7 ms·

I feel the same burning hate like a thousand suns for FB/Meta, Google/YT and other platforms that monetize their users. But, let's be frank here: They monetize

I feel the same burning hate like a thousand suns for FB/Meta, Google/YT and other platforms that monetize their users. But, let's be frank here: They monetize you and me, us, the users because 1 they can and, 2, they have to. Yes, they have to. Imagine they provided access to their platforms for free. How would the shareholders (your retirement funds included) respond when less profit was made? You see, we view them as public utilities, as a shared park or public garden or nice riverside picnic area, but they are not anything like that at all. They are companies that have a responsibility to the paying user, that is to the advertisers who want to track you as a viewer, to know if/how much their ads work. The closest thing to a "public utility" on the internet to this day is email, good old SMTP/IMAP email. It's open, everybody who's not yet on Hotmail's or Gmail's spam-list can use it, and you can even develop an app for it yourself if you so wish. The closest thing to a social open protocol is: the fedi-verse on Mastodon or the relay-based Nostr system. You don't want to be the product of a mega corp? Try these open platforms instead...

anonymousiam 3y ago
They can monetize by presenting ads, and they can identify you with cookies when you don't log in (or later when you do). They don't need to restrict their content to monetize. It's more likely that they are restricting their content to prevent scraping and/or indexing.
- henriquez 3y ago
  It's definitely to prevent scraping. Used to be you could scrape and hydrate any profile or hashtag. It was sort of a cat and mouse thing a couple years ago and now the Instagram website is locked down tight.
spondylosaurus 3y ago
Yep, and Reddit in particular is the culmination of over a billion dollars' worth of VC funding. The changes we're seeing are unsurprising when you take that into account—even though Reddit has never been profitable, those investors are still expecting their return, which forces Reddit to either start bringing in serious revenue or have a promising IPO (or both). None of this has ever been for users; we're merely a driver of growth/profit to them. Investor-backed platforms offer the illusion of "free public utility," but they were never meant to serve us in the first place. Their goal has always been to cash out.
- weaksauce 3y ago
  > even though Reddit has never been profitable they sure had a good trajectory before huffman fucked that up and bought moonshot projects and hired 2,000 employees and did everything possible to mess up that trajectory so they could pump and dump for an ipo.
- myspy 3y ago
  Isn‘t that a problem of shareholder thinking? A problem that imo should be meanwhile singled out as a bad way to handle a company. Shouldn‘t it be handled with thinking of all stakeholders? This would result in better management decisions, or not?
kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
The alternative is OSI or Xanadu with microtransactions for everything and every action tied to an identity.
wpietri 3y ago
> Yes, they have to. Nope. They chose to. Do some incentives encourage them in this direction? Sure. That's different than them "having to". Actual people are doing this, and they actually made choices toward maximum exploitation of human weakness. They are morally responsible for those choices. I agree that people should leave those platforms and move to open solutions. That would be some good choice-making. But that possibility doesn't diminish the responsibility of the monetizers for their choices.
- qwerasdf5 3y ago
  As I understand it, they have to. Google 'Fiduciary Duty'.
  - p0pcult 3y ago
    [dead]
  - wpietri 3y ago
    Imagine that I had already read about that and still wrote what I wrote. What might you take from that?
duxup 3y ago
And generally users of the web want things to be free / don't want to pay directly for these utilities. I feel like we as internet users are a big part of the math here.
- mindslight 3y ago
  I'm happy paying for a few personal cloud servers, more than I need perhaps. I'm happy paying for a solid Internet connection, electricity, computers, hard drives, UPSs, etc. I'm happy for paying for VOIP PSTN connectivity, mobile connectivity, etc. With very few exceptions (mostly arising out of expedience), I do not pay for software. I honestly do wish the dynamics of the software ecosystem were different, so that there would be any software worth paying for. But the harsh reality is that there is a stark divide between software that represents my interests aka Libre software, and proprietary software for which it's only a matter of time of when it will betray my interests, if it isn't already doing so out of the gate. And if I'm using software that is set up to betray me, such that I have to sandbox it to mitigate it (isolated VMs etc), then why the hell should I also be paying for the privilege of that hostile relationship? This is the underlying divide that the user surveillance industry attempts to arbitrage. Startups offer what appears to be convenient software that mostly represents users, but then once users become dependent on it, cranks up the abuse and extraction. Instead of the shareware nag screen, it's a nag dopamine drip of habituated dependency. One of the things that really needs to happen is anti-trust enforcement to stop this bundling of hosted services with software. Any company offering a service should be required to make that service available in a programmatic way to every authorized user, such that users can always use "third party" clients. This would drastically curtail the current bait and switch dynamic.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - eddythompson80 3y ago
