Inexplicably, otherwise rational people seem surprised social media is not on their side. I don’t get it. It’s a willful inability to learn even the simplest of lesson. Here’s a Curmudgeonly Gem of Insight:
No matter who owns the vice, don’t put your nuts in it!
Got it? It’s not rocket science: Corporations are not your friends. Don’t act like they care. How many shots across the bow do you need?
I was reminded of this by Z-Man’s (as usual) well written examination of the topic (titled: Feudalism.Net).
“… something to keep in mind as we see technology evolve into a feudal system, where a small elite controls the resources and grants permission to users. The software oligopolies are now shifting all of their licencing to a subscription model. It’s not just the mobile platforms. Developers of enterprise software for business are adopting the same model. The users have no ownership rights. Instead they are renters, subject to terms and conditions imposed by the developer or platform holder. The users is literally a tenant.”
Yep.
“Take a look at the situation Stefan Molyneux faces. A band of religious fanatics has declared him a heretic and wants him burned. The Great Church of Technology is now in the process of having him expelled from the internet. As he wrote in a post, he invests 12 years building his business on-line, only to find out he owns none of it. He was always just a tenant farmer, who foolishly invested millions in YouTube. Like a peasant, he is now about to be evicted.”
I don’t know anything about Stefan Molyneux. I don’t read his stuff. I don’t have a dog in his fight. He’s probably a great guy who does thoughtful stuff and maybe has a melodious voice and a well trained dog. I wouldn’t know. But if he spent 12 years building a business entirely based on YouTube, that’s bad planning.
I’m shocked, shocked to discover that owners of media platforms act like asshats.
There’s just no excuse for that kind of unawareness.
YouTube doesn’t love you. Twitter isn’t looking out for your best interests. Google failed to “not be evil”. Facebook is a snitch factory. This is not new information. It’s not untested. It’s not unproven. It’s not a surprise.
So how am I to feel empathy for someone who sat in the rain whining he’s wet? Sure it’s not fair. So what? Life isn’t fair. Put on your big boy pants and act accordingly. Mirror on a different platform. Choose a different business model. Fucking diversify! Or at the very least, have a mental parachute ready for the day you’ve got to pull the rip cord. There was ample warning.
Say it once more with feeling. Don’t put your nuts in someone else’s vice!
It’s an easy deduction. I’m not a particularly “connected” guy. My phone is not overly smart, I won’t “like” you on F***book, and I’ve never sent a Tweet. If I can grok the social media trend, a professional in the field should know it twice as well. I got the hint. Why didn’t he?
Two years ago I did the requisite hassles to move from a platform I didn’t control to one I did. Planning months and months ahead, I migrated with no hurry and no fuss. Here’s my explanation (Upcoming Blog Hosting Switcheroo) from two years ago:
“My blog is hosted by wordpress.com. It’s a vice with a firm steely grip on my balls. Bad image in your head and bad practice for me.
Let me start out by saying WordPress has treated me well. I’ve never heard a peep out of ‘em. For all I know it’s all running on a 486DX in a closet in New Jersey and they’ll never mess with me. I write verbiage and they paste ads near my crap and we don’t piss each other off. I have no ill will toward wordpress.
It’s just that I am dependent on them and dependency is Latin for “eventually dumb blogger will get deleted”. WordPress can randomly decide talking to trees is a hate crime, owning a chainsaw is punishable by banishment, or crackpot theories about Abba are threats to civilization.
If they decide to “off” my blog I can’t do Jack shit to stop them. What kind of idiot would entertain such dependency after the lessons of 2016? Could any larger hint be possible?”
Well? Why did Mr. Molyneux not have a plan? I may be an idiot but I recognized my “free” blog on WordPress was vulnerable to being a not-blog. I took simple and reasonable precautions. It’s not rocket science.
What’s wrong with people that “trust” media platforms? Life isn’t fair. So what?
A.C.
Ditto. I moved my blog to a server that I rent. (I keep backups and can move it again to another server if necessary). WordPress’s recent misbehaviour though leads me to wonder if I should back up all my posts and media onto a different format entirely, in case they start trying to go after independent instances of their software through some backdoor.
