I use FB occasionally to stay in touch with family/friends.
I subscribe to interesting people on Twitter and find it a great source of intellectual information.
I know these are harmful to some people, and I’ve occasionally noticed addictive behavior in myself, but overall seems like a good trade. If someone wants to explain/convince me that this is highly dangerous to me in a non-obvious way or that **my kind** of usage is endangering the commons I’m open to hear it.
Your kind of usage contributes to the popularity of the social networks—the “network effects” that give them the attractiveness and power that Zvi describes. The more that people like you do what you describe, the more incentive other people have to use Facebook and Twitter, and thus the more power Facebook and Twitter have—and what they do with that power is, as we see, quite bad.
You are, indeed, endangering the commons, because you are deriving personal benefit from it, in exchange for giving power to the companies whose entire business model is building a giant pyre on which to burn that commons—and our society along with it.
I get that my usage hurts indirectly, my question was specifically if everyone used FB occasionally and for similar purposes as I do, would FB still be detrimental? Harming other people because they have unhealthy patterns of usage is still a concern but a lesser one to me
1. Do you produce/distribute content via those sites?
2. What are they for? Are you killing off alternatives/not developing things in that vein yourself? Because you use them?
If someone wants to explain/convince me that this is highly dangerous to me in a non-obvious way or that **my kind** of usage is endangering the commons I’m open to hear it.
Perhaps: Facebook uses what it gains from you (money from ads?) to fight their ‘better alternatives’ (BA), such as via government lobbying, as well as via the normal channels (you’re using them instead of their competitors (this has the clear side effect that FB is more DOS resistant than BAs).
I use FB occasionally to stay in touch with family/friends.
I subscribe to interesting people on Twitter and find it a great source of intellectual information.
I know these are harmful to some people, and I’ve occasionally noticed addictive behavior in myself, but overall seems like a good trade. If someone wants to explain/convince me that this is highly dangerous to me in a non-obvious way or that **my kind** of usage is endangering the commons I’m open to hear it.
Your kind of usage contributes to the popularity of the social networks—the “network effects” that give them the attractiveness and power that Zvi describes. The more that people like you do what you describe, the more incentive other people have to use Facebook and Twitter, and thus the more power Facebook and Twitter have—and what they do with that power is, as we see, quite bad.
You are, indeed, endangering the commons, because you are deriving personal benefit from it, in exchange for giving power to the companies whose entire business model is building a giant pyre on which to burn that commons—and our society along with it.
I get that my usage hurts indirectly, my question was specifically if everyone used FB occasionally and for similar purposes as I do, would FB still be detrimental? Harming other people because they have unhealthy patterns of usage is still a concern but a lesser one to me
I think part of the question is:
1. Do you produce/distribute content via those sites?
2. What are they for? Are you killing off alternatives/not developing things in that vein yourself? Because you use them?
Perhaps: Facebook uses what it gains from you (money from ads?) to fight their ‘better alternatives’ (BA), such as via government lobbying, as well as via the normal channels (you’re using them instead of their competitors (this has the clear side effect that FB is more DOS resistant than BAs).