    Most of the time in the current era you're not paying for software. You're paying for software as a service. You're paying someone to take on the operational aspects of running a service because to you the value is in using the software, not in operating it. It's all opportunity cost.
slg 3y ago
>How would the shareholders (your retirement funds included) respond when less profit was made? At a certain point, who cares? A company can exist indefinitely with any level of long term profit. They don't need to constantly be maximizing profit in the short term which is where these "fuck you" patterns generally arise. We have designed a system that has convinced everyone to never be satisfied or say they have enough. But there is no reason why that needs to be the case. Companies don't need to grow every quarter forever. It is both impossible and ends up degrading the lives of both employees and customers.
- lamontcg 3y ago
  A nonprofit that wasn't a publicly traded company would a viable alternative model. It wouldn't need to have the same insane up-and-to-the-right incentives and drive to toxic monetization.
  - slg 3y ago
    It doesn't have to be a nonprofit. There is nothing wrong with turning a profit. The problem is when the company's only goal is ever-increasing profit and they are willing to sacrifice the wellbeing of their employees, customers, and community to achieve it.
    - lamontcg 3y ago
      Which every for-profit company seems to wind up doing these days.
      - OJFord 3y ago
        Every for-profit public company. And so they should/have to.
        lamontcg 3y ago
        Which is every for-profit company once MBAs take it over and want to cash out in an IPO.
guestbest 3y ago
It’s a Trojan Horse pattern, really. They give away the service for free membership with billions of VC until their competitors collapse or fade away, then they start becoming more aggressive with ads and/or charging for premium access which used to be free.
- jitix 3y ago
  This is not new, Gillette used to give out free razors to get people used to their ecosystem and get recurring revenue. It’s just more “in your face” now.
  - benjaminbachman 3y ago
    But there's no network effects with razors.
    - jitix 3y ago
      Exactly! This is a strategy that works even for markets without network effects. It just gets even more amplified (and profitable) when network effects exist. In todays terms the equivalent would be an invite to a closed Gillette page/group/discord that has exclusive videos from the latest influencers (or whatever teenagers like and talk about). For example OOP could get their daily cat based dopamine fix from a myriad of online sources, most open or easily bypassed but they want to see this one particular cat which is behind Meta’s wall and requires additional payment (in terms of data) from them.
  - DMell 3y ago
    I noticed this same thing recently with Arcoss golf sensors which are now essentially free everywhere.
  - silisili 3y ago
    Did they stop? It used to be every guy got a razor for their 18th birthday, which was creepy as nobody even signed up for it(unsure about women?). Myself and all my classmates got one. I tried Googling this, and the last article I found was from 2019...
deely3 3y ago
Just to add: these arguments are good and valid until company become monopoly. And until company start to actively shutdown, integrate, prevent any other company from becoming competitor. Imagine shared park or public garden owners that buys all other shared parks in country and actively prevent creation of new public parks. And then started to put loud and bright advertisement boards on every tree, near every gil and on every picnic place. And punish you for wearing headphones.
sroussey 3y ago
> we view them as public utilities Maybe that is side effect of age. I certainly do not see YouTube that way. Maybe growing up with it is different. And when they started it seemed like a fools errand—copyright issues, giant costs (OMG, so much money down the drain), no real way to monetize at all at the time. In other words: giant heap of risk. I had a friend that was a competitor to them (but was more on top of copyright issues, thus their downfall). This was not for the faint of heart, and the exact opposite of a public utility.
des1nderlase 3y ago
So you said it yourself, it's not really a 100% utility as "someone" decides what is a spam and what's not. Try running an email service yourself. Being open protocol still gives leverage to someone to decide who can and cannot use the service, and who can monetize ads.
- jclulow 3y ago
  What _does_ count as a utility, then? I expect anything that is considered (or even legally classified) as a utility is going to have rules and "someone" to decide who to kick out; e.g., the electrical grid, or the water supply, or the telephone system, or council rubbish collection, etc.
jitix 3y ago
Great point, in the 90s people used to spend a fortune (relatively speaking) on taking, sharing and discovering pictures, consuming media and getting their news. Now everyone wants everything for free, but won’t give anything in return. And they also want market returns on their stocks, 401ks, etc at the same time. That being said, Meta/Google could implement a guaranteed privacy-first, ad-free option for something like $10-20 a month to give people the option to be a “customer” instead of “product”. And as you said there is the whole mastodon/pixelfed/lemmy network that people could use, although many mastodon instances seem to be running into financial problems lately.
