@aniket Have you read Jarod Lanier? 10 Reasons to Dekete your social media accounts now or who owns the future ? He argues ad based platforms stealing our data are actually not the only ways to finance social media.
There are loads of alternatives - the availability of alternatives to Facebook has absolutely nothing to do with the reason why it is unlikely that any of these will succeed âat scaleâ.
Social Networks rely on âNetwork Effectsâ and for all the good alternatives, you join and guess what, nobody else from your social network is there. People do not like checking lots of different accounts so most people will just stick with the one that âeveryone elseâ in their peer group is on.
I suspect the arena where alternatives will meet with more success is those which are vertically targeted - which serve specific groups.
I built a social networking site for people in recovery from addictions (https://www.recoveryonline.org) which I hope will work because the target for recruitment is people who convene existing recovery groups and who might not like running things on FB.
My view is that the effort to build alternatives would be better to focus on different kinds of âaffinity groupsâ rather than generic social network platforms as at least for now, that particular war has been lost.
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Thank you for creating recoveryonline.org; I may refer a friend to it.
Regarding what you say here:
When I was on Facebook, I had about a hundred friends. Four have followed me to mewe.com. You can calculate this as 4% of my friends, but we know how FB has distorted the meaning of what was once an honorable word. If we narrow my FB circle of âfriendsâ to those with whom I had mutually caring relationships, youâll get about a dozen. So, recalculating, about 33% of my friends have followed meâthe latest just a few days ago. Will more follow? My guess is no.
We therefore have a new question: can I be content with one-third of my former circle? Of the four who have followed me, I have known three for over a decade, and our friendships were forged not on FB but through email. The fourth person is someone I befriended just last year. All of them live on the mainlandâthree on the East Coast and one on the Westâso I rarely get to see them.
Which makes our connection on mewe.com all the sweeter. And more important.
I think this is how an alternative social network can improve on FB: it can reduce the âfriendâ noise to words and expressions of sincere affection. I donât feel popular on mewe.com, but I do feel that each friend is truly one.
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When quitting Facebook I had exactly 500 âfriendsâ. The number doesnât matter, because actually almost none of them were my actual friends.
Most were interested in âvanity friendshipsâ where they could show off to other people that we were âfriendsâ without actually having to be friends. By being Facebook âfriendsâ with those 500 people, I was feeding their disease of narcissism. For many people, social media was sadly their only outlet of creativity, and also their way to show off to the world that they are doing ok. Social networks channel human energy into the destruction of genuine and deep human relationships because they promote superficial and shallow ârelationshipsâ where in fact there is no human bond or caring whatsoever. When I think about it, itâs so much lost potential because that same energy could be directed towards constructive uses.
Friends are people who would keep in contact with even if they were not on any social network. Friends talk or chat regularly via messaging (even by Messenger) and meet up when they can. Leaving a social network shouldnât change anyoneâs real friends, because real friends stay in touch in other ways and will adjust the way the communicate.
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Well said, @Free. When friendship can be packaged and distributed, it is no longer priceless. Tonight I was watching music videos on YouTube and was annoyed to see Facebook ads flashing across the screen. They were not so blatant as to be identifiable as ads. They were more like subliminal messages: pictures of family with text that said something like âPost more pictures on Facebook.â
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This is disturbing because it means we have one of the worldâs most profitable corporations performing societal engineering on our interpersonal relationships. Theyâre redefining what it means to have a relationship in the interest of profits.
Personally I find that looking at never ending feeds of pictures is nothing short of madness. One of my friends describes selfies as âthe most insane behaviour that I have ever witnessed in my lifeâ yet here we have Facebook trying to engineer people to do just that.
Thanks for letting the community know about this. Iâm too often blind to this kind of manipulation because I use the open-source uBlock Origin ad and tracking blocker and so never see any adverts.
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