finding out that something is every bit as tacky and dumb as you suspect it to be. 

For me Reels offers an annoyingly addictive combination of titillation and irritation. Being an evil business genius, Mark Zuckerberg knows damn well that if you’re trying to get people on the Internet excited about something, gorgeous young women are the way to go. 

Reels connects grinning, shiny haired young exhibitionists with anonymous voyeurs and Facebook gets all the money!

I’m annoyed at Facebook for shoving Reels down my throat after I successfully avoided Vine and TikTok but I’m even more frustrated with myself for hate-watching instead of ignoring the way I did all of its earlier incarnations.  

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