- iamleppert 3y ago
  If giving people the choice of an ad-free premium subscription was more profitable, they would do it. The issue with doing that is the users who pay are also the most desirable audience for advertisers. A premium model also eventually creates two separate products. The free product is (at first) built for the needs of the users to attract them and get enough volume to support an advertisement model. Then, it is gradually built and focused toward the needs of the advertisers. That gradually shifts over time once the company has captured the market on both sides (this is a two-sided marketplace after all) to optimizing for the needs of the company. It’s harder to achieve this final end goal if you have a product that is optimized for the needs of the user, because you don’t have a two-sided marketplace anymore that can be exploited on both sides. Collecting money from businesses (advertisers) in bulk and providing them support can be easier and less costly than managing millions of premium users and supporting them.
  - jitix 3y ago
    I understand how the market works and how the Gompertz curve looks for new product lifecycles. I have a (professionally useless) masters degree in that. My question is, what’s your solution? The shareholders/stock market (largely represented by the board) will replace any CEO who doesn’t employ patterns (dark, fu, whatever) to maximize revenue. And private companies can’t raise capital easily nor can they give Options/RSUs to employees. We are in the current state due to market equilibrium driven by people’s willingness to pay, and since I personally don’t like meta or Zuck I use Reddit on Brave + Mastodon + Dev.to for my social media dopamine hits. OOP could do the same. I don’t know how old you are but growing up in the 90s I certainly remember (parents) paying for many of these things we now take for granted. The net negative result is that independent journalism is dead.
naikrovek 3y ago
> Yes, they have to. you say that like we don't all know it already. Most readers of this site likely work at these places. No kidding they have to do this, if they exist. Their existence is the problem, whatever the cause.
amelius 3y ago
We just have to take their stupid ad-based monetization scheme away, so we can just pay for what we use like in the good old times. We can start with a law that applies to all social media systems that have more than 1M users.
- motoxpro 3y ago
  That would be a nightmare. I would hate to pay for all the stuff I get for free now.
  - amelius 3y ago
    Also if the law only applied to social media >1M users?
baxtr 3y ago
And at the same time many people don’t want to pay for software. Either you pay or you are the product.
- NoRelToEmber 3y ago
  We've seen too many times how bogus this saying is. You can pay top dollar for a high-end TV, and it'll still spy on you and show you ads in the menus [1]. You either control the software, or you are the product. No amount of Danegeld will buy you freedom. [1] https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2021/3/10/22323790/lg-oled-tv-commercials-content-store https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2021/3/10/22323790/lg-oled-tv-...
TacticalCoder 3y ago
> But, let's be frank here: They monetize you and me, us, the users because 1 they can and, 2, they have to. Don't let them. No FB. No WhatsApp. No Instagram. I take entire IP blocks assigned to Meta and traffic to/from these IPs is simply dropped. I take their domains and nullroute them too, because I can. Once you do that, you become harder to monetize.
pnt12 3y ago
Won't someone think of the shareholders? This denial of responsability is a cancer on society. Poor devs, they can do no better because their manager ordered them to. Poor managers, they can do no better because they must reach their OKRs. Poor CxOs, they can do no better because they must please the board. Poor board, who must maximize the returns of the shareholders. Poor shareholders, who just want their retirement funds.
- thethimble 3y ago
  The idea that everyone involved in the economic system of app development simply lacks moral character is a pretty weak take. Most apps/companies exist within a capitalistic framework. They likely wouldn’t exist without early external capital providing upfront funding for R&D. In your mind, who should bear the cost of building and maintaining large services like Instagram?
  - pnt12 3y ago
    It's not that they lack moral character - is that they don't exercise it. The whole system rewards maximization of profits, and all else is an up hill battle.
- dgreensp 3y ago
  Yup!! When I criticize Google, or some other company, I am not forgetting that they are motivated by making money.
- akudha 3y ago
  We can keep debating this all day long, nothing is going to change. The best thing to do is stop using these services. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok... We can easily live without them. Our lives might actually be better without them. Why are we spending time debating the ethics of these services? It is like fast food - just avoid. When entities like banks, hospitals, insurance companies etc do shady shit, THAT is a problem. Those are necessary services, social media is not
  - 3y ago

