Whenever a walled garden on the internet appears, it seems a matter of time before groups of people show up trying to make their own mark on things, and in doing so, convert what started off as maybe a good idea into a litterbox.
Of course, they don’t start that way. They generally are at least dressed as good intentions. I’ve had a place in many of them and still retain placeholders in the larger ones.
In general, the main problem with most of Web 2.0 has been that it has circled around advertising models based on impressions. This is the same model that works for spam: If you send a message out to 1 million people and only 0.01% take the bait, that’s 100 people. It’s about volume, and you can read up more about how much volume here.
Interestingly, when one looks at the companies that spam the most, 2 of them are walled garden social networks: Facebook and LinkedIn. You might be surprised to know the U.S. generates the most.
It’s all about impressions, and algorithms that get impressions, be it via email spam or social networks.
It’s no wonder fake news has taken deep root in social networks, which act as echo chambers that users think are about their interests, but really are about getting the most impressions for advertising.
Now, it’s also about training artificial intelligences not just on user content, but also user interactions with each other and the platform – and whatever connects to the platform.
My reasoning for recently leaving Facebook and cutting information going to Meta has some bearing on this. It started off simply enough for me almost 20 years ago; my then boss strongly suggested we get on Facebook since, as he put it, “it’s the future”.
It’s peculiar how people say, “it’s the future” without some qualifier of good or bad.
That the Facebook walled garden is now home of spamming AI generated spam through it’s algorithms has recently been outed: I had my suspicions as a user for some time. Worse, the arbitrary restrictions of user accounts has made the platform untenable for regular users, where sharing content from one group to another (cross-pollination) is apparently presently seen as a negative by the algorithms rather than a positive.
That it remains so used is a matter of inertia. When paid placement started on Facebook, it was an indicator that either paid placement was the de facto algorithm for user content or it would become it. The advertising you see isn’t necessarily for good products, it’s paid for by people who understand that if 100 people click out of 1 million and you get $1 from each one, you get $100. All you have to do is incessantly market a poor product and pay less than $100 in advertising: The standard Web 2.0 model.
In time, people will realize that they don’t need that platform to share information.
Twitter, now X
Twitter is not something I ever really liked because it is based on the same technologies that a few of us implemented for the Alert Retrieval Cache a year prior to Twitter being formed. My push was for it to be used for disaster communication, and in doing that I found a lot of issues related to trusted sources that I couldn’t work out. I stopped pushing on it til I had resolution, but in paying the bills that went to the back burner.
It’s no wonder that fake news became an issue on platforms, Twitter inclusive, because it was patently obvious that even accidentally less-than-trusted-sources could send messages that echoed across the Internet. When I did dip beyond my toes in supporting Ukraine on Twitter, I found a lot of propaganda (yes, both sides), a lot of hate, and even some racism. It was a cesspool of humanity’s most hateful things and from what I have observed in the feed when I do log in, I see it seems to have gotten worse.
People either praise or blame Elon Musk. He certainly hasn’t made it better, and his overt hypocrisy regarding free speech echoes across the Internet. Regardless, the platform was inherently flawed, particularly when it was time for it to start making money.
LinkedIn started well enough as a place where people could post a more dynamic version of a resume. It was, at the time, a great idea. It also soon became a bit of a joke because when one was employed, one is connected to the people in the company and when you update your LinkedIn profile – you pretty much let the company you were presently working for that you’re shopping around. Therefore, it became pretty useless because it didn’t really afford that level of privacy one needs to shop employers.
It’s a harsh reality. Updating your LinkedIn profile could well have an employer looking for a way to get rid of you before you got rid of them. It works best if you’re unemployed, and as someone who has been in the professional arena for some decades, I can tell you that I never got a position through LinkedIn. All I got was loads of recruiter spam from people who obviously had not actually read my profile. Once, many years ago, I did some Java programming and never touched the language since. Up to last year I was getting recruiter spam about Java programming which required years of experience which… of course… I do not have. Little items like that through decades of software engineering became fodder for people claiming to be recruiters spamming me.
To their credit, they don’t seem to make money from advertising, but instead through selling ‘premium’ which I did try for a while. It wasn’t worth it to me, and I wouldn’t suggest it to anyone. Instead, I got positions through personal connections – real connections, registering with real headhunters, and even Craigslist for 2 software engineering positions. LinkedIn is just too easily gamed, and too easily a liability for employed people looking for a new position.
What they’re doing now, it would seem, is getting people to write articles on LinkedIn so that Microsoft can train it’s AI on them. It’s successful because people believe publishing on LinkedIn helps them find new positions when instead it helps AIs write better at no cost.
It didn’t take long for getting spam connections, considering I have a decent profile and a fair amount of connections. People wanting to sell me stuff, and even worse, the few who ask for sweat equity.
It’s just another walled garden that has become a litterbox.
There Are Others.
Instagram, TikTok, etc, all pretty much do the same thing at this point with different flavors of litter for the litterbox. If you find value in these walled gardens, that’s fair and you should do as you see fit.
There are an increasing amount of people who just feel stuck in them, and having invested so much time and energy into them. This is the ‘Sunk Cost Fallacy‘: the tendency to follow through on an something if we have already invested time, effort, or money into it, whether or not the current costs outweigh the benefits or value.
This is about having you chase the laser pointer in the hope that one day you’ll catch the red dot. You are a revenue stream in a walled garden, not a customer.
So What To Do?
If you can use your time on something productive, do that instead. The walled gardens become prisons because of the Sunk Cost Fallacy, with no parole. The only way out is to break out.
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