One of the perks of social media is precisely the shift in cat herding burden from the user to the platform. I present the following as supporting evidence: >N

One of the perks of social media is precisely the shift in cat herding burden from the user to the platform. I present the following as supporting evidence: >NOTE: THIS SITE IS A PARTICIPANT IN THE AMAZON SERVICES LLC ASSOCIATES PROGRAM, AN AFFILIATE ADVERTISING PROGRAM DESIGNED TO PROVIDE A MEANS FOR SITES TO EARN ADVERTISING FEES BY ADVERTISING AND LINKING TO AMAZON.COM. I do not revel in the glorious autonomy of, say, permanent academics whose self-help blogger reflexes have become so internalized that it's no longer clear whether they recognize that a post is opportunist piggybacking on trending slacktivist topics. If I can't tell from the general tenor of your blog whether you can tell that you're baldly shilling your books, your self-perception in the matter has ceased to hold relevance. My first thought upon seeing affiliate marketing links on a self-serious blog is usually something more along the lines of: why does this creature believe they should be paid to have tastes in others' works? For the most part, I'm not going to visit at all. But when I do, I am going — 100% of the time — to strip tracking parameters, affiliate codes, and all the other bullshit off any link prior to visiting. Knowing that a platform's design serves to background any given individual user's capitalism of-the-soul in the service of a more homogeneous, impersonal assault from the proprietors is an extremely valuable thing. De-emphasizing personal schemes allows platform-centric economies of scale to double as behavioral peacekeeping. If I only have to circumnavigate a user's terrible ideology, vainglorious twitter feuds, etc. to accrue value from the subset of their posts I find worthwhile, I'm doing better, curatorially-speaking, than if I had to concern myself with that user's schemes to monetize their mere existence in my vicinity. Constraints on affordances limit a small proportion of content-creating elites. You know you're one of those when your whining about the platform becomes action in leaving the platform, self-publishing in parallel, or otherwise upregulating personal agency. For everyone else, though, those same constraints make the world go round. The average internet user has no business whatsoever running their own services, per every single survey of digital skills ever conducted. And a CS prof writing otherwise is either (a) grossly incompetent in his stated area of expertise or (b) allowing himself to shoehorn flights of fancy into his writing in the service of pushing schlock. A profile you lose because you didn't pay $4 last month, or didn't get security updates for, or […] is simply not a plausible centerpiece of alternative social media under any demographically-literate view of the world. Homestead the noosphere all you want. Tenements will still need building too.