anonymousiam 3y ago

They can monetize by presenting ads, and they can identify you with cookies when you don't log in (or later when you do). They don't need to restrict their content to monetize. It's more likely that they are restricting their content to prevent scraping and/or indexing.

henriquez 3y ago
It's definitely to prevent scraping. Used to be you could scrape and hydrate any profile or hashtag. It was sort of a cat and mouse thing a couple years ago and now the Instagram website is locked down tight.

spondylosaurus 3y ago

Yep, and Reddit in particular is the culmination of over a billion dollars' worth of VC funding. The changes we're seeing are unsurprising when you take that into account—even though Reddit has never been profitable, those investors are still expecting their return, which forces Reddit to either start bringing in serious revenue or have a promising IPO (or both). None of this has ever been for users; we're merely a driver of growth/profit to them. Investor-backed platforms offer the illusion of "free public utility," but they were never meant to serve us in the first place. Their goal has always been to cash out.

weaksauce 3y ago
> even though Reddit has never been profitable they sure had a good trajectory before huffman fucked that up and bought moonshot projects and hired 2,000 employees and did everything possible to mess up that trajectory so they could pump and dump for an ipo.
myspy 3y ago
Isn‘t that a problem of shareholder thinking? A problem that imo should be meanwhile singled out as a bad way to handle a company. Shouldn‘t it be handled with thinking of all stakeholders? This would result in better management decisions, or not?

kevin_thibedeau 3y ago

The alternative is OSI or Xanadu with microtransactions for everything and every action tied to an identity.

wpietri 3y ago

> Yes, they have to. Nope. They chose to. Do some incentives encourage them in this direction? Sure. That's different than them "having to". Actual people are doing this, and they actually made choices toward maximum exploitation of human weakness. They are morally responsible for those choices. I agree that people should leave those platforms and move to open solutions. That would be some good choice-making. But that possibility doesn't diminish the responsibility of the monetizers for their choices.

qwerasdf5 3y ago
As I understand it, they have to. Google 'Fiduciary Duty'.
- p0pcult 3y ago
  [dead]
- wpietri 3y ago
  Imagine that I had already read about that and still wrote what I wrote. What might you take from that?

duxup 3y ago

And generally users of the web want things to be free / don't want to pay directly for these utilities. I feel like we as internet users are a big part of the math here.

mindslight 3y ago
I'm happy paying for a few personal cloud servers, more than I need perhaps. I'm happy paying for a solid Internet connection, electricity, computers, hard drives, UPSs, etc. I'm happy for paying for VOIP PSTN connectivity, mobile connectivity, etc. With very few exceptions (mostly arising out of expedience), I do not pay for software. I honestly do wish the dynamics of the software ecosystem were different, so that there would be any software worth paying for. But the harsh reality is that there is a stark divide between software that represents my interests aka Libre software, and proprietary software for which it's only a matter of time of when it will betray my interests, if it isn't already doing so out of the gate. And if I'm using software that is set up to betray me, such that I have to sandbox it to mitigate it (isolated VMs etc), then why the hell should I also be paying for the privilege of that hostile relationship? This is the underlying divide that the user surveillance industry attempts to arbitrage. Startups offer what appears to be convenient software that mostly represents users, but then once users become dependent on it, cranks up the abuse and extraction. Instead of the shareware nag screen, it's a nag dopamine drip of habituated dependency. One of the things that really needs to happen is anti-trust enforcement to stop this bundling of hosted services with software. Any company offering a service should be required to make that service available in a programmatic way to every authorized user, such that users can always use "third party" clients. This would drastically curtail the current bait and switch dynamic.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- eddythompson80 3y ago
  Most of the time in the current era you're not paying for software. You're paying for software as a service. You're paying someone to take on the operational aspects of running a service because to you the value is in using the software, not in operating it. It's all opportunity cost.

