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posted by mrpg on Sunday April 29 2018, @03:56PM   Printer-friendly
from the all-my-life-is-in-my-flash-drive dept.

Steven Saus has written a blog post about why you should never rely on social media. In his latest post on the topic he points out that:

[...] If you don’t personally own your website and data, you don’t have a website or data. Quite simply, you cannot rely on someone else for you to have a website, platform, or social media presence.

[...] I now know, in my gut, how fragile my access to the services Google, Facebook, and Twitter supply are.

Because – and I cannot stress this enough – my ban from G+ was due to something I supposedly posted to G+ when I was unable to post to G+. Hell, I still don’t know what got me in trouble in the first place.

Regardless, my trust is broken, and my role as product has been made painfully clear.

G+ is used as the example, but the same principles apply to the other social control media.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 30 2018, @02:14AM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 30 2018, @02:14AM (#673566)

    If you read these stories over and over the same thing comes up about google. The opaque 'we have done something' 'why' 'you do not need to know that just reasons were used'. This is what is frustrating people. It is why someone picked up a gun and walked into youtube. They are frustrated with the stone face they get from google. They are gutting Codys Lab for god sake. He basically did not thing wrong when he posted his videos. Yet he has them yanked on a whim. He is desperately trying to stay in the system because he has turned it into a big part of his life. Yet his life is at the mercy of google and their precocious whims. He is hardly alone. He only survived because he is one of the bigger more popular ones. There are hundreds that are being driven out in a halestorm of made up righteousness that they had no clue they were even subject to. How many times do you go back and re-re-re-re-read the latest updated terms to something? Bet it does not happen often does it? Lindsey Graham stated to Mark Z that he is a full time lawyer whose job it is to make laws that he can not follow the TOS of Facebook. Facebook is not exactly alone in that regard. Then ding-a-lings like you come in with your 'but achcktually' and it does not help. You know it. You are being pedantic. It only serves to make the problem worse. Which is these companies want as many 'creators' on their sites as they can get. But the second the political winds change they dump on them and call them scum. So yeah, some people are getting frustrated.

  • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday April 30 2018, @03:26AM (2 children)

    by Thexalon (636) on Monday April 30 2018, @03:26AM (#673585)

    The point is, if you are trusting Google, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, Geocities, MySpace, Dropbox, Apple, or any other major corporation with your key revenue model, you are being a fool. Anybody who looks at the TOS can realize this. For example, a lot of the complaints about Google seem to amount to "I was relying on ad revenue to do my thing, and now I can't because won't let me show ads anymore." But the problem there lies in large part on the first part of that sentence, not the second part. And no, there isn't a player in that kind of game that's not going to grab as much from your pocket as they can. If you want to make stuff for a living, you're going to have to create your own tech infrastructure for it sooner or later.

    TL;DR: If you get into bed with giant dicks, you're going to get screwed.

    --
    The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
    • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday April 30 2018, @03:27AM

      by Thexalon (636) on Monday April 30 2018, @03:27AM (#673586)

      Darn filters. Revised sentence:

      For example, a lot of the complaints about Google seem to amount to "I was relying on $PLATFORM ad revenue to do my thing, and now I can't because $PLATFORM won't let me show ads anymore."

      --
      The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
    • (Score: 2) by bobthecimmerian on Monday April 30 2018, @03:03PM

      by bobthecimmerian (6834) on Monday April 30 2018, @03:03PM (#673758)

      I responded to this a bit upthread: https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=25343&page=1&cid=673475#commentwrap [soylentnews.org] "The point is, if you are trusting Google, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, Geocities, MySpace, Dropbox, Apple, or any other major corporation with your key revenue model, you are being a fool. "

      Those companies collectively own a colossal market. So if you don't jump into bed with them they can't screw you, but there are not that many other profitable beds left (pardon the mixed metaphor).