I remember what made me quit facebook, way before it became Meta: the TV serie Person of interest. It gave me a big awarness of the scale of mass surveillance. I already had the project to quit because of Zuck’s shenanigans and the lack of interest i had in the platform, but this was the last straw for me.
What made me leave Facebook was discovering Reddit. What made me leave Reddit was getting banned lol. What made me leave Twitter (or never actually ever bother much with it) is that it seems more like a big popularity contest than ‘social’ platform to me. Besides, if it was really social, there wouldn’t be a character limit that benefits marketing speak and hashtags more than constructive conversation.
Never saw the point of places like Instagram that are based on being able to upload photos. Big deal, you can upload photos anywhere. And the only time I use YouTube is when I’m in the mood for music videos. I have less than zero interest in watching people’s crappy home videos, it’s like reality TV but even more boring and brain rotting. And I’ve got better things to spend my time watching. Oh, and I tried TikTok but noped out very quickly. I see absolutely no value in being spoonfed content by some shady algorithm as opposed to choosing and curating your own content.
Personally, I do not care if the platform that I’m on uses my data to advertise to me. I fell in with the ‘privacy’ crowd like a decade ago and did my time shaking my fists at big brother but I just don’t care anymore. None of this is new. As long as the people on the platform are the kind of people that I could get along with, I’m fine. And quite capable of using an ad blocker if I so desire. I couldn’t care less if Reddit used my posts in the Xena or She-Ra subreddits to advertise romance fantasy novels to me. There’s more important things to focus on.