slg 3y ago

>How would the shareholders (your retirement funds included) respond when less profit was made? At a certain point, who cares? A company can exist indefinitely with any level of long term profit. They don't need to constantly be maximizing profit in the short term which is where these "fuck you" patterns generally arise. We have designed a system that has convinced everyone to never be satisfied or say they have enough. But there is no reason why that needs to be the case. Companies don't need to grow every quarter forever. It is both impossible and ends up degrading the lives of both employees and customers.

lamontcg 3y ago
A nonprofit that wasn't a publicly traded company would a viable alternative model. It wouldn't need to have the same insane up-and-to-the-right incentives and drive to toxic monetization.
- slg 3y ago
  It doesn't have to be a nonprofit. There is nothing wrong with turning a profit. The problem is when the company's only goal is ever-increasing profit and they are willing to sacrifice the wellbeing of their employees, customers, and community to achieve it.
  - lamontcg 3y ago
    Which every for-profit company seems to wind up doing these days.
    - OJFord 3y ago
      Every for-profit public company. And so they should/have to.
      - lamontcg 3y ago
        Which is every for-profit company once MBAs take it over and want to cash out in an IPO.

guestbest 3y ago

It’s a Trojan Horse pattern, really. They give away the service for free membership with billions of VC until their competitors collapse or fade away, then they start becoming more aggressive with ads and/or charging for premium access which used to be free.

jitix 3y ago
This is not new, Gillette used to give out free razors to get people used to their ecosystem and get recurring revenue. It’s just more “in your face” now.
- benjaminbachman 3y ago
  But there's no network effects with razors.
  - jitix 3y ago
    Exactly! This is a strategy that works even for markets without network effects. It just gets even more amplified (and profitable) when network effects exist. In todays terms the equivalent would be an invite to a closed Gillette page/group/discord that has exclusive videos from the latest influencers (or whatever teenagers like and talk about). For example OOP could get their daily cat based dopamine fix from a myriad of online sources, most open or easily bypassed but they want to see this one particular cat which is behind Meta’s wall and requires additional payment (in terms of data) from them.
- DMell 3y ago
  I noticed this same thing recently with Arcoss golf sensors which are now essentially free everywhere.
- silisili 3y ago
  Did they stop? It used to be every guy got a razor for their 18th birthday, which was creepy as nobody even signed up for it(unsure about women?). Myself and all my classmates got one. I tried Googling this, and the last article I found was from 2019...

deely3 3y ago

Just to add: these arguments are good and valid until company become monopoly. And until company start to actively shutdown, integrate, prevent any other company from becoming competitor. Imagine shared park or public garden owners that buys all other shared parks in country and actively prevent creation of new public parks. And then started to put loud and bright advertisement boards on every tree, near every gil and on every picnic place. And punish you for wearing headphones.

sroussey 3y ago

> we view them as public utilities Maybe that is side effect of age. I certainly do not see YouTube that way. Maybe growing up with it is different. And when they started it seemed like a fools errand—copyright issues, giant costs (OMG, so much money down the drain), no real way to monetize at all at the time. In other words: giant heap of risk. I had a friend that was a competitor to them (but was more on top of copyright issues, thus their downfall). This was not for the faint of heart, and the exact opposite of a public utility.

des1nderlase 3y ago

So you said it yourself, it's not really a 100% utility as "someone" decides what is a spam and what's not. Try running an email service yourself. Being open protocol still gives leverage to someone to decide who can and cannot use the service, and who can monetize ads.

jclulow 3y ago
What _does_ count as a utility, then? I expect anything that is considered (or even legally classified) as a utility is going to have rules and "someone" to decide who to kick out; e.g., the electrical grid, or the water supply, or the telephone system, or council rubbish collection, etc.

jitix 3y ago

Great point, in the 90s people used to spend a fortune (relatively speaking) on taking, sharing and discovering pictures, consuming media and getting their news. Now everyone wants everything for free, but won’t give anything in return. And they also want market returns on their stocks, 401ks, etc at the same time. That being said, Meta/Google could implement a guaranteed privacy-first, ad-free option for something like $10-20 a month to give people the option to be a “customer” instead of “product”. And as you said there is the whole mastodon/pixelfed/lemmy network that people could use, although many mastodon instances seem to be running into financial problems lately.

