Fixing Facebook is actually quite easy. All you have to do is pay for the service.
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I don’t understand how I am repressing my own free speech by not using fb. If anything, fb makes my voice irrelevant by controlling who can see it and drowning it among comercials.
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There are many issues with paid services:
- They can be wolves in sheep’s clothing. They ask for payment, or even donations, but then still be greedy and abuse people for furthering their own profits even more.
- Paid services unfairly discriminate against the vast majority of the world’s population, who either shouldn’t pay because it’s too expensive for them or don’t want to pay. This creates a divide between the 7% of the population with high income (over about USD $20,000 per year) and the vast majority of people who make far, and far, far less than that. In any case it is clear and absolute that neither the rich nor the rest should be subsidising the ultra-rich techie or capitalist.
- Paying for something doesn’t fix its problems. If I pay for social media, the ads may disappear but it’s still the same addictive service which is proven to cause depression, waste time, ruin your health by keeping you online, cause envy and other mental distortions. If I pay for news media, they will probably still be the same lying, manipulative bastards that they are now, twisting our minds and trying to addict us ever more and still writing fake click bait. Because that doesn’t change the overlying model of them needing to ensnare, abuse and manipulate people to make more money.
- Social networks can make more money from ads than from subscriptions, so that is why we don’t see paid major social networks.
- If only 10% of your friends paid, then the network would be very empty. That is the opposite of how social networks work, they want to sign up all of humanity and in fact pay huge money in ads to attract new people. It is the social network itself that pays to get people to start using it, not the people who pay to use the social network. No way around these economics.
On another note, Apple and Google could easily crush Facebook if they wanted to. Each of these companies already has the user base. All they would need to do is simply create a humane social network, a relatively easy task for such accomplished companies. Apple could simply create iMessage for Android and web. Why these companies don’t is simply out of short-sight.
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same addictive service which is proven to cause depression, waste time
The only reason Facebook manipulates you to stay on its platform and tracks your every move is to sell targeted ads to their customers. Each users data provides around $150 a year in revenue so an ad and tracking free version would cost a user about $12 a month. The irony of the situation is that it doesn’t really work. Users that can’t afford to pay for the service don’t support the advertisers (Facebook’s customers) and when an alternate solution becomes available all the customers who would support the advertisers will leave. It’s a house of cards that will fall.
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@alex-esc I see what you’re saying about quitting Facebook being against free speech- because that avenue of communication would be lost.
As far as a solution in quitting Facebook… I think some people simply don’t want to “participate” in anything that sustains in some thing they don’t “believe” in. Opting to not contribute by disappearing- because the problem is simply too big to manage. It’s the only element of control out there- even though it’s not fixed this way.
It’s a big gray problem without linear answers. The answer lies at the end of our journey as a whole. We will not see an answer today or even dream of an answer. The miracle of life’s solutions to our biggest problems happens when we chip away at life one step at a time- and fir some chipping away is not contributing to something they are against or doesn’t feel right.
This is why discussion forums are so good- everybody of right in some way.
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Social media feeding frenzy is only part of the big picture and the hoarding and spying of data is only going to get exponentially worse as more data is created.
Lol imo to make tech humane we humans need an ethics upgrade across all human beings.
This chart was made in the year 2011, might have gotten steeper last decade only going up:
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