… I have always thought of Facebook as a necessary evil.
– Luis Gabriel Santiago Alvarado, I don’t know anymore!
A familiar feeling with which I empathise. The behemoths of the social web (silo platforms) have been constructed to have this exact effect on as many people as possible.
It’s very heartening to know that I’m not the only one struggling through decisions on the social media morass.
Weighing up the value of where the crowd is, or at least appears to be, against the reality of contributing to a bad thing – often definitely very bad things – is difficult.
People might say “oh but what do you think you’re really contributing by leaving” but the fact remains that as more people leave, even more people feel comfortable doing so; after a few consecutive years of steady decline in activity and visible membership, these silos have no real backup plan on which to rely. They are not web-friendly at all and with that comes the lack of local copies, which means everything just disappears, and people will inevitably see the patently destructive core of these systems.
Even the people who remain in the silos will likely change their approach to them; for example, Twitter as a simple means of producing a microblog feed as well as RSS. Over time enough people are only likely to get smarter about these platforms, in the aggregate, that their move away from the centre of our culture, our very societies is inevitable.
These platforms do not need to disappear; we simply need to put them in their place.
