Social Media

Goodbye to Flicker… Thanks for 12 years of Service

So, I used to be a huge user of Flickr for photos, I would check it daily and comment and join communities and pretty much posted every photo I had taken there. I used to use flicker a lot and look for the best life insurance for all.   Over time I sort of fell out of the habit of using it.  This wasn’t over Instagram or anything, I didn’t join Instagram until much later, something just sort of became less compelling about it.  I still kept up my subscription though.  The annual $25 fee is pretty small and it let me keep a backup of all of my photos.  I even posted all of my family photos there though they are listed as private.  I’m talking some tens of thousands of photos, though my profile suggests only around 3500 are publicly available.

I feel like things started to take a turn downhill when Yahoo changed the way Flickr accounts worked.  I wasn’t really affected, being a paid user and all, but it seems like the addition of ads and whatnot for free users kind of helped kill some of the community.  This wasn’t helped by Instagram coming up in popularity, even if i hadn’t started using IG, others had, which only further hurt the community.  Having been a paid user since 2006. I was able to keep paying for my account at the grandfathered rate of $25/year.

Recently Flickr was bought by SmugMug.  I don’t use SmugMug, though I don’t really have anything against them.  Hell, Yahoo has pretty much been ignoring Flickr for a while, SmugMug can only improve it.

Or possibly not.

It’s been recently announced that free accounts will be limited to 1000 photos max, and that any photos over that number will be deleted.  This is definitely a rough change from previous, which I believe was 1TB of storage.  This wouldn’t affect me, as a paid user, except that Flickr has stopped honoring the old grandfathered subscription rate.  Renewals now renew at current rates, which I believe is $50/year.  This isn’t a lot, I admit, but frankly, as little as I use Flickr, it feels like too much.  I also feel that for the same price, I could buy into something like One Drive or Google Drive and get a lot more functionality out of the storage, in addition to Photo storage.

Granted, not everyone uses Yahoo as a photo backup, some people use it for business, and for the community, which is fine.  In my case, the new plans just don’t work.  So I find I must say good bye to Flickr, for the most part.  I’ve started deleting out the old backup photos.  Once that’s done, I’ll prune out the rest to under 1000 photos.  I haven’s actually use Flickr for backup for a few years now, so it’s not even current anyway.  Pretty much the only thing posted there new is just a mirror of my Instagram anyway.  It kind of feels bad to clear everything out, but sometimes it’s just better to move on.  I’m just sad to see something I used to really enjoy, fall away.

The Fall of Reddit

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VoatGoatSo, Reddit may not be dead.  Hell, it probably isn’t.  It’ll go on the way it has, at least for a while.  Still, it’s fallen, fallen from favor, fallen from trust.  I’ve been trying to use Voat.co more myself, though I still visit Reddit, I find I visit less and comment even less so.

A bit of history, because it’s important as to why Reddit has fallen.  A lot of coverage on this seems to focus around /r/fatpeoplehate and other “hate groups” but this is just one part of a much larger more complex puzzle.  It’s honestly, a pretty small piece, it’s just the easiest piece to swallow and point to.

The recent fall probably started with “The Fappening”.  Photos of several popular celebrities were leaked from their private iCloud accounts (supposedly, I’m not sure this was ever truly confirmed).  These were private photos, as in, mostly nude photos.  Reddit was forced to take action against it’s long standing “Anything goes” policy and take down the photos.  It’s understandable, there were legal DMCA requests, the materials in question were without a doubt illegally obtained and illegally distributed.  No big deal, and an appropriate response.  Was it a bit hypocritical considering there are subreddits promoting piracy and leaks of non celebrity people?  Probably, but at the very least this was a legal compliance matter.

