Oh, hell. First Facebook, now this. It’s been a while since I indulged in a rant. Probably I should just stop. Nah!
Huffington Post just ruined itself for me. I used to enjoy reading articles and commenting there, but the site has gone social media wacko. Without asking me or anyone else, they dumped everyone’s account into a scheme where you’re assigned “badges” and earn points for God knows what, so that there’s now a hierarchy of commenters. At the top level, when you leave a comment, it says “Super User” above your name, and you get a purple badge. I find this terribly undemocratic and a little intimidating, as if “super users” are some kind of brownshirts. What idiocy. All I want to do is leave a comment, not compete with anybody, and I certainly don’t want to be part of a “Huffington Post community,” I just want to read stuff!
What really ticked me off, however, was when I tried to cancel my account: there was a big red button that said “Cancel Account,” but when I clicked on it, it didn’t do anything! I checked the code and found it just linked to an anchor tag. A FAKE cancel button, in other words, to keep you from actually cancelling. That step required two separate emails, and I had to hunt for where to send them. This is just wrong.
That reminded me of Facebook, of course. Without going into too much detail, they did it again! Entirely on their own and without asking permission–as is increasingly the custom damn near everywhere–Facebook signed everyone up for something called “Instant Personalization.” (Google already did the same thing with your searches, by the way, and I’ll bet hardly anyone knows.) I may never see exactly what that is, because I opted out immediately and turned off 99% of the obviously evil apps, notifications, “sharing” options, and a dozen other Orwellian manglings of language. But anyone who doesn’t take these steps will apparently find that content at their favorite websites is served up depending on how many of their friends “like” it.
Furthermore, even if you opt out of Instant Personalization but don’t do the rest of the cleanup, you’ll still see personalized content at other websites when you’re logged into Facebook, and that content will reflect every time you ever “liked” a thing on Facebook, what your friends “liked,” which “like” buttons on other websites they’ve pushed, which games you’ve been playing on Facebook, who your friends actually are, and so on. How utterly appalling and deceitful.
The point of all this is make more money for Facebook, of course. They will do this like they’ve always done, by crafting ever-larger databases of marketing information to sell targeted advertising. (The same thing with HuffPost, I’m sure.) If you have an account, YOU are the product. YOU are what they sell, by marketing ads designed for you and your friends.
I have about 80 “friends” on Facebook and 360 followers on Twitter, yet I get five times as many referrals–visitors to this blog– from Facebook as from Twitter, about 6% of the total. Why? The Facebook connections are primarily social, the Twitter ones mostly interest-related or professional: artists, writers, specialists in various fields. (Some of my Twitter contacts are personal friends, but just a few.) These folks don’t really care about the blog, and why should they? Blog visitor stats-wise, I guess that proves the value of purely social contacts. From an artist’s point of view, however, it amounts to selling to my friends. Nothing wrong with that, but…
I’m on Facebook to pimp blog posts, mostly. I’m on Twitter to do that and to learn things. It’s partly social, but without the feeling like I’m being violated that comes over me with Facebook. I have no idea why I’m on LinkedIn. (What the hell is that for?!? It’s not like I’m trying to get a job or anything.) Once upon a time I signed up for Plaxo. Sounds like a toilet bowl cleaner, right? GO AWAY!
If I kill anything next, it’ll be Facebook. Twitter is still cool and mostly fun, but I’m keeping a close watch.
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