notes on Teh Social Medias

I’ve had some variation of the “Always Own Your Platform” page link floating around my site for ages. It’s good, I like it. I also found it via quick search-skim, because my Full Thoughts™ on the topic have been formed through countless articles of varying formality and subject matter, which means writing an Opinion Piece myself would mean a very long and potentially frustrating trek through the internet wilderness trying to source my ideas.

That said, in the interest of putting it in my own words, even if those words have citations of the “just trust me dude” variety… what the heck, here ya go.

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Three big reasons: algorithms, social climate, and, well, ownership. The first two are deeply intertwined and have inspired many a journalistic thinkpiece; the latter stands even if the Evil Corporations and Cultures spontaneously turned good tomorrow.

You might be interested in…

“Hey, wouldn’t it be great if we displayed user feeds achronologically? And wouldn’t it also be great if we threw advertisements unsolicited posts in their feeds based on a profile spawned by our totally-not-invasive tracking software??” —CEOs, probably

…You know what, though? Instead of going on some “if you’re not paying for the product, you are the product” screed, which is oft-repeated (and for which, whilst searching for it, I found an interesting rebuttal), lemme just lay out how I understand it works:

• Sites automatically track browser activity via analytics, cookies, and other techy things. In layman’s terms: What you’re doing on a website, when, and from where are all on record.
  • Yes, there are ways to opt out. It’s all opted in by default, though. Most non-techy people are not going to know what a browser extension is, never mind which one to install and which settings to configure.
• Algorithms piece together user profiles based on this data. These profiles make assumptions about people’s demographics (including but not limited to: age, sex/gender, and locale), interests (what were you looking at? what did you ignore?), and even lifestyle (hey Siri, why is my wife leaving me?).
• Sites make money through advertisements—if not through direct cooperation with advertisers, then by selling data to ad companies. (I make a distinction here because a, say, indie webcomic group =/= a whole-ass corporation dedicated to data-gobbling.)
• The more people use a site, the more in-depth their data profile. Chances are, if someone’s on the site a lot, they’ve got friends and/or relatives there, too—more data, more tracking, more content generated (whether it be back-and-forth comments or entire portfolios) for that platform.
• And thus more people are incentivized to use the website, to join in the fun, because we’re social creatures. This in and of itself is not insidious. I may live like a hermit, but I don’t think everyone should have to, even on the internet. That said:
• Do you think Facebook gives a shit about your privacy?

#cancelled

Look, I’m just straight-up not gonna get into this too much because it would launch another rant and that is entirely besides the point of this post.

That said: due to the bullet-point-chain reasoning above, social media wants to keep people engaged. And what better way than to make the users generate their own Pavlov bell? The stimulation need not be good (by any definition—uplifting, helpful, informative, actually interest-relevant; the list goes on). It just needs to keep people checking.

At this point I wonder if I’m sounding like a conspiracy theorist. “They don’t care about you, you know, them higher-ups! They makin’ robots to scan you live irl, we live in a society,” etc. etc. etc. But like… yes?? Yeah, I do think corporations would happily throw their userbase under the bus for a good buck (or millions). Have you heard of dark patterns? The sci-fi dsytopia is real and everything is (watched by the owners of popular web browser) Chrome.

You know what could very well happen if I put this ranty aside in, say, a Twitter thread? People doing a casual search for “Chrome” could see it, because the search is sitewide instead of user-limited, and so next thing I know I could have an inbox full of angry counter-rants from Chrome users about how I said their browser sucks and therefore I should crawl in a hole and die. Hypothetical-(but-also-very-real-)Twitter has zero incentive to stop people from doing this.

It might not “want” this to happen, in the sense that no real human people are saying “hmm, yes, let’s put this one thing that sounds bad out of context on the feeds of people who are extremely passionate about the thing, surely this will not go awry.” There’s no intention driving this specific incident. In fact, “Twitter” could “suffer” for it, in that “I” get sick of the platform and leave forever.

But uh, that is one (1) drop out of the ocean. Barely a ripple. They’re not gonna retool the algorithms for that.

It doesn’t matter if everything is chrome in your future. I don’t care if you want a tattoo of Google’s logo on your forehead. This not-at-all-hypothetical platform should not be funnelling your frustrations at random strangers, and Average Joe should not have to sp*ll sh!t |ike th!$ (“spell shit like this,” for legibility) to avoid incurring a tweet-slathered tarring.

“But what if the corporations had a redemption arc?”

Yeesh, that got cynical. I’m not too sorry, because I am not immune to beating the dead tweetsite horse (neither avians nor equines deserve that, living or otherwise), but I can’t just rant about the Anger Mill and leave it at that without feeling like a massive hypocrite. Besides, I don’t not use “social media,” in small doses; I had a lengthy stint on tumblr, and currently use deviantArt and YouTube—neither of which I consider “social media” in the vein of, say, instagram or Facebook, but they’re still pretty damn algorithm-driven. (Which isn’t even getting into the slew of UI updates no one asked for, never mind what corporate nonsense might be spurring them….)