Then there was the sudden closure of /r/fatpeoplehate.  I have no personal experience with this subreddit.  I am aware that there are many “hate” sub reddits on the site though, including /r/coontown, which was not closed down and is arguably worse.  There is all sorts of history of violent, hate and activity around racial hate, there is considerably less history of actual violence towards fat people.  That doesn’t justify it, but it seems really odd that somehow /r/coontown was acceptable but /r/fatpeoplehate was not.  The confusion was complicated further when /r/whalewatching was closed later the same day.  This subreddit was a legitimate subreddit for actual whale watching, as in, the giant sea creatures.  Granted it had been “taken over” by folks from /r/fatpeoplehate, but checking farther in the archives would show that this was a recent occurrence and the subreddit wasn’t a dedicated hate sub Reddit.  Forced closure seems a bit extreme and knee jerk there.

Still, this really wasn’t that bad.  Reddit wants to purge hate speach, fine, they are well within their rights to do so and it probably makes the site a better place for it.  It’s hard to feel sympathy for the people outraged that their hate subreddits were closed.

The real ultimate problem was the firing of Victoria.  Victoria was a very well liked mod that handled the organization and PR for a lot of the iama events.  By all accounts she was excellent at what she did and everyone loved her.  I have no idea who she is, but her sudden firing definitely had the most impact on my respect for Reddit.  We’ll probably never know why Victoria was fired, the speculation is out there, some of it more plausible than others.

Shortly before being fired there was an AMA for Rev. Jessie Jackson that went extremely south, there is some speculation that the powers that be were not happy about this.  There is also some speculation that Reddit wanted Victoria to organize more heavily commercialized and essentially pre planned out AMAs for commercial purposes.  These two are my favorite conspiracy theories, I have no idea if either is true.

The commercialized angle is a good one though, and it’s obvious all over Reddit these days.  Threads that are mysteriously deleted despite tons of upvotes and no obviously negative content.  They are often refuting claims of the topic or some major news story.  It’s blatant suppression of information and ideas.  At the same time there are all sorts of paid posts that promote a movie or a TV show or even some idea or product that seem to spring from nowhere with 5000 upvotes.  Reddit in general lately is desperate to cash in on it’s growing user base with no clear idea how to do it.  Display ads are generally ineffective and not a lot of people buy Reddit Gold.  Not to mention that the more techno savvy audience that Reddit tends to draw is likely using an ad blocker anyway.  This also aligns with the push to close “hate” subreddits.  Big name advertisers are fine with advertising next to news or discussion about gadgets, no one wants to advertise next to /r/fatpeoplehate.

The core issue with all of this is, Reddit has built itself on the backs of it’s users.  It creates little if any content itself.  People have clocked there BECAUSE of it’s open nature.  Because it’s a place to discuss news or LEGO or hockey or whales or Raspberry Pi or porn or hating fat people or pics of cats in neckties.  It’s a community where discussion can form around any topic, open discussion.  If people in /r/LEGO get pissy anytime Mega Bloks is mentioned, you can go and create /r/buildingblocks and encourage the discussion of all LEGO style bricks.

The censorship of topics is tricky, because what is offensive.  A lot of people agree that hating black people or fat people isn’t great, but some people still do it and don’t think it’s wrong.  There are people who are going to think a lot of topics are “wrong” and don’t deserve discussion.  Lots of people dislike the gay and transgender community, lots of people dislike cats, some people dislike non LEGO bricks.  These are all topics of decreasing importance of course but the point is, someone will always not agree with the opinion of someone else, who decides?

The community has been built up deciding for itself.  It’s why we have moderators, it’s why there are upvotes and downvotes.  Popular opinion won’t let the discussion of /r/fatpeople hate make it to the front page by design.  You also don’t HAVE to go to these subreddits.  you can pretend they aren’t even there.  Admittedly you can’t always just ignore a problem and hope it goes away but often not giving attention to an issue, it WILL fizzle out and go away.  All the negative publicity for /r/fatpeople hate has almost definitely increased it’s followers and supporters.

