author: Joanne McNeil #media/Book soft tech
Summary
- user as a term user is useful term to distinguish with developers
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“My name is attached to most of my online activity, so my fork on the internet is shaped more like a shadow than a vapor “
- shadow vs. vapor, still ephemeral but has a record
- Internet is a place but now it’s more like a person. We talk to the internet using search. We used to have to hunt for treasures ourselves but now we demand answers and expect them to be completely right or completely wrong
- Google has users, Comcast has customers. Beholden to customers not users even though Google uses its customers and they pay a price
- Google wants you to have tools to find things rather than providing people to help you
- Like coda but it is better in that case because you are actually designing and developing for yourself. You have full control from the get-go
community
TLDR; Author thinks that Facebook is a stain on the earth and promoting all the wrong kinds of things because it locks people into the platform, cares only about data collection and takes the perspective that they know better than users do and has a proven track record of prioritizing dark patterns that promote the company’s interests over anything users want.
I think the piece I identify with most that is a crime is how Facebook deliberately tries to build a data moat and lock users in. Nothing is given for “free” in that everything has a shadow goal for collecting data for the company’s algorithms, locking people into using the platform, or encouraging users to spend more time on the product.
Zuckerberg clings to the word “community” because it “creates a flattened space where everyone is the same… It colonizes, but it does not homogenize.”
Like Google, Facebook prioritized one thing: scaling. The platform mobilized its platform as a platform of platforms; it assembled as a community of communities.