The Facebook/Xwitter/Instagram icons are still ubiquitous on far too many web pages, and I really don’t understand why they’re still there. These services have proven time and time and time again to be toxic in so many ways, and don’t even add any sort of value to the organizations that still use them.
Whatever you may think of NPR, when they finally left Xwitter (or were thrown off, I don’t remember) they found that there was a negligible drop off in traffic to their site. Toxic, and not even worth the effort, not for NPR, and I bet for a lot of other organizations as well. Why don’t they wake up?
I remember a while back reading a number of similarly-themed articles whose authors would complain about how they were “trapped” by Facebook/Twitter/Instagram, not realizing, or not even making the effort to realize, that there were already a number of alternatives like Mastodon, Lemmy, Pixelfed, and so forth. Every time I read one of these articles (I can search for them if anyone is interested, but I suspect folks on Lemmy have encountered at least one or two in the past), a little voice in my head said "there’s an easy way to solve this . . . " So either people in general just want to have something to complain about, or are just plain stupid. Grrr.
EDIT: One of my favorite uses of uBlock Origin is using it to remove Facebook/Xwitter/Instagram (and sometimes even BlueSky, depends on what mood I’m in) links from webpages that still have them. It does seem like the “f”, the bird/x, and the camera icon thingy are at least less prominently displayed than they used to be, if nothing else.
Learned helplessness is an insidious foe, and one that market forces have tended to side with over the past 20 years (probably for far longer than that, but as I was a mere child back then I wouldn’t claim it with as much certainty).
It’s an “easy way” for those like you and me who have more or less already built up the know-how over countless small steps, but if you’ve never known “life” outside of these corporate surveillance playgrounds I imagine it seems very scary and deserted.
The Facebook/Xwitter/Instagram icons are still ubiquitous on far too many web pages, and I really don’t understand why they’re still there. These services have proven time and time and time again to be toxic in so many ways, and don’t even add any sort of value to the organizations that still use them.
Whatever you may think of NPR, when they finally left Xwitter (or were thrown off, I don’t remember) they found that there was a negligible drop off in traffic to their site. Toxic, and not even worth the effort, not for NPR, and I bet for a lot of other organizations as well. Why don’t they wake up?
I remember a while back reading a number of similarly-themed articles whose authors would complain about how they were “trapped” by Facebook/Twitter/Instagram, not realizing, or not even making the effort to realize, that there were already a number of alternatives like Mastodon, Lemmy, Pixelfed, and so forth. Every time I read one of these articles (I can search for them if anyone is interested, but I suspect folks on Lemmy have encountered at least one or two in the past), a little voice in my head said "there’s an easy way to solve this . . . " So either people in general just want to have something to complain about, or are just plain stupid. Grrr.
EDIT: One of my favorite uses of uBlock Origin is using it to remove Facebook/Xwitter/Instagram (and sometimes even BlueSky, depends on what mood I’m in) links from webpages that still have them. It does seem like the “f”, the bird/x, and the camera icon thingy are at least less prominently displayed than they used to be, if nothing else.
Learned helplessness is an insidious foe, and one that market forces have tended to side with over the past 20 years (probably for far longer than that, but as I was a mere child back then I wouldn’t claim it with as much certainty).
It’s an “easy way” for those like you and me who have more or less already built up the know-how over countless small steps, but if you’ve never known “life” outside of these corporate surveillance playgrounds I imagine it seems very scary and deserted.