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.
Even if you ignore all the ads and data-mining IG its still a shit experience.
You can't share any links, which does nothing but make it a worse experience, because people just use annoying workarounds.
All the buttons for user profiles, hashtags, and comments are impossibly small.
In the search function you can conveniently "flick" between posts so you don't have to line each one up perfectly on the screen, but this works nowhere else in the app for some reason.
They created what are essentially 2 completely isolated social media platforms (posts and stories) into the same app, which results in fragmentation of where people post and where you have to look find their posts.
Every time I try to scroll down, I scroll to the side instead.
Every time you open the app, it shows you a post, and then that post disappears 2 seconds later.
They abuse the DM system by cramming other notifications into it for tags and "broadcasts", presumably to force you to receive them after you've disabled all the other notifications.
Of course there's the flaw of not allowing text posts, which again does nothing except force people to post photos of text, which undermines the fundamental purpose of the platform.
Incessant "suggested" posts that I do not have and have never expressed interest in.
No scroll bar for video, so if there's something you missed or want to watch again, you have to watch to the end or start from the beginning.
Read receipts subject users to abuse. Any other platform you can disable them.
Standard image posts are hidden by the algorithm, so no point in even posting them anymore, which essentially makes it almost entirely a TikTok/Snapchat clone.
You click the play button on an image, thinking it's a video, but it's just a still image with annoying ass audio.
Auto-playing videos.
Stories just flip along without you doing anything, and trying to go back and see them again is a nightmare.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's also the main organization tool for "groups". I have tried to migrate mine to other platforms with no success.
And also the biggest online classifieds marketplace for trading goods. Even though it's a fucking awful experience and simply ignores any filters you give it. If you want to actually sell your stuff, or sell it for market value, without shipping, you just have to use it.
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.
Using Reddit as a platform to protest Reddit is even more idiotic than staging a sit in at Disneyworld to protest against Disney.
"Hey we're getting revenue and media is gonna give us a bajillion clickthroughs from rubbernecking, please, if you can still protest in any capacity on our site please do, make it a huge spectacle"
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
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.
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."
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.