And Mastodon, to be honest. I’ve seen worse interfaces, but Mastodon seems to be pretty horrible in general.
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That’s not rural. It’s hypothetical.
Well, UFC looks like gay porn with slightly more clothes, so…
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Yeah so they say. For now. As any woman online knows, men think everything is for dating. I get romance scammers on FB already. Women get hit on via Linkedin. I get hit on in Words with Friends for god’s sake.
In conclusion, I hate this and it might just get me to delete Facebook.
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Too late, already exists, Google it yourself.
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“Watch overly muscled guys pound on each other!!”
Yup, pretty much.
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Wrestling, as well. The costumes show off their “packages” to great effect. American football is sadomasochist porn with a body-inflation fantasy thrown in for good measure. Too bad about their brains, though.
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I think it’s Lore, pretending to be Data.
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Now that makes more sense!
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“Social media” like Facebook and Twitter … no. Online communities like our bulletin board … yes.
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my competing service, /dev/null, is now available. use our API to transfer your data to /dev/null, you’ll not be sorry!
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i used to use a landline, but i kept getting snail mail ads that were strangely relevant so I went to using Signal which was much cheaper.
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For me, the inconvenience of having to individually gather and forward references, work experience, credentials and CV for everything from job hunting to major projects is a small price to pay for not putting my career graph online. After all, we did all those things before LinkedIn. Of course its frictional coefficient is higher now that everyone with whom one does those things off LinkedIn now asks why one doesn’t just use LinkedIn.
And I’m keenly aware that that’s a privilege of having sufficient leverage in a relatively traditional tech-adjacent field, a privilege many workers don’t have, and that many workers would just get ghosted if they tried to pull those teeth. I’m thankful I got out of tech before LinkedIn, before the dark times.
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How do you square the fact that there are no incentives to tell the truth on LinkedIn? The opposite, in fact.
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I’m saying I don’t use LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a social network, and as such what’s on it is a curated and frequently distorted reality, but it attracts users by functioning as a central clearing house. For that convenience, people give up information. The veracity of that information is largely beside the point; like Fecesbook, they’re gathering a social graph that they can monetize, turning users and entire economic sectors into products. The users aren’t the customers, they’re the products, Eloi complying with the Morlocks out of either duress, naivety or fatalism.
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If you’re talking about my use of LinkedIn, I can’t control what other users do. I’d assume that if a critical mass of them are lying then it will become useless for its intended purpose.
FWIW, I do find that the privacy controls on LinkedIn for the public-facing side are better than those of the other social networks. My account is locked down well enough that I don’t get a lot of unsolicited inquiries or requests to join my professional network. I also don’t see a lot of garbage political or non-business posts or spam in my timeline, so I assume there’s some active moderation and/or community standards going on there that’s absent on Facebook and Twitter.
I do take @GulliverFoyle’s view above about the nature of reality on LinkedIn, and that I am more product than user for them, but since I do occasionally see a significant financial return being there (in the form of new clients who want to see my CV and who I’ve worked with) I can live with the trade-off.
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I’m certainly not antagonistic to social networks in general. On the contrary, they’re incredibly useful. After all, here I am on one. I’m just opposed to user productization by voracious corporations.
Ideally people would favor federated social networks like Mastodon, but Late Stage Capitalism, the ethos of Silicon Valley, and most of all the lack of widespread awareness about what’s given up when tech companies take ownership of users’ data seems to be an insurmountable barrier to widespread adoption of open-source social networks, without which their purpose is defeated. Until the general public understands how much power their data footprint has over their lives, we’re unlikely even to succeed in robust laws protecting people’s rights to own their data.
The irony is that in a sense the public does realize it every time they panic about a data breach or Facebook’s infamously harmful hostility to privacy. That’s, as you point out, where LinkedIn has been smarter, making privacy controls within the network better (for now anyway), and that’s a genuinely good thing (credit where credit is due). Unfortunately what the general public rarely realizes is that privacy from other users is only half of what’s needed, that privacy from the companies themselves and the selling of their data is the hidden half of the problem, that the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world regard them as dumb fucks for trusting them.
There is a danger of sounding as though I’m also denigrating users, and I’m absolutely not. The users are absolutely not to blame. The companies are.
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Hold my beer. I’ve got a 5 pound hammer right…here.
On the plus side, FB knows so much about people they should be able to match you up with “the one”, the one person who shares exactly all your hopes and dreams. Now wether that’s actually a good thing in practice I don’t know.
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FB already knows who you’re sleeping with. Or, more to the point, whose phone spends the night on a nightstand a few feet from yours.
Haven’t signed up yet.
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