First off, if you haven’t been paying attention to what’s been going on with our Patreon – we recently closed it down. Now, one of the things they got was an audio version of our Friday Blog on their feed.
We thought it was only fair to put that live up on the site for everyone now, so you can expect to hear from Rob and myself a little bit more over the month.
This week though, with the recent explosions of Reddit and Twitter, I thought I would talk about some of the modern problems I’m having with social media. Now, some of this comes from a guy who used to read Fidonet on local BBS’s, kept up with his Usenet feed, hung out on IRC, and made some of my longest internet friends on forums. I’m clearly not anti-social media… but…
The new crop of social media that are going to try and fill in the gap left in the financial sinkhole of Twitter and the growing corporatization of Reddit are a problem. A site like Threads, owned by Team Zuckerberg, has made it abundantly clear they don’t want you using a desktop computer, much like the restrictions they put on Instagram.. and do you know why? I assure you it isn’t because you *can’t* view the data on a computer, but that they don’t want you to.
On my computer I have adblockers, anti-trackers, and ways to make the data I receive cleaner. They don’t want that – they want, and I am in no way being hyperbolic here, camera control to make sure you’re engaging with the product, no way to stop ads, and no ability to adjust the way the data is viewed. They have that right, too, but I can say for certain I’ll never use any service like it.
Next is the content limitations. All of these companies want the ability to have high-end advertisers and you know what advertisers from big brands don’t like? …sex. For a prime example of how that story goes, go read up on a little thing called TUMBLR. If you allow sex work on your platform, you are drawing a line in the sand that you accept you won’t be getting that Pepsi sponsorship. Hell, even OnlyFans, the site that is synonymous with modern pornography, tried to ditch sex until it realized that was the entirety of its userbase.
So what do we do? Sadly, we aren’t going to go back to a world of forums when we’ve been shhown places we can talk to *everyone* since MySpace. So we will have to wade through the muck of places like Threads and Hive until a better option comes along. I hope it is something like Mastodon or Lemmy that allows people to find their tribe… but they have a long way to go and they’re facing down the diamond encrusted barrels of Google and Meta.
That said, you can find us on Threads @somethingcast, but Rob handles that stuff because it makes me feel gross.
What are you using? Sound off in all the places – and we’ll see you next week.
