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The Death of jimktrains
Date: 2018-05-14
Tags: social_media
Yesterday I got into yet another argument about the GDPR on hackernews. It ended with me being rate limited to some long amount of time and no actual discussion except people insinuating that my position is wrong because of the GDPR. This is a fundemental misunderstanding in how arguments work. I can find the GDPR to be silly and baseless while still complying with it. Their arguments boil down to, in another context, marijuana is bad because the law says so. That doesn't help expand the conversation more. I'm not talking about compliance with the law, I'm talking about the premise of it.
(I'm working on a longer post discussing my thoughts on the GDPR. I view it in much the same way as previous cookie legislation: good intentioned, but ultimatly poorly designed. I feel that, unfortunatly, the onus is ultimatly on us, the consumers of said services to understand what we're sending to these services and how it might be used. Moreover, we need to understand and be fully aware that anything we give someone else is no longer ours to control. I've deleted my accounts from a few social media outlets, but I'm under no delusion that they're actually gone. Even the best of intentioned places will have remenants of me in backups and logs at the very least or at "worst" just set a "deleted" field on my record(s). I gave this information away and no longer believe I am in ultimate control of said data.)
I realized in that I don't gain anything meaningful from social media. It brings out the worst in me, and becomes a huge time sink that I can't afford.
I hardly use Twitter anymore because, for me, the restricted length of a tweet makes discussion difficult to near meaningless. The stream of news is redundant with 1st-party sources I already check, and many tweets are often linking to articles of questionable origin.
I used Facebook sparingly. While it is extremly nice to see some of the heartwarming posts from actual friends, ultimately, I don't feel like that furthers our friendship. Those interactions are few and far between, and in contrast to the constant stream of nonsense and questionable sources posted by others. I was part of a community message board, but perhaps I can coax them elsewhere or simply have Anne let me know if there is anything interesting there.
LinkedIn was nothing but recruiter spam and a deletion I should have done a very long time ago.
HackerNews provides no way to delete an account or older posts. I emailed the mods and requested my account be deleted. We'll see what ultimately happens. It's funny that I was yelled at because I asserted websites should control the data you send them and the group-think is that the GDPR changes that long-standing (and practical and realistic convention) and that I'm just plain wrong, and yet the website we're arguing on provides no means for the users disagreeing with me to control "their" data (hint: it's not really and ultimately theirs, no matter the law).
So anyway, please don't try to find me on social media. If you'd like to contact me, send me an email, gchat, or text.