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posted by
martyb
on Monday January 21 2019, @02:42PM
from the Hard-to-be-social-without-a-network dept.
from the Hard-to-be-social-without-a-network dept.
It's been a long time coming but soon the wishful thinking social media site alternative Google+ is shutting down for good. Or for bad as the case may be for the hundreds of thousands of users who still call Google+ a home and who are severely lacking in options for a place to move to. There's always Facebook, but given the anti-Facebook culture prevalent in the G+ network over the years it won't be an option for many. While communities debate the move, admins of communities size up the prospect of migrating years of data to another platform. Google plans to execute the shutdown in April 2019.
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It is far more impressive when others discover your good qualities without
your help.
-- Miss Manners
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 21 2019, @11:08PM
And there is the connection. It's in the Internet wire we all have in houses. But it is not used as intended. The problem started by going from semi-decentralized network based partially on mutual knowledge (who is who / who can do what) to platform-dependent centralization when nobody knows nobody, and everyone can turn to spambot every moment. This introduced a need for censorship and ended with "censorocracy" in which people who have capability to make up their lives by censorship have more power.
"Social media" is NOT community. This is the main thing which is notoriously ignored.
The main objective of "Social media" is to create division for society. Samsung and Apple. Creators and remixers. Right-wing seeing leftists' plot in all things and left-wing which takes all things as offending. This is the objective. Divided will try to prove the other side and will buy more, and will not do one more thing.
This thing had to be fixed when XIX-century (or even XVIII-century) publishing model started to fall apart in 1990s. Since introduction of the Net there was no blessed publisher with holy decisions, licensing hegemony and protection money. The Internet gave an equal start, with its few megabytes in a shell account for own stuff licensed in own conditions. This started a community boom in 1990s, when everyone had a website. The problem noticed by publishers was that some people shared knowledge there without paying mafia.
A nicely described model: In late 1990s, some professor, (sorry, I don't remember the name but I know it was like "Dick" or "Pecker"?), shown these communities as made of creators ("digitariat"), distributors, compilers and remixers ("cogitariat") and consumers ("proletariat") - with no space used earlier by publishers. Everyone could be all of classes at the same time, depending on their interests, expertise and data processed. Many people devoted time and energy to share knowledge using the new media, on their own terms, which outed these publishers from distribution chain.
So it was needed to "burn" this energy used for creating and distributing using something other. And it is burned in all these "social media" things. This is outside of Internet's objective which is contacting people and sharing ideas, knowledge, information. "Social media" comes down to ad distribution system, made to keep an used absorbed by throwing usually useless information about other people, but with no intellectual gain to the "user" (?still user? or a newly created product?).
Discord misses the historic capability - to know something, you have to ask and ask forever. A nice alternative would be these open source platforms shown a few comments above, but servers are expensive and these platforms have a poor reach - I don't know any people from hobby forums who may have such account.
P.S. If you again try to find a plot here: No, there's no plot. It's an objective of optimization.