Snapchat? Most things other than WhatsApp, which, whole we’re at dismantling this whole thing let’s take that back to pre buyout.
Wow I completely forgot about TikTok. Probably would have preferred to have kept it that way. I’m very close to deleting my Amazon account. You still have one?
Dude I can't buy fuckin' razor blades in LA without Amazon. It's one thing if you live in a semi-thriving community where people actually care about each other. Los Angeles? I was incapable of buying Shimano bike parts anyway other than Amazon or eBay. Purging Amazon would be like hitting the Oregon Trail without a Sears Roebuck catalog.
That whole "we don't actually delete anything" kerfuffle wasn't great.
It’d be the SnapChat guys going to prison, not you :).
Between 2007 and 2010 I told four different "community managers" at Reddit that their algorithms and design were actively destroying lives. I was in the fucking office meeting with them explaining which experts to talk to, which books to read, and what they could do to make it a community device rather than a virulence engine. Between 2007 and 2010 four different "community managers" got sick of earning minimum wage and fucked off without doing anything. The powers that be give no fucks. From their perspective, they wrote code; the fact that people use it for evil is down to the people, not to the use. That it is far, far more agile at evil than good does not alter their perspective a whit; guns don't kill people people kill people here kid have a SAW.But it's like these tech geeks never thought "gee, could this be used to mess up people's lives?"
There was a time Reddit wasn't shit. Or, more accurately, there were pockets of useful commentary removed from the shit. There was a moment in history where Reddit could have become a force for good, but it would have involved rewriting Reddit, and nobody wanted to do that because it would have lost money. I knew a guy (through Reddit) who was high enough up in the structure at a major media conglomerate (think "Paramount" or "Sony") that his email address was his-first-initial-at-mediaconglomerate.com. He told me the time he was trying to get mediaconglomerate.com to advertise on Reddit so the suits commissioned some actual traffic studies for Reddit. They discovered that 70% of Reddit's referral traffic was from the search term "jailbait." Reddit knew this. Conde Nast knew this. Anyone willing to do more than take Alexa's word knew this (and this was when Alexis and Steve were pooh-pooing Alexa's traffic estimates because they showed that Reddit's numbers were about 100x higher than what anyone else was reporting). Reddit has become bigger than eBay by empowering martinets to work for free for the power of bossing other people around. They have very few actual employees - in 2009 there were seven of them. The problem is not that Reddit elevated itself to match the quality of moderation and discussion offered elsewhere, it's that everywhere else fell to Reddit's level.