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posted by Fnord666 on Sunday February 04 2018, @08:27AM   Printer-friendly
from the do-as-I-say dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday February 04 2018, @04:31PM (1 child)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Sunday February 04 2018, @04:31PM (#632944) Journal

    "using Facebook" and "hiring a team to exploit Facebook" aren't quite the same thing.

    Sure, the latter is a proper subset of the former.

    A team of public relations and/or some psyche people exploiting other users wasn't exactly the intended purpose when this crap all started.

    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

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Sunday February 04 2018, @04:44PM (#632952) Journal

    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.