I was also recently IP banned by google. That was a fun experience. I was looking up academic papers, but I must have looked up the wrong one in the wrong way (spin up the tinfoil beanie: there must be some deep dark secret about superconductivity!). It turns out there is absolutely no customer service number to call, and absolutely no one to appeal to. Not even an automated robot, as infurating as those are to deal with. If you’re banned by google, you’re banned. I called up my internet service provider to get them to reset my IP address, and they treated it like a federal crime to try to evade a google-ban. Something must be deeply wrong with me, my computer, or both, if I happen to be *disliked* by a mindless robot. Send the FBI! (I called sales the next day, and salesmen seem to have a more pragmatic attitude towards what they owe their *paying customer*, especially since I had one toe out the door at that point.)
While it is *thankfully* possible to go through different services, it’s nevertheless unsettling when the owners of a near-monopoly act like assholes. Just because it is possible to defend against assholish behavior, doesn’t mean that the world isn’t a less friendly place because of it. It could be one definition of a golden age: For a few brief decades, people cut each other a tiny break, do what they promise, and stop acting like jerks! Civilisation flowers.
I agree, learning how to defend against it and owning your own platforms are vitally important. It’s somewhat depressing that so many people have followed a convenience gradient down into placing all their content in just a few oligopoly platforms that they don’t own or control.
I think we’re both thinking about the same with oligopoly platforms.
As for WordPress software, I’m not 100% happy with it but haven’t found an alternative that is much better. Everything seems to be setup with a GUI that’s “cloudlike”. I’d like to have my whole blog somewhere “local”. Like a laptop that functions with an airgap. And then I could write and tweak on the local. Whenever I want to upload a post, daily or whatever, I’d login to my hosting service and say “update the changes” and the new information would get sent at that time. As far as I can tell this is a management model that’s “outdated”… which is probably true. I’m something of a dinosaur.
Google worries me. Even though I use “duck duck go” it’s the same thing. But for now, I only concern myself with the things I can control.
Wow! I didn’t realize you had a direct connection to the Internet. Most other bloggers, even the large ones, have to go through an ISP such as AT&T or Verizon or Comcast or HughesNet Satellite.
Of course, if you were relying on an ISP to keep you connected, in reality you would be no better off than if you were relying on Facebook or YouTube or Twitter. They can decide that you are abusing the connection they provide – just as Facebook and the rest have decided for those they are censoring – and cut you off.
Oh c’mon. Sure I’m using an ISP. I’d have to be super techno guy to do otherwise and I can barely keep a tractor running.
That said, I use whatever ISP is hand at the time. Hotels, wifi at coffee shops, a couple other locations. Sure my ISP could “cut me off” but if they do it’s just a speed bump until I find some other ISP. The long term solution is to get a better ISP and the short term solution may be as easy as driving around with a laptop in my truck. (Note: I used to have HughesNet Satellite… it was a bit of a PITA. Satellite was cool but I’m glad to have land based ISP options too.)
The thing I was talking about was a “media platform” where there’s just one hand on the “off switch”. Someone who’s depending on F***book or YouTube can be taken down at the knees in a heartbeat at Zuckerberg’s whim (or whomever is in YouTube’s censoring department). Same for Twitter and many Apple-ish iServices.
On a not entirely unrelated note, I’ve been meaning to get a private VPN setup. No, it’s not perfect, but it’s a sort of online hygiene. If you or anyone has advice about which VPN service is cheap and not too much BS I’m all ears.
So you’re saying this blog is fully portable to hotels, wifi at coffee shops and the rest? It might be possible to do that, but DNS does not play well with such a thing. Your web server carrying this blog goes through an ISP. And if said ISP says you’re cut off, then this blog is down until you can find another ISP to give you a static IP address that can be propagated through the Domain Name Servers so anyone trying to get here can do so.
My blog is backed up everywhere and I maintain it from wherever feel but I don’t host it from coffee shops and shit. That’s way too much work for a slob like me. The day may someday come when I need to do such things. I imagine a Raspberry Pi duck taped to the ceiling tiles in a McDonalds shitter would last a good long time. But lets step back a bit and chill. That would be a crazy alternate universe somewhere between Mad Max and North Korea, but with Big Macs. We’re not there yet.
I misunderstood your comment. I thought you were discussing my ability to get to my host. I use any one of a zillion ways to get to my hosting site. I interpret that as “whatever ISP I use at my house can only screw me a little”.
You are correct that my hosting service also has an ISP. Presumably the Illuminati and Zuckerberg-esque drones can get to and run a search for fools who talk to squirrels and then disrupt the hosting service and/or it’s ISP. I suppose this could lead to my blog going down for however many hours it would take me to discover it, decide I care, and get up and running on a new hosting service. I suppose too (as you pointed out) someone could disrupt the infrastructure that points to adaptivecurmudgeon.com at wherever the heck it lives in terms of DNS.
