An Open Challenge to the Tech Industry: Make and Maintain Something Which Will Last, I Dare You

Google Plus is closing down in April. When that happens, I will be an ex-user of the service. Possibly no big loss, because social media is terrible right now, but this has certainly become a thing of late: platform is created, then is sold off to a clueless buyer who then dismantles it, or it’s cancelled because it didn’t wind up killing off the competition like the owner was hoping (all while completely forgetting that a few million users is objectively a success on its own terms), or the owner loses interest, kills it….

The result being there is nothing institutional or stable about any form of social media.

It’s almost impressive when the costs of a “free account” have to be weighed against a loss/violation of privacy, instability when it comes to income flow and—not least—the overall impact your product will have on democracy itself. That’s some galaxy brain level stuff at play, there.

At this point, the only thing I’m convinced the tech industry knows how to do is make an inconvenient mess. Facebook is actually an incredible example of this: they have the world’s largest user base, but they managed to piss away that accomplishment for ad money which contributed to the downfall of the US, effectively destroying one of the biggest tech brands on the planet. Who trusts Facebook now? Nobody does, and with good reason: they’re not worthy of any trust. Arguably, they never were, but Facebook managed to erase any shadow of a doubt on this point.

Say what you will about Myspace, but at their most relevant, they never sold out Tom’s home country to its enemies for the cost of a few ads. That seems like a low bar to clear, but I can at least appreciate it.

Google is just as bad. Privacy concerns aside, they create incredibly useful products, bought out a few others, and then squander their modest success by shutting down popular and useful services.

The most important lesson any tech company offers is an heuristic one: eventually, whatever it is we’re using is going to go away. Get used to that level of undependabilty. Maybe create a bulwark against losing it.

Which raises some very good questions:

Are we going to miss it? (Was any of it even worth it?)

And if you have to create a bulwark against your favorite service disappearing anyway, why bother using it in the first place?

We’ll get back to these in a few. But first I want to address a few things based on experience on using your platform, Tech Company.

Don’t make digital shoggoths.

Tumblr, which got so much right in the early days that it hurts to see it this way now, has a major issue. The founders have cashiered out and the users are now navigating the awkward state of having a way to blog and make public posts which can be arbitrarily removed from public view by what can be best described as a digital shoggoth, an algorithm functioning perfectly as designed, but deployed with little thought or regard given to the effect it will have on a community which is not supposed to be in its jurisdiction. No, really, I had posts which depicted paintings, bird feet, and an alligator’s head which were flagged and removed from view.

When folk of the future look up the word asinine, a photo of a brogrammer belongs next to it forever.

Keep in mind nobody agreed to this in the original Terms of Service; this virulent campaign of “finding” objectionable content is the product of FOSTA-SESTA and bumbling management. What should have purged the site of unwelcome and child porn was cranked up to include bystanders, then blogs by way of association (however distant), and finally, literally all of the false positives.

Stop creating a condition which revokes and breaks trust, which no amount of utility or apology can un-break.

Am I aware of the irony of using Medium to raise the issue of platforms with the potential to succumb to a buyout and subsequent betrayal of their users?

Yep, I’m aware. This isn’t my first externally-hosted blog, and probably won’t be my last. But the cloud is an invitation to lose your data on someone else’s computer, and once you realize this, not trusting your data to it becomes nearly trivial.

Being a maker without committing to being a maintainer makes for an ultimately ephemeral existence—and not even in the sense of ephemera we associate with tangible things like ticket stubs, pamphlets, or any other things you might insert into a scrapbook as a souvenir to help you remember a trip: these are just websites.

Some of them aren’t even very good at being websites. Every change made to Google Plus tested the patience of those who found it useful overall—every single time. This happens so often in tech that a strategy of “wait until they forget” often seems an encoded rule for sites to alter their flow, appearance, or algorithms. No user ever asked for any of those changes, which are often perfect examples of the Dunning-Kruger Effect platform creators exhibit when it comes to what their users will find tolerable, let alone useful. “But I made it in the first place,” they tell themselves, “surely I know how to keep my users engaged!”

After a certain number of unwelcome changes, that annoyance becomes a permanent aspect of the UX.

Nazis are never a mark of a healthy platform. Evict them.

