I personally feel the same way, but I would guess we're probably in the minority.
People who share information about themselves are generally more valuable customers for social media, and most people don't seem to have much issue with it, at least so far. I think there will always still be some percentage of old internet, but the amount of information the average person is willing to share online has been steadily creeping up.
You don't need social media for Internet presence. You only need a decent discovery system.
A propos, right now, at the end of the social media era, Google comes up with an interesting gesture.
Days ago TechChunch reported[0] that Google will be tweaking the parameters of its Pagerank. According to the report, the new "ranking improvements" seek to reduce low-quality or unoriginal content [which currently enjoys a high ranking in search results]. Google says the update will target content created specifically to improve search engine rankings – known as “SEO-first” content.
“With this update, you're more likely to read something you've never seen before", Google says. Of course, nothing revolutionary is going to happen, but it must have become clear to the finance department that there will be no way to sell junk links to advertisers if the target audience is disbanded due to the lack of original content.
Somehow the executives at Alphabet understood that a good anchoring of content in the results pages is necessary.
Honestly its hard to do this.
Especially if you work in Tech, you want to have an online presence, that shows the work and the projects you manage.
I think people are adopting the separate identity way.
One official identity, and another one which hidden and has no clear connection to who they are.
>I think people are adopting the separate identity way. One official identity, and another one which hidden and has no clear connection to who they are.
Bingo. And I think it's layered.
This is a separate identity from myself, with just enough actual content from my life and knowledge that if someone is interested in contacting me for something professional, they can put together what my specialties might be. But even with all of the posts on here, you'll play hell figuring out who I actually am.
Then there are the other online identities who have literally no connection to myself. No clues. No posts. No pictures. Nothing to link them to me. Reddit is a good example. I post there, but nobody would ever be able to put together who is the human doing that. (it helps to have a username that someone else uses on a different site, btw. I stole an HN handle that made me chuckle to use on reddit, and this one is used by another very salty person on reddit).
It's all about separation. I think that's the key.
Me, for one. I like my real life and my online life being totally separate.