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The Guardian writes how tech insiders give their own products a wide berth. The reason is in the design of these services.
I am a compulsive social media user. I have sent about 140,000 tweets since I joined Twitter in April 2007 – six Jacks' worth. I use Instagram, Snapchat and Reddit daily. I have accounts on Ello, Peach and Mastodon (remember them? No? Don't worry). Three years ago, I managed to quit Facebook. I went cold turkey, deleting my account in a moment of lucidity about how it made me feel and act. I have never regretted it, but I haven't been able to pull the same stunt twice.
I used to look at the heads of the social networks and get annoyed that they didn't understand their own sites. Regular users encounter bugs, abuse or bad design decisions that the executives could never understand without using the sites themselves. How, I would wonder, could they build the best service possible if they didn't use their networks like normal people?
Now, I wonder something else: what do they know that we don't?
Apparently what's good for the goose isn't good for the gander.
(Score: 5, Informative) by canopic jug on Sunday February 04 2018, @01:41PM (4 children)
No. Zuckerberg does not use Faecebook himself. He has a whole team dedicated to the task [nymag.com], that includes deleting comments, and never has to go near it.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 1, Disagree) by khallow on Sunday February 04 2018, @03:29PM (3 children)
That's an odd way to say "Yes, he does use Facebook." It's a standard way celebrities and businesses use Facebook.
The story is rather bizarre. This still counts as "use" even though executives don't use their social media products either in a way or frequency that this journalist thinks they should (and which, let us note the journalist has already heavily implied is harmful!).
(Score: 4, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Sunday February 04 2018, @03:46PM (2 children)
"using Facebook" and "hiring a team to exploit Facebook" aren't quite the same thing. Trump is an exception, I think, among household names. He actually "uses" Facebook, pretty much in the manner it was designed to be used. A team of public relations and/or some psyche people exploiting other users wasn't exactly the intended purpose when this crap all started. Trump uses, Zuck doesn't.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday February 04 2018, @04:31PM (1 child)
Sure, the latter is a proper subset of the former.
So what? Facebook is not the same service it was more than a decade ago.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday February 04 2018, @04:44PM
The "product" changes though. Most "users" are the product. Zuck isn't the product, he is the proprietor. The entire exploitation chain is switched around here.