lol I saw someone else last year complaining about GDPR because they thought clicking cookie banners was annoying. But it's like... don't be mad at GDPR for making you click banners that warn you about invasive practices, be mad at the fact that the invasive practices are allowed in the first place.
That's fair. Standardize everything. For the moment, it's the best of what we got. These changes happen over slowly, over decades.
I'm all for addressing root causes and not symptoms.
With open source and interoperability, this is a good thing, because then you can choose the experience you wanna have. You're not bound to a single vendor-locked platform that's subject to continuity issues or a degraded experience that forces you to move elsewhere and start over in terms of following/followers. You simply pack up and migrate to another instance.
You're not wrong about there being multiple factors, but I'd argue that this is often the least important factor. The technical features are easily replicated. (See: threads, stories, reels/tiktoks/shorts, etc.)
Network effects, on the other hand, have a stranglehold like no other.
You're on Facebook because your family's on there. You're on Twitter because your favorite meme pages are on there. You're on Instagram because the photographer you really like is on there. So on and so forth.
It is the people that make a social network great.
You're right. I say this every time these conversations come up. It's the people that hold the power. Imagine how quickly things would change if everyone stopped using Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Threads, WhatsApp, Telegram, Snapchat, etc. overnight. From billions/millions to users, to zero. Can you imagine how quickly the companies would change/adjust/pivot/react?
Social media company’s don’t understand what makes a Social network great.
Disagree. They know. It's just that they're trapped in an unethical business model that will never allow them to make it great. This is because the platform's interests are constantly at war with the user's interests. This was a critical mistake in the earlier days of the internet.
Google itself identified this in the early days in a paper that they wrote. They originally just wanted to organize the internet. But with an advertising revenue model, the interests of the advertisers was ultimately gonna be more important.
Call it "enshittification": Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
I don't "like" that it got this bad, but I do like that the worse things get, the more we can collectively organize and pressure reform to fix these things.
It'd be great to see a true social revolution take place in my lifetime. Social for the sake of social, not controlled by a single corporation with a business model that's designed to exploit its users.
lol I saw someone else last year complaining about GDPR because they thought clicking cookie banners was annoying. But it's like... don't be mad at GDPR for making you click banners that warn you about invasive practices, be mad at the fact that the invasive practices are allowed in the first place.
I actually run a directory of companies and products that don't use invasive tracking cookies called CookieSlayers in an effort to make people aware of better alternatives, and ultimately build a better web. Feel free to contribute to it.