I feel like the main reason Reddit has survived the repeated waves of bad publicity is the lack of real alternatives.  Voat is the most promising, but it’s been plagued with load issues each time Reddit does some major screw up and angers the community.  It’s doesn’t help that Voat is supposedly being DDOSed (according to Voat).  Assuming the DDOS is true, this just lends more credence to the Reddit conspiracy, who else would bother DDOSing Voat besides Reddit, Voat isn’t a threat to anyone else.  It’s pretty trivial to buy a botnet to DDOS a site and Reddit has a lot to protect by making it hard for people to migrate to Voat.  It’s entirely possible Voat simple can’t handle the incoming user load.  They have a donate button but they only take Bitcoin.  Supposedly, Paypal has blacklisted them, which is also suspicious.  Paypal blacklists places like Wikileaks that promote the release of leaks or crypto mail services that encourage encrypted private communication.  There really isn’t a reason for Voat to be blacklisted except the influence of a large corporate entity with everything to lose.

It doesn’t help that Voat keeps getting negative publicity either.  The same commentary pushing that banning /r/fatpeople hate was the only reason for the Reddit Revolt will also suggest Voat as the new bastion of hate for all groups.  Voat has all the same topics as Reddit and anyone can create subverses.  There is probably a /v/fatpeoplehate but I’m just as aware of it’s activities as I was /r/fatpeoplehate, which is to say, I don’t know or care.  Voat isn’t the “new place to go hate people”, it’s just “the new place to run an open community on any topic.”

How I Lost My Faith in Google

I know, that in the past, I have praised Google.  Repeatedly, held them up to some sort of crazy standard of perfection.  Somewhere, they seem to have lost their way, and along that way, they lost me.

I can’t really say it was a single factor or the turn occurred at a single moment, it just sort of… happened…

I can’t even say it was Google+, as much as I dislike Google+, though the focus on Google+ didn’t help.  It certainly started around the time Google+ became a thing, though there was a bit of a build up before that.  I think maybe the initial start of the decline involved Search.

Google is supposedly the "King of Search".  I’ve felt that the results have been declining more and more over the years.  So many people are gaming the system with perfect SEO blah blah blah bull shit.  Maybe it’s just that the type of results I want never show up.   I now how to use modifiers in searches to streamline things too, is it’s not like I’m making crappy searches.  My biggest pet peeve is that searching for reviews of products always returns shopping sites with reviews on product pages.  I don’t want some nobody slob’s review that they were prompted to give by some email a day after they received an item, I want a thorough thought out review from someone who does reviews.  I used to be able to get this sort of thing using a Blog Search but Google took that away.  Even the Blog search started getting iffy because news sites that use a blog style format started SEOing the crap out of it and pushing to the top. 

If I want to shop, I’ll use Google Shipping.  A generic shop related search page that would just show me the lowest prices in order, so I know where to get the best deal.  Google took that away.  Google shopping is now all paid placement.  It’s useless now by default since the site with the most money to burn will just be on top.

There are also an excess of returned results from sites like wikihow.com and answers.com and the worst offender, about.com.  Google used to have a feature that you could tell it, "Don’t ever show me results from this domain".  Google took that away.  The result was the return of the crappy searches.

Everything, supposedly is at the mercy of Google’s almighty mysterious algorithm.  Which brings up another annoyance I have with Google over all.  They are increasingly pushing the idea of "Give us more information for better tailored results".  Except I don’t want tailored results.  I want raw results.  I want serendipity.  I want the site I have never been to to show up, not results mostly from my "top 5 sites for my demographic of similar aged people with similar interests".  I don’t WANT a filter bubble of information that some algorithm thinks I want to see.

Which is where Google plus starts coming in.  Google Plus is way more than some shitty Facebook knockoff.  It’s also about more than adding a name to your "secret profile of data".  Google doesn’t give a crap about your name, you name is meaningless for marketing data.  You get a number, which is plenty.  It’s about seeing your connections.  Sure, some of that can be drawn from your email contacts but the data that can be pulled from who is in a circle called "Friends" vs a circle called "coworkers" is pretty vast.  Not to mention the cross marketing potential of pushing the same product to you and your friends or you and your colleagues at the same time. 

