I'm still pissed off that I've never had a facebook. I never gave them any info about me. I gave them no reason to have a profile on me.
Yet because OTHER people have facebook, they know my name, my address, my phone number. I don't know if they can identify me in pictures that other people post, but it wouldn't surprise me.
Correct. And the same is true for the mobile phones, carriers, and a slew of apps that all look at contacts. They know who you are and who your friends and family are.
There's a guy in the world of pro wrestling named Jim Cornette that said a quote this reminds me of.
Cornette is known for holding grudges, and being hateful. He keeps a shitlist of people he hates.
Well in the 1980s he was working for a wrestling company, and hated one of his coworkers for a year. Then a new guy came in and was so much worse.
Then one day he says to the first guy "You know, you used to be at the top of my shit list, but with all these new fuckheads coming in, you managed to move down a few spots simply by not doing anything!"
I think Meta is doing a decent job with Instagram. I mean except for collecting all possible data and psychological profiling of users to serve them targeted ads, it's a decent enough platform. And the only one still allowing for engagement with your actual friends rather than exclusively professional content creators.
WTF are you on about? no one likes instagram shorts and the feed is a jumbled mess of bullshit and advertisements. I deleted mine a long time ago and don't regret it for a second.
I really don't understand how people use Instagram. I've tried, but it's about 45% ads, 10-15% posts by people I don't follow, it's not in chronological order (or any sense of order for that matter), and regardless of whether I was on there yesterday or 2 months ago, it'll show me about 40 posts before saying "You're all caught up from the past 3 days!" and then refuse to show me any more.
I guess this is why I'm here on Lemmy and went crawling back to Tumblr, one of the last vestiges of the old internet. At this point, I'd rather watch a platform die than become marketable to advertisers and shareholders.
Yes the random feed filled with ads unrelated post suggestions and limited to three days is the main issue. i use an Instagram mod but they didn't manage yet to replace the main feed with the friend only feed you can get by clicking on the Instagram button
Meta is a little hard because they acquired a lot of existing social networks in their prime and have kept things subtle. Think about how long it took EA to finally strip Maxis of everything but The Sims. The only way you would know something is owned by Meta is from the splash screen.
The problem is that FB is the "core forum" for tons of niche hobbies. Irts the only reason I still have a account. They successfully killed off the old php forums.
Yep, agreed. The biggest problem there is that Meta is generally not making life worse for its users than they're used to. Facebook and Instagram are giving you almost the same shitty experience you got a decade ago.
Affordable purely by the money you pay upfront. They earn more by the ridiculous amount of tracking they do, and they're also forcing you to stay within their services.
As with so many other things, you're paying with more than just money.
I left Twitter for much the same reasons. All the replies are basically unusable now, because bots just pay to get put at the top of the sorting algorithm, and it's now full of bait and spam, since the website formerly known as Twitter now pays for engagement, since that apparently worked out well for Quora (!).
I genuinely tried to leave but lots of communities didn’t leave Reddit and therefore had to stick to Reddit. I did with RRSS-feed and avoided their app.
Recently figured out we can Sideload Apollo app with almost all functions available. So did that.
Thankfully never used twitter! I read valuation dropped from 44B to 9,4B recently.
It's super easy, the main problem is no one will move. I still moderate a couple on reddit, but it was hard enough getting people even there, certainly no one will come here.
I feel like internet users have become so lazy, stubborn, and resistant to change. I'm pretty sure it used to be easier to get people to move to new things like new forums, Xfire, Ventrillo, IRC, ICQ, AIM... people used to try new things
Companies have done this on purpose. They all want you to stay in their walled garden, their "ecosystem" of various products. So they make it easy to get into and get connected to people and things, and then make it hard to leave because you're "invested."
I’m pretty sure it used to be easier to get people to move to new things like new forums, Xfire, Ventrillo
In some respects it was somewhat easier to get them to be on multiple platforms instead of moving. Think of the original messenger proliferation, where sometimes people would be on IRC, XMPP, AIM, ICQ, MSN Messenger, or etc. so much so that you had software like Pidgin and Trillian to help consolidate server/chat rooms and friends lists to more easily chat with all your contacts.
Even with Ventrilo, I remember being open to also switching to Mumble or vice versa if there was some hiccup with either.
I don't feel I have the time (this issue is made worse by my timezone not aligning up with the most active hours for communities), nor do I have the maturity and level-headedness to be a fair and impartial moderator.
E: oops replying 3 days later. I'm surprised this thread is still in my feed...
It's in its afterlife phase right now. Much of the comment sections on any given subreddit are full of newbies using colloquialisms from other platforms. e.g. Users call subreddits "groups" which I think originates from Facebook. Or users trying to "bump" posts. There's a lot of signs that the core userbases are gone.
The hold outs for these sites are so fucking dumb. They act like social media is somehow an important part of their existence when just 10, 20 years ago it was an emerging technology. These early iterations of social media are toxic as fuck. YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc. They don't deserve your patronage and are taking your goodwill and turning it into social decay.
10-20 years and you people can't give it up for something better. There is no argument. You don't owe them loyalty. They aren't innovating. They have contributed to the rise of authoritarianism.
No, because then they'll all flood here. Then I'll have to consult with 9,006 different rules between each sub, while subsequently making sure I'm bending to each power-mods weird and unwritten agenda.
No I'm good with reddit. I encourage reddit. And I encourage all the weirdos to use reddit!
If you encourage it, it will continue to fester and rot, and the entire internet will lower their expectations.
We need to destroy these companies. We need to smash them to pieces, and hey guess what - it's going to hurt a bit! We need to be prepared to stand up against evil, corrupt, racist, bigoted robber barons. We need to make some sacrifices to fix the internet.
Burn the fuckers to the ground, and let spez rot in a hole.
I think you have misconstrued what I'm saying here. I hope reddit exists to collect the weirdos, and be a breeding ground for the gross shit it is, and keep it away from here. We don't need to inherit the 2024 users of reddit, no one wants them. Let them echo in their bot chambers until they literally spin into the ground. Keep Lemmy normal.
I get what you're saying, but it never works like that.
You said it yourself: "I hope reddit exists to...be a breeding ground..." And it will. The worst of humanity will collect and fester and grow in numbers. And what's going to happen then? Some will spill over to here, and other 'safe' communities.
There's no way we can thrive and simultaneously isolate ourselves from assholery; and by encouraging it to thrive elsewhere, we're only expanding its power and reach; and at the same time, enriching and empowering asshole billionaires like spez, Zuck, Musk, etc.
No, we need to fight them. We need to wade hip-deep in the shit to shovel it down the drain, rather than hoping it'll just go away on its own.
Look at it another way: If you have a garden, what happens if you designate one corner as "the weed corner?" It grows, spreads, and takes over the rest of the garden.
We can fight them, but ultimately these companies have the control. They can enrich and empower, and there's probably not a lot we can ultimately do about it. When the chips fall, I'd rather they just stay on a sub and endlessly echo chamber themselves into oblivion. Some will come here, but it seems like most will stay there until something ultra stupid forces them here. And I mean at this point, even ultra stupid hasn't, so yeah. If they have to collect somewhere, I'd personally rather it be there than here. I think that's the main point I'm making.