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Last line of the article: “Just like choosing not to ride on airplanes isn’t really an option, for many, using social media isn’t much of a choice either.”
Holy crap. We have reached that point. As someone with no social media, it just amazes me how people have let these apps become ingrained in their lives. Sad in my opinion.
Last line of the article: “Just like choosing not to ride on airplanes isn’t really an option, for many, using social media isn’t much of a choice either.”
That, and not only is not riding on an airplans an option for a lot of people, its their reality for a lot of people and out of reach financially. Way to be completely out of touch, Gizmodo. Couldn’t have used a worse example lol.
I think it’s referring to flights required (and paid) by your job. When a job of mine required me to be in Brussels in two days, I couldn’t tell them that I‘m hitchhiking there for the next month instead.
I think you’re misreading it. In the same way as there are people that need to ride on planes (for example for their job, or to move to where they have a job, etc), there are people that need to use social media.
For example, if you own an online store you really need to have a social media presence. Same if you are an artist, and live off of commissions. I’m sure there are plenty more examples.
Also, Facebook groups are now how most extracurriculars are handled in schools, so if you have kids and you want to be involved in their activities you don’t have much of an option.
Yeah that’s one of the stupidest comparisons that they could make. Transportation is a necessity, sharing what you’re doing to the entire world isn’t a necessity. I’m 37 and grew up with MySpace and I was part of Facebook back when it was still The Facebook and was only open to 4 years universities (I got in about 2 years after I was created).
I wouldn’t give two shits if every social media company was destroyed tomorrow, including Lemmy and Reddit. They’re just time killers to me.
I think the author might be referring to businesses who use social media to reach and connect with customers, however if your customers don’t see a value in paying for social media they won’t use it and it won’t be that necessary for those small and medium businesses.
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Yeah there absolutely have been consequences for me not using it. It’s hard to keep in touch with people and I only date weirdos who are cool with my strange lifestyle.
See, to me, all of those people are willing to trade their privacy for convenience. And the fact that others are getting rich off of sifting through and collecting all of this data also is wrong in my opinion. To each his/her/their own, but I still think it’s sad how dependent people have become on social media.
I never scroll my facebook wall, but in my country people use fb messenger instead of whatsapp to communicate with each other, so I’m stuck with it as a communication tool. Also, most of birthday/event invites come with a facebook event, so I would also miss those.
It’s just so integrated in to a lot of people’s lives, that it would be hard to remove individually.
I am going to say this, and it’s because this is such a cliche’ response to me at this point, but I call bullshit. People making these excuses are laughable to me now with this. You aren’t talking about scaling Mt. Everest levels of effort here. Everyone you are communicating with has a phone number, and you could take the time to call them if you wanted to communicate with them, use text messaging, or email. As for the birthdays and events, go to the dollar store, or an equivalent and buy a calendar. They sell them with cute pics, or funny quotes, or whatever. Then mark the dates down. It’s fucking comical to me now how people act about getting rid of facebook. If facebook was waking up every morning and driving you to work, then yeah, it might be hard, but come on people… I feel like I am watching a b movie where everyone has been put in a trance and is just walking around mindlessly all saying the same mantra. “It’s too hard. Can’t break free.” And none of this has even touched on privacy, of which there is none on facebook. People spouting this are just willing to give up any shred of privacy for some minor convenience and it’s frustrating to watch.
I mean they’re probably taking about Shitfluencers and the people who’s careers she strictly online outreach based (YouTube)
If that’s how you connect with a certain community it’s not a serious option to stop using that kind of social media without solving the collective action problem of getting that whole community to switch.
I’m over here on lemmy giving it a go, but it is a real challenge.
I love the idea of paid social media.
Theres so few people who’d pay for it that all the social media companies would, hopefully, collapse and cure us of one of the worst technoplagues of the 21st century.
I’d pay some reasonable subscription, say $1 a month to the maintainer of lemm.ee for the promise to keep my data safe. To Zuck and Elon absolutely not.
I pay like $2 or $3 a month to lemm.ee dev, its worth it to me.
Yeah web site cost money and developers need food. So its adds, subs or donations
It would just be corporations paying for it, and paying for ever more direct access to individuals.
Imagine paying a company, who sells your data, to see memes
Fine. But imagining it is as far as I will go.
Mandatory blood sample to register.
If you read the article, you’ll note that paid subscriptions are for ad-free services, which means your data is worthless, which means it won’t be sold.
The entire point of these models is to comply with EU rules on data harvesting.
Lol, it will still be sold. They are still tracking your attention span and clicks. I can already think of two or three correlation tests to sell to advertisers based on that information alone.
Except this change is occurring because of EU rules that don’t allow them to gather that data.
Those rules are dumb, sure, but this is the workaround - and personally it’s a workaround that I think is quite untenable. Social media succeeds because it is free.
*looks around at Lemmy*
I love y’all.
I refuse to be both.
You want me to dodge ads and try to scrape my data from your service in order to use it? Fine.
Want me to pay for the service? Maybe…
I will not support double dipping while pushing ads in my face. Fuck right off.
I remember when cable tv first started the big promise was that since you were paying for it the cable channels would be ad free. Well that lasted about a week.
Yeah, strong feelings of deja vue.
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Exactly. I’d honestly rather have paid social media than engagement algo and ad-driven social media. When your algorithms chase engagement over all else, it leads to real harms, like the youtube alt-right pipeline. Fediverse ain’t perfect, but I like that there’s no engagement-chasing algorithm, no ads, just donations.
No business that has investors has any right to claim any of this is about operating expenses.
If they didn’t farm data and charged for it right in the beginning, maybe it would have lasted longer before turning to shit. But demanding payment while farming data is just insane.
Not to mention that they chose the absolute worst time to do this. They are just absolutely despised right now. They are either in the midst of scandal or scandal is just in their rearview. Why would anyone pay for this right now?
As in “they pay me to use their garbage?”
If else: “No.”
Know what? “Still no.” I already don’t use it for free, they’re gonna have to pay me substantially before I use it.
Agreed! Join me in the real world, it’s free.
Not exactly. It’s the age of stockholders, and doing what’s best for them is the law. They expect unlimited growth
Airline seats could be fixed if the gov had any backbone but social media isn’t some essential service so good luck with it.
I look at FB less and less. I mostly use messenger to talk to people directly. Most of the feed is ads and the rest is pet photos, kids, pics of drinks/meals, memes, etc. Youtube has become an endless stream of auto insurance and grammarly ads.
