Oh boy… Eugene Rochko’s status. And what a flashy name, “Social Web Foundation”. See the “industry support” header on that page. Don’t like it one bit.
@bender@twtxt.net What don’t you like about all this? 🤔 i’m not entirely sure I know all of the folks behind this to be honest.
It comes across as the beginning of a “corporate sell out”. Also, links to X, and Threads, but the Fediverse link doesn’t work. Really? Overall, it doesn’t seem right (at least to me). Oh, also Meta on that list: https://socialwebfoundation.org/2024/09/24/launch/. Nope. Pass.
@bender@twtxt.net Cool ! Thanks for sharing your thoughts 🙏 I agree, on the surface this looks bad for privacy and community well being.
I would recommend watching at least the very end of this video, as it explains, how Meta funds “independent advocacy groups”, to fight government regulation, disguised as some social good, open-source, equality, freedom, whatever…
So… Yes all this is sorta/kinda true, remember I used to work there once (great place to work, awful company). It isn’t by design or on-purpose I don’t think, at least not from the perspective I had back then.
What really needs to happen here in general, and I’ve said it before; is this:
Profiting off of user-generated data and metadata should be made illegal.
Social Media (systems) don’t need to be regulated beyond not allowing minors to access social media. But if you enact the changes to laws (see above) such that profiting off of userdata is made illegal, then you minors can be potentially “safe” from predators. Let’s be honest, predators are the “big tech” companies that make this shit™ highly addictive to the point where it “rots your brain”.
I share that opinion, but sadly advertisers were completely spoiled, over the years of social media companies bowing down to them. Even if unethical ways of targeting ads were banned, I assume the websites would get paid less.
Now when the pockets of many investors also dried up and they won’t just infinitely pump billions of dollars into an empty promise of mysterious grand future returns (unless AI is involved), sites would have no options, other than squeeze that cash, out of their users.
I know community donations exist, but they’re a model unsustainable for bigger sites and less dedicated communities - furthermore the more sites start begging for donations, the less money there will be to split among them.
The only option that remains, is paid subscriptions and microtransactions, that are already way out of hand, on many sites and I can’t even imagine how hard those would be pushed, if their finances got worse.