But okay, okay. Let’s say there was a Magic “Corporations Don’t Suck” Button and it got pressed overnight. Tomorrow you wake up, and everyone can tweet and update Facebook statii to their hearts’ content, like they always have, except their feeds are chronological and there are no recommendations and all user data has poofed into nothing. Sci-fi utopia real!!

Here’s why I think you should consider making a site anyway.

the part that’s actually about owning your platform

What does “own your platform” mean in this context, anyway? Do I, a-flyleaf dot github dot io, own GitHub? (Hahaha, no, that’s Microsoft. I am aware that, if I was a Real and True Scotsman Stickler, I would be hosting this site from my basement.)

Anyway: I think “own your platform” is a (potentially?) less intimidating way of saying “learn to code”*—or at the very least, “use a less ephemeral sitebuilder.” Because, far as I can see it, there’s no other way.

—Wait wait wait I see you running for the hills, yelling and/or thinking (forgive the powerplay) “Nooo, not a custom website! I don’t understand your ‘htmls’ and your ‘csses,’ and I don’t have the time and/or energy to learn about it!” Maybe you just don’t think you have stuff to bother making a site for.

And you know what? Fair! I’m not gonna say you can churn out a magical hyper-interactive website without either a really fancy sitebuilder or serious code-effort on your part. And for people who primarily use social media to check in on their circle, tolerating the downsides might be worth the connection. (I’d argue y’all could still have a site for, say, photo-sharing, but also, the more people involved the more moving parts the harder it is to coordinate something everyone’s on board with, and sometimes it’s just simpler to hit the gosh dang faced book like button.)

That said: if you create things—and I’m including many things, from playlists to moodboards to writing to drawing to music to [basically anything that could be put on the internet]—I highly. highly. Highly. recommend taking the steps to own how your stuff is seen on the internet.

Here, a snippet from the Always Own Your Platform page:

Stop giving away your work to people who don’t care about it. Host it yourself. Distribute it via methods you control. Build your audience deliberately and on your own terms.

Breaking that down:

• “Stop giving away your work.” Without getting into the nitty-gritty of various sites’ Terms of Service, I think the main point here is that, when you post your stuff on a site like tumblr, and nowhere else? Tumblr has zero incentive to keep your stuff, specifically, out of all the stuff it has to host, online. The flagging algorithm could go awry and declare your sand dunes unsafe for the workplace. Hell, you could get banned tomorrow and poof goes the post—and, y’know, everything else you’ve ever posted there. That Would Kind Of Suck! Is that “ownership”?
  • Sites also tend to impose limits on how your stuff is displayed. I see this on Twitter every so often, artists bemoaning a new jpeg-compressor (non-digital-artist translation: Image Quality Bad) and/or forced layout change. Instagram, I’m pretty sure, won’t let you post any images that aren’t square- (or phone-?)shaped. But if you’re the builder of the metaphorical frame, the only limits are your know-how.
• “Host it yourself.” This is where I, personally, cede: seeing as I do not own GitHub, if Microsoft decides to shut it down tomorrow, poof there goes my site. Hosting a website involves $$$, monthly, and is frankly above my technical comfort level (for now, anyway). But!!—
  • Even if GitHub were to go down tomorrow, every single file that makes this website lives on my computer. I could easily rehost everything on, say, neocities or GitLab
  • Would it be annoying and inconvenient to change all the links and/or mess with the backend for adjusted compatibility? For sure. But I still have it all, at my fingertips. I can’t say the same for my old tumblr blog, which was unceremoniously nuked—and took lots of my work with it. Some of my art might exist on old hard drives. Writing, though? Gone into the ether.
  • Tangent aside: Own your files. Save things if they mean anything to you. If you can “own” (or have some not-website-bound degree of control over) how they’re displayed, even better.
• “Distribute it via methods you control. Build your audience deliberately and on your own terms.” Hey, you know that “this stuff should not show up on these people’s feeds” thing I mentioned earlier? Guess what doesn’t happen if you’re not giving your stuff directly to the algorithm gods?
  • Still want to use social media to promote your stuff? You can do that. Just want to show a few friends, and remain otherwise unknown? Super doable. Hell, if you get into coding, you can just send your pals webpage folders directly, no publication required.

 

Look. Coding Is Hard. I’m not here to promote my brand new coding book (it does not exist), or tell you to delete all your accounts, or say you suck as a person for doing what’s been deliberately engineered to be super convenient. I didn’t even set out to write this as anything persuasive (though, hey, if I’ve done anything in that territory, it’s a cool (and not strictly unintended) bonus). Far as any argument goes, the subject at hand is ultimately your stuff.

That being said: hi, you’re on a-flyleaf(.github).com. This is my stuff. This is why, other than the aforementioned dA and YouTube, you won’t find me posting my stuff anywhere else.*

But really. I did my “social media” time. I had fun, learned a lot, met some cool people—but all in all, it is a ton of screentime that I don’t think I spent well. What I’m doing now? Not perfect (it never is), but rewarding.

Also I was raised on “don’t trust strangers on the internet” and after years of avoiding those platforms like the plague (and learning about all their privacy issues along the way) there’s no way in hell I’m gonna touch them now byeeeee~

 

(P.S.: Can a non-homemade site do this?!??)