Originally published at: Social networks are roach motels | Boing Boing
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Social networks are roach motels
Why yes. I’d even go so far as to say they’re Kafkaesque.
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Just kidding, I wouldn’t touch social media with a ten foot pole.
BTW: No, BB is not social media, just so’s yous know.
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I feel the cost of leaving a social network is a feature: the thing is, it lets me simply abandon old social networks and let new ones grow from scratch. I don’t need to take my friends from BoingBoing over to the Reddit, or my fellow Ingress ENL agents from Telegram into WhatsApp. I would rather rebuild than take the time to weed out.
With Facebook, I doubt I would miss all too much if it went away. A lot of the stuff on there is ephemeral and vapid, so if it were to be deleted I would not shed a tear.
In other words, what I do in one clubhouse does not need to be moved into a new clubhouse.
I would argue that is exactly where social media went wrong.
When Facebook first came out, I was incredulous that my friends/family rushed to join and add everyone they’d ever known.
IRL, I don’t speak the same way to older relatives (back when I wasn’t in the oldest generation in my family) as I do to friends. I don’t tell the same stories to someone I went to school with – decades ago – as someone I’m currently close to.
The internet was supposed to allow for greater freedom of expression and collaboration, but instead it has flattened communication for most people.
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The BoingBoing BBS is a place to socialise, which may cause confusion, but there is one key difference: it doesn’t have any sort of friend networking, not even rudimentary thingies like Slashdot’s fans and foes. There is no easy way to say, “oh, I’ll go be friends with everyone @fnordius is friends with!” or “oh, I see @papasan likes so and so, so I’ll follow so and so as well!” And I like it like that.
I like that Discourse-based BBSes are not out to suck attention, that they aren’t trying to get me to “engage” more.
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