Life Gets Better After Social Control Media
Almost exactly 4 years ago (2022-02-10) I made the decision to altogether stop posting anything to social control media (I had already quit replying years earlier; it was the "write only" approach); I only ever regretted not doing this sooner. It is nowadays "trendy" (doing what I did, quitting "cold turkey").
There are many reasons not to "play ball" in social control media and this past week I was reminded of the fact that some people say self-incriminating things in social control media, revealing they had done illegal things. That's a lot worse than the time-wasting and the unnecessary conflicts.
Techrights was never interested in social control media, it was an "outside observer". That has paid off because for many weeks already both this site and the sister site serve over a million requests a day. I used to say that despite not sharing any personal photos in sites such as Facebook, my personal (self-hosted) photo albums were receiving many visitors (it says over 7 million today).
If you're not in control of your own platform (and let's face it, all social control media is controlled by someone else, either directly or via "the network"), you have no control over your speech. It's about control, hence we coined the term "social control media" (many others - including Wikileaks - have adopted it since then).
There are many interesting and lengthy articles about social control media in Daniel Pocock's index. It's preceded by this introduction: "Social control media web sites like Facebook, Twitter/x and TikTok encourage people to publish things about themselves so that companies can study and experiment on them."
Indeed. Don't become part of these experiments [1, 2]. █
