Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch
That's how I feel about it, but as a business, we're kinda stuck having a FB presence. I really, really HATE FB and all social media. I think that social media and the immediacy of smartphones are seriously contributing to the destruction of the fabric of human society and interaction, with outrage addiction being fed and the pursuit of knowledge being horribly diminished.
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I have a Facebook account. But I don't post to it and my profile is deliberately as sparse as possible. I only use it to keep up on a few people I care about who are also on Facebook. I assume anything I post to FB is visible to World+Dog, and am circumspect about what I post in consequence.
I tell other folks "FB is an infinite time sink, and it's too easy to get lost in it."
I'm philosophical about social media. It's not going away, but I have only so many hours in a day to devote to it. I have a Twitter account, but never use it. I have a LinkedIn account, but LinkedIn has been steadily reducing the utility of their forums, which were the only parts I used. (When the forum has a 4K character limit on posts, and you are involved in discussions where there
isn't a short answer to some questions, you give up trying to provide answers there.)
The social media I miss is Google+. That's a micro-blogging platform far better suited to the sorts of things I do, but Google killed it off after a data breach. (It still exists as a paid GSuite app.) Google never seemed to understand what it had and how it fit into the rest of their services. Google has historically been "Let's throw it against the wall and see what sticks" in terms of product development, and never seemed to have an overall idea of how the pieces fit together.
I think part of the problem is where the revenue comes from. If your revenue comes from advertising, there is a disconnect between you and the people who use your services. I have similar issues with Mozilla. Because their funding comes from advertising agreements, there is a disconnect with the user base, and a fair bit of stuff done to Firefox left me saying "Did it occur to you to talk the Firefox
users about this?"
I'm reaching the point where I think a strength of proprietary software is that when you make your money because people
buy] your programs, you have good reasons to keep in touch with your customers and see what they want and need, so they'll
continue to buy your software.
Open source projects don't have that incentive and suffer accordingly.
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Dennis