Virtually all platforms run into this issue. Sometimes it’s a nearly invisible thing, like Twitter’s TOS violators which are held to a different standard than the rest of their users, yet somehow are protected because they drive traffic or are seen as “notable” by Twitter’s upper management. According to Twitter’s Terms of Service, no Nazi should thrive there. Yet they do. The result is that it appears that the rules which apply to smaller fish are not the same as the larger fish. A capriciously enforced TOS is worthless.

And how do you think that makes legitimate users who create the value of being on Twitter feel? Like they might be better off elsewhere?

If this is a trick on Twitter’s part to drive engagement (in the combative sense), it’s working, because I suspect it is partly how Mastodon got started. But I suppose I could also fall back to using Google Plus—oh, wait.

“Free speech” is the bleat of the politically shallow and intellectually lazy when it comes to doing the right thing for everyone involved. If Nazis want free speech, make them implement it for themselves. Allowing them to remain makes you complicit in broadcasting hate; and once it worms its way into your brand, you are never going to get it out.

So long as Nazis not only remain but use your platform to maintain a high profile, no change you implement in the future will have any meaning to anyone. It’s nice to be able to edit instead of delete tweets. But overall? Worthless if there are Nazis in the walls.

If you value the controversially hateful more than your legitimate users, you will eventually destroy what you have built by giving it exclusively to those who do not play well with others. What you will have left isn’t a community, but a battleground. Or, more simply, you will just have Twitter.

Argument from Capitalism is not a defense—and it is absolutely worthless.

So you’ve made lots of money, and are likely to remain wealthy. Who cares? Certainly not the people who’ve made you wealthy. Without them, you would be nothing. “Because money,” “you don’t have to use a free service,” “just use something else/make it yourself” are common refrains from those who want to deflect the real effects of these issues, but they are excuses, devoid of value.

1. Because money: not our problem. Fix it.
2. If we don’t have to use a free service, explain to me how I can opt out of Facebook completely. (Twitter at least makes this somewhat easier to accomplish.)
3. Make it yourself: if I have a problem with traffic, the solution to that is not going to be designing and inventing my own vehicle. Again, this isn’t our problem. It is your problem. Even if most folk could just up and make their own service/site, it won’t make your problems go away.

See, you did part of your job too well as a free service to evade responsibility now. You made large, significant communities, allowed folk to get settled into them, which you then proceeded to disrupt.

Even if your service is free to use, those of us who use it are permitting you to make your money off of us. You have no excuses when it comes to ignoring our needs in return. If you tell yourself the people who use your platform aren’t the customer, they’re the product being sold — that isn’t going to work if they all leave and you have no “product” to sell to advertisers once you annoy those people into jettisoning their attachment to your platform.

Consider us your customers first. If you can’t follow from that, then what business do you have being in social media in the first place?

Awkward when this is your day job.

Let’s review:

Depending on algorithms to save your platform will probably not work well—and that’s your best case scenario. If you will unleash digital shoggoths nobody asked for, that’s what you’ll be remembered for.

Was that change really necessary? If you annoy your users, they will go away.

If you don’t deplatform Nazis, you’re no damned good to anyone.

There is no amount of money which justifies any of this. These issues aren’t directly caused by capitalism, money, or the pursuit thereof, and these outcomes are not preordained — they’re caused by arrogance and stupidity in the name of efficiency.

If you really want to disrupt something, this is an ideal set of situations to disrupt. Build something lasting which exhibits the more positive aspects of social media, while avoiding the things that make using social media not only unpleasant, but unhealthy to democracy itself, could actually be a good thing to make.

You have a chance to become memorable for your endurance and steadfast refusal to compromise your users or democracy.

Make it last.

Did I make it sound like that was going to be easy? For the most part, it should have been. If anyone told you it was actually too difficult to avoid selling out your customers, you were told lies.

You fell for it like an egg from a tall chicken.*

And the result is an entire industry tainted by the poor behavior of its largest participants. It’s going to take a lot to rebuild that trust, assuming it’s even possible now.

It may not be possible. But it looks so much worse for you if you don’t try.

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*An utterly lovely line uttered by Tex Panthollow (played by James Coburn) in Charade.