The arbitrariness with which these companies rule over our digital lives infuriates me more from month to month. We do our best to fight dictators in the physical world but somehow accept them in the digital realm.
While they do have power over users on their platform, they're voluntary applications that people choose to give control to for convenience and publicity. Unlike credit bureaus who actually ruin peoples' lives with their carelessness and you can't even opt out, social media apps are purely opt-in, and you don't get your wages garnished or bank accounts emptied or lose your ability to drive because of them.
And while I hope danny gets his username back, and it's ridiculous what happened, the value of the user account handle that danny had was created by Instagram's efforts. You don't have property rights to it the same way you own actual property or a domain name registered under your name.
>While they do have power over users on their platform, they're voluntary applications that people choose to give control to for convenience and publicity.
It's true a username isn't property, but there are some instances where merely conferring a certain status has such an enormous impact on people's lives that there are certain legal protections around it. Your job, for example.
One could argue that digital identity codes like domains and social media usernames have become similarly important. Entire businesses, extremely profitable ones sometimes, can be tied to a single username.
I’m with you to a degree, but if most anyone’s email account vanished, or worse was stolen, I’d be pretty confident guessing that they’re screwed.
For more typical social media, losing a decade of pictures is pretty harmful. It’s not about the value of the @danny handle, it’s also about the account being gone. And the privacy issues if the new person got all the DMs and private info.
You're right that these things are devastating when they happen, but pre- social media, they happened all the time. Every year, half the people born in [year-21] lose their university email accounts (including their google drive, etc.) and eventually transfer to another email just fine. Before online identity, people lost their phone numbers and had to inform friends that they switched to a new one. You'd get the previous owner's texts, and have to tell them you just got that number. Or if you moved addresses and you would get the previous owner's mail, and the same would happen to you due to postal errors. People lost their pictures because of disk failure, fires, and other means, and would continue living happy and productive lives.
Post- social media, if people are backing up their data, then the problem is pretty much nil (chances that your social media account and your local storage both go kaput at the same time are pretty small).
Of course email isn’t new and neither are phones. Things like 2FA are new, as are other things assuming you still have the phone and email you signed up with. The problem isn’t the thing, it’s the services that rely on the assumption that you still have the thing.
...in an unfree economic system (patents and IP give monopolies) with a black box money system (money is an enclosed protocol). Cooperative Open Value Networks are the future. [1]
It is a nuisance to the people around you. If they're organizing something and make a FB/VK event for it, someone will have to bother themselves with relaying you all the updates via your preferred communication channels.
In this context he's not wrong. Planning a party (for example) might involve a lot of discussion for time, food etc. It's far more complicated to organize this with everyone and find a common demoninator compared to simply putting people in a group, with everyone giving his input when needed.
Yes. Some of my friends have a VK event for their birthday party that they reuse annually. Much more convenient than chatting with everyone individually or making a group chat (but then everyone needs to be using the same IM service so this problem comes up again).
In the end, if you're not on whichever social media service is popular around you, you're missing out.
Well said. There should be really good laws for these companies. Sadly no same bad PR yet received to google/amazon like facebook. The amound of data both collect is enormous.
I've often pondered this. Might be going out on a limb here but tech workers aren't typically the sorts of people espousing the tenets of Fascism. Why is it that the companies they work for invariably end up leaning that way?
I don't believe this is something inherent in Capitalism either. If I had an issue with any other kind of business the experience would be vastly different.
In most other industries there is actual competition so companies benefit by providing exceptional customer service. Due to the winner takes all network effects of social media platforms they can get away with treating individuals poorly since there are not real alternatives. If Instagram was separated from Facebook then both would have an incentive to improve.
You can just... stop using their services. I deleted my Reddit and Twitter accounts a year or two ago, and have missed out on absolutely nothing of importance. Digital "life" is totally impoverished.
And while I hope danny gets his username back, and it's ridiculous what happened, the value of the user account handle that danny had was created by Instagram's efforts. You don't have property rights to it the same way you own actual property or a domain name registered under your name.