Snippet: Your Data, Their Profits, Our Loss ☇

Jay Little:

So what does this mean? Beyond the obvious conclusion that institutionalized greed (aka Capitalism) kills everything we love, it means that platforms are transient participants in our tech lives. By extension it also means that we’d all be a lot happier if we just got on board with that idea then planned and acted accordingly.

But alas we are all human beings suffering from some major cognitive disorder known to some as the “human condition”. For the most part we aren’t capable of that. We find things we like. Then we get attached to them. Then we react very negatively when something comes around that overtly threatens those things. But we don’t exist in the long term. Our lives are essentially a long series of strung together semi-random short term experiences largely devoid of actual cause and effect which we desperately attempt to assign meaning to. […]

So what can we do about this? Not a damn thing. The purpose of this post isn’t to provide you with some sense of the path down which remediation lies, rather it exists so that I have a space in which to vocalize my absolute frustration with this state of affairs. I’m tired of seeing people go through this. I’m tired of going through it. I will be deleting my Reddit account soon even as a week ago I logged onto Bluesky for the very first time.

I’ve been thinking of these same ideas a lot lately, and I’ve deleted all of my content on Twitter and Reddit before heading for the door (deleted Reddit after the disastrous AMA with CEO Steve Huffman). We constantly provide free content to these various platforms because they make it easy to communicate and share with others and then pull the rug out from under us. I don’t know about you, but I’m moving more and more towards self-hosting and owning everything of mine.