The 'fuck you' pattern (2021)
I feel the same burning hate like a thousand suns for FB/Meta, Google/YT and other platforms that monetize their users.<p>But, let's be frank here: They monetize you and me, us, the users because 1 they can and, 2, they have to.<p>Yes, they have to.<p>Imagine they provided access to their platforms for free. How would the shareholders (your retirement funds included) respond when less profit was made?<p>You see, we view them as public utilities, as a shared park or public garden or nice riverside picnic area, but they are not anything like that at all. They are companies that have a responsibility to the paying user, that is to the advertisers who want to track you as a viewer, to know if/how much their ads work.<p>The closest thing to a "public utility" on the internet to this day is email, good old SMTP/IMAP email. It's open, everybody who's not yet on Hotmail's or Gmail's spam-list can use it, and you can even develop an app for it yourself if you so wish.<p>The closest thing to a social open protocol is: the fedi-verse on Mastodon or the relay-based Nostr system. You don't want to be the product of a mega corp? Try these open platforms instead...