Google data mines that you go out every Friday based on your location history, it data mines that you always go out with your buddy Jim based on Jim’s location data.  Now it starts advertising Restaurant X to both of you.  Suddenly you both want to go.  Sure, this is how Marketing works, I guess, but it feels skeevy and deceitful.

So ignore Google+.  Don’t let it have your connections, don’t let it have your data.  These things are all on varying levels of accomplishability.  Not using G+ is great, except Google is really pushing it to the point of (maybe at this point) forcing your to sign up even if you never use it.  Even if not, there is the constant push on Youtube to "Link your profiles and use your real name".

The question of course is, why does Google care if you use your real name if they don’t need your name to market to you.  "While Male, 30-35, watches lots of music videos" is marketable data that’s useful.  "Your name is Dave" is not useful.  Daves can like sports, Daves can like video games, Daves can be 5 years old, Daves can be 80 years old. 

You can’t makert to a Dave.

The point is, why does Google care if someone calls themselves Dave or if they call themselves KookyBearsFan84.

My belief is that part of the desire for real names is to help make people more "discoverable".  This helps others find each other and creates more connections.  connections are marketable.  Dave’s friends may not know he posts semi anonymously as KookyBearsFan84 but they all know him as Dave Davidson.  So when they search Google+ for their friends and see Dave, they circle him.  Now Google can market with that data.  Maybe all of Dave’s friends are known to drink Pepsi, so Dave can be shown ads for Pepsi.

So why not just use Google+, everyone already uses Facebook right?  Except a lot of Google+ is modeled after Facebook and a lot of people really don’t like Facebook.  Google had a chance to make G+ something better, but instead it’s just another marketing engine, just another Facebook.  I don’t need another feed my friends content (friends who are not even on G+ in the first place).  I have Facebook for that.  I also don’t need or care about "what’s hot".  If I wanted feeds from  Bullshit News Blog I’d subscribe to their page.  I don’t care if everyone else on G+ liked their post, I’m not interested.  I just want a feed of everything my friends post.

Which I had, with Google Reader.

The closing of Google Reader is the closest thing to a turning point in my love for Google as you can get.  I never used Buzz, I vaguely used Wave, there were some other Google projects that got closed that I didn’t care about, but Google Reader really hurt.  Sure, there are other RSS clients, but Google reader was the best and it had put a lot of the others out of business. My RSS feeds and reader are the closest thing I can get to a raw unfiltered feed of what I care about.  If I want to read a headline, fine, i will, if not, I can skip it.

But I made that choice.

Not some bull shit algorithm based on my history and friend’s interests.  It’s likely Google Reader was the largest product that Google shut down, it certainly generated a lot more buzz than Wave or… Buzz.

I think ultimately, I am tired of Google pushing itself more and more into my life in an attempt to tell me what I want to hear and show me what I want to see.  It’s just getting progressively worse.  Cell phones that gather your location.  Mics on devices listening constantly for "keywords" and whatever else they might find useful.  sniffing your wifi for your smart TV so it can see what you are watching on TV.  Pushing all your friends’ data and your data together to make a big ball of what ifs to push more ads.

I think ultimately I am just tired of constantly being sold to.  And tired of constantly being the product.  What the hell happened to being able to pay for a service and just use it.  "Free" is great, except it’s not free, it’s "Free".  Google has one business in the end, it’s not mail, or social networking, or making self driving electric cars, it’s advertising.

Yeah, the story about "What if Google knows you need jeans and you drive by a store and there is a sale and your self driving car takes you there automatically and then your phone detects your mood when you try on pants and automatically orders the best jeans," sounds great…  Until you realize it likely won’t be the best jeans, it’ll just be the jeans from the store that paid Google to advertise it’s sale.

And even if they are the best, what happened to choice?  People are not robots, and sometimes it’s ok to screw up and make mistakes.  People don’t need some almighty algorithm telling them what they need or want.  People can already do that on their own.  Sometimes they may be wrong, but that’s ok…