Mainstream Social Media Is Inferior

At least one person on a small dating/social media website like this one has asked me for a link to my profile on a large, popular social media site (Instagram). And someone else on that site mentioned that several other users tried to get him to communicate over Skype.

My problem with sites like these two is that they are run by corporations and have huge userbases. The corporations have the resources to monitor, retain, and sell user communications and other other data. (Facebook for example is notorious for monetizing user data.) They’re terrible for user privacy. The small sites run by a handful of people don’t have the resources to do that and don’t have enough users to make that profitable.

The large userbases make these huge social media sites magnets for all kinds of dishonest behavior: misinformation campaigns, fake social media influencers, bot accounts, etc. These are not good environments for making authentic social connections.

The moderators become cynical, distrustful, and heavy-handed because they’ve dealt with so much disruption, and communcation becomes hampered because they end up disallowing or deleting mild or misunderstood content, or they prioritize attracting advertisers.

The supposedly secure messaging apps like Signal are obviously not so secure; they’ve been used by law enforcement to gather evidence. To me it seems that the most secure online communication happens in places nobody cares or thinks about monitoring.

Like this site, the other site I mentioned also has very little activity. But these types of sites are much better for social connection. My point is that, for social connection or privacy, people should prefer sites like this one we are on and not rely on mainstream social media or messaging apps. Meeting people is more difficult when users avoid smaller websites or want to transfer communication to some platform that is going to sell access to every message we send.