Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter THERE – i.e., Social Media Monopolies

Update, 2022/12/08

Ole Elon Musk bought hisself a crime scene when he  paid premium money for the Twitter application.  Looks like my pessimistic assessment of the evil inherent in social  media apps was  understated.   A couple of conclusions that fall out of the new info:

1) If Twitter is this bad it is a certain wager that every other social media app is doing the same shit if not worse.  Probably worse, especially in case of search engines like google.

2) Records are being destroyed right now at every other social media app.

3) We will find out much of this was directed by the government, factions within government agencies, and/or individual influential political figures.

TWITTER FILES #1….https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1598822959866683394.html

TWITTER FILES #2….https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1601007575633305600.html

Original follows:

Fascinating how in only a few years “don’t be evil” mindset morphed into “Embody Evil”, aina?

My original estimation was that social media was a waste of time. Then I thought it might be a viable way to communicate. Now it appears to have evolved into an information cemetery, where good ideas go to be buried, stealthily modified, or more perniciously – forever forgotten.  Then you can expect gaslighting as to whether it ever existed.

My own little circle of self flagellation here on the www-interwebzz is where I keep notes on projects. It is easy to search, and provides mechanisms to catalog and gather related items.   When required most of the content edits are dated.  All of it for my own uses, but most of it public.

Social media originally set about in a similar fashion, providing less motivated folks a method of establishing a personal web presence for whatever reasons.  The major use I found for it was reconnecting with transient friends.  Folks who are good people, who one maybe loses touch with when jobs are changed, people move, or whatever. 

As time marched on, monopoly power was aggregated without limit.  Bigg fish ate liddle fish.  Monopolists collaborate.  Options dwindle.  Sinecures established and fortified.

One of the interesting permutations is that a lot of folks who had previously set up blogs or personal websites abandoned them in favor of the “new shiny”.   Another facet is that few people understand that social media sites don’t really work the way they seem to believe they do.  Rather than proactively going to content a person wants to see,  folks passively wait for the content to be pushed to them via the application.   The applications have minds of their own, and their aims diverge from those of the “sheep” they curate.

Social media monopolies evolved and redesigned the concept of a feed.  Big Brother pushes curated content HE wants a person to see rather than what a user thought they were signing up for.  And Big Brother also HIDES content he does NOT want seen.  All via the “Holy AlGore-ithm”, whose arcane ways are mystic and adjudicated by high priests of increasingly Orwellian nature.  

These problems seem a lot more pernicious in the long run than the whole raft of probable privacy violations – an entirely huge issue of its own.  Generally, if the only source for information on a subject is going to be on a social media site, I have decided it is no longer worthy of interest.  Pass. Cashiered.  Dead Parrot. 

Printed copies of everything of sufficient interest are now necessary and worthwhile.  Otherwise the airbrushes are sure to come out and Trotsky is deleted wherever he might appear.  Keep a hard copy of favorite books and reference sources.   DVD copies of any video of interest. And multiple offline backups of all digital content, especially if it might be even slightly politikkkally inkkkerrekkktified. 

Another example of webb apps gone astray is U-toob.  Once a place for individual and start-up creators, U-toob has decided to partner with dinosaur media to try to save their bacon.  Dinosaur media video links are now pushed, while many individual content creators are suppressed or extinguished.   Any company that was once associated with a motto “don’t be evil”  is probably overcompensating for their own malign intentions.  Seems obvious in hindsight.  The only surprise is that the evil has been phased in so gradually. 

So I have come full circle, more or less.   It was bad enough when old school media was pushing propaganda.  With old school print media it was once a lot more difficult to 1984[i.e., selectively edit] articles, texts, and scientific journals.  Widespread library archives on microfiche were hard to alter.  Today the edits happen in real time, and nothing is intended to be permanent.    Now that modern Big Brother gnu media have fully embraced content modification, censorship, propaganda, and behavior modification techniques, it has become more of a roadblock than an information highway.  

Takes the sheen right off.  May as well stay here.  All social media terminated.  If they want the personal data going forward they can work for it.  Lotsa luck with that.