Then again they could contract out with Seal Team Six to subdue my dog, bring in James Bond to track me down, and have the Hulk shove a grenade down my shorts too. :?-) Let’s get real about the relative risks out there. Even the craziest freak online (which is far more inflammatory than your’s truly) isn’t getting sucked into all out cyberwarfare… yet.
Right now the action is based on simple things. Like kicking Deplorables off platforms like Twitter, F***book, or in the example in my post YouTube. (How many times a month do I see a news article about how Trump shouldn’t be allowed on Twitter?) It’s easy to stay away from that chum.
SO be happy for now. They’re not (yet!) going full retard by meddling with ISPs and hosting services. That day may come but it’s not an immediate concern.
BTW: I once toyed with the idea of disseminating posts via snailmail and one time pad; just to see if it would work. If they get seriously annoying watch for me to start pitching the idea of posting via snailmail… possibly with one time pads involved (mostly because I love me a one time pad). It can’t be free but it can be cheap. Anyone want squirrels by stamp?
Well put.
As I often say “don’t put yourself in a position where one person can cut your throat”.
Dont’ depend on one employer. Don’t depend on one skill-set. Keep enough F-you money you can afford to say “no”….or even “NO”…..
Yep. It’s hard to maintain discipline but it’s always best to prepare for the worst.
It’s the same reason conservatives keep using Twitter even though they know it’s only a matter of time before they’re banned over some faux outrage: market saturation.
Sure, they could use some other alternative to Twitter, but then instead of thousands of followers and the possibility of going “viral”, they’d have a handful of followers and the possibility of going microbial.
So, they keep supporting a platform that is the sworn enemy of everything they believe in.
Same thing with Youtube “businesses”. Sure, they could self-host their videos on a server in their basement, but that would require interested people to actually seek them out. On Youtube, they get the benefit of millions of “surfers” stumbling across their content strictly by accident and, again, the possibility of one of their videos going “viral”.
I’m completely with you. I moved my blog off of blogspot years ago…right after Google bought it, the writing was already on the wall about Google even back then.
I don’t host my blog on a personal server, but it’s on server space that I pay for and I maintain. I make regular backups so if my hosting provider someday decides that I’m an enemy of humanity and yanks the cord, I simply transfer the DNS pointers to another hosting site, restore the backups and start giving them my money instead. Easy peasy.
But I don’t make money off of ads on my blog. I don’t rely on clicks and views and referrals for my income. I blog for my own entertainment and occasionally to “vent” when I have something to say and no one’s listening.
That’s the danger of monopoly. Facebook and Youtube and Twitter aren’t true technical monopolies, but they are practically so. If you want to reach a big audience, you have to go where the audience is. I can understand people using those platforms in their social media based business ventures because practically speaking, they’re the only game in town.
But having a fallback plan when they pull the rug out is always a very good idea.
Not to mention the wisdom (or lack thereof) of depending on social media for your livelihood in the first place.
Wise thoughts. I think we’re on the same wavelength with this.
Also, it’s not entirely red in tooth and claw out there… yet. I take pains to point out that I never had issue with WordPress. They never treated me poorly. I only bailed because they had the potential to do so. Nor has Patreon (yet) hassled me for being insufficiently woke.
Another story I left off the post. After I was out of the WordPress.com playpen I decided to use my new freedom to include Amazon CPM ads. (These are different than Affiliate Links. Don’t ask me. I don’t make the vocabulary.) Anyway I made a few bucks with the CPM and was happy. It was too easy! I regretted not setting up CPM years earlier! Then, as predictably as night following day, Amazon “changed” the program. I went from “enough for a free beer every month” to “a tiny pittance at best”. I shrugged it off; “At least I got a few months on the gravy train”. But the chatter from bloggers was like a huge tsunami of sad had hit everyone. I’d never realized what CPM was and only arrived late in the game, so I wasn’t upset when the party ended.
Curmudgeon: “No matter who owns the vice, don’t put your nuts in it!”
Curmudgeon: Has a wife.
Explain.
Ha ha ha… ah yes you’ve caught me in an internal inconsistency. Despite the risk of being deplatformed that comes with matrimony I’m a happily married man. Such is the mystery of love.
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