iamleppert 3y ago
If giving people the choice of an ad-free premium subscription was more profitable, they would do it. The issue with doing that is the users who pay are also the most desirable audience for advertisers. A premium model also eventually creates two separate products. The free product is (at first) built for the needs of the users to attract them and get enough volume to support an advertisement model. Then, it is gradually built and focused toward the needs of the advertisers. That gradually shifts over time once the company has captured the market on both sides (this is a two-sided marketplace after all) to optimizing for the needs of the company. It’s harder to achieve this final end goal if you have a product that is optimized for the needs of the user, because you don’t have a two-sided marketplace anymore that can be exploited on both sides. Collecting money from businesses (advertisers) in bulk and providing them support can be easier and less costly than managing millions of premium users and supporting them.
- jitix 3y ago
  I understand how the market works and how the Gompertz curve looks for new product lifecycles. I have a (professionally useless) masters degree in that. My question is, what’s your solution? The shareholders/stock market (largely represented by the board) will replace any CEO who doesn’t employ patterns (dark, fu, whatever) to maximize revenue. And private companies can’t raise capital easily nor can they give Options/RSUs to employees. We are in the current state due to market equilibrium driven by people’s willingness to pay, and since I personally don’t like meta or Zuck I use Reddit on Brave + Mastodon + Dev.to for my social media dopamine hits. OOP could do the same. I don’t know how old you are but growing up in the 90s I certainly remember (parents) paying for many of these things we now take for granted. The net negative result is that independent journalism is dead.

naikrovek 3y ago

> Yes, they have to. you say that like we don't all know it already. Most readers of this site likely work at these places. No kidding they have to do this, if they exist. Their existence is the problem, whatever the cause.

amelius 3y ago

We just have to take their stupid ad-based monetization scheme away, so we can just pay for what we use like in the good old times. We can start with a law that applies to all social media systems that have more than 1M users.

motoxpro 3y ago
That would be a nightmare. I would hate to pay for all the stuff I get for free now.
- amelius 3y ago
  Also if the law only applied to social media >1M users?

baxtr 3y ago

And at the same time many people don’t want to pay for software. Either you pay or you are the product.

NoRelToEmber 3y ago
We've seen too many times how bogus this saying is. You can pay top dollar for a high-end TV, and it'll still spy on you and show you ads in the menus [1]. You either control the software, or you are the product. No amount of Danegeld will buy you freedom. [1] https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2021/3/10/22323790/lg-oled-tv-commercials-content-store https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2021/3/10/22323790/lg-oled-tv-...

TacticalCoder 3y ago

> But, let's be frank here: They monetize you and me, us, the users because 1 they can and, 2, they have to. Don't let them. No FB. No WhatsApp. No Instagram. I take entire IP blocks assigned to Meta and traffic to/from these IPs is simply dropped. I take their domains and nullroute them too, because I can. Once you do that, you become harder to monetize.

pnt12 3y ago

Won't someone think of the shareholders? This denial of responsability is a cancer on society. Poor devs, they can do no better because their manager ordered them to. Poor managers, they can do no better because they must reach their OKRs. Poor CxOs, they can do no better because they must please the board. Poor board, who must maximize the returns of the shareholders. Poor shareholders, who just want their retirement funds.

thethimble 3y ago
The idea that everyone involved in the economic system of app development simply lacks moral character is a pretty weak take. Most apps/companies exist within a capitalistic framework. They likely wouldn’t exist without early external capital providing upfront funding for R&D. In your mind, who should bear the cost of building and maintaining large services like Instagram?
- pnt12 3y ago
  It's not that they lack moral character - is that they don't exercise it. The whole system rewards maximization of profits, and all else is an up hill battle.
dgreensp 3y ago
Yup!! When I criticize Google, or some other company, I am not forgetting that they are motivated by making money.
akudha 3y ago
We can keep debating this all day long, nothing is going to change. The best thing to do is stop using these services. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok... We can easily live without them. Our lives might actually be better without them. Why are we spending time debating the ethics of these services? It is like fast food - just avoid. When entities like banks, hospitals, insurance companies etc do shady shit, THAT is a problem. Those are necessary services, social media is not
- 3y ago