Thread by @Barnacules

Social media is toxic to anyone that suffers from mental health issues 😞 I wish these social media companies invested more resources into protecting vulnerable people rather than exploiting their vulnerabilities for profit which is exactly what they do now 😡

It makes me sad that all the algorithms (Twitter, Insta, Facebook, YouTube, etc) all focus on engagement at all costs but don’t care about the quality or the end results of those engagement beyond profitability 🤦‍♂️ It’s a difficult problem to solve honestly 🤔

Imagine telling a Casino they shouldn’t allow anyone to gamble that can’t afford to lose their money? They wouldn’t be profitable anymore. They pretend to protect people from problem gambling but that’s just public image stuff, it doesn’t honestly work at the end of the day.

Imagine telling a marketing company they shouldn’t target people in a vulnerable state that would make them more likely to buy their product. It would reduce their sales and profitability which isn’t smart if you’re a business in it for profit & nothing else.

At the end of the day social media costs millions of dollars to run but they charge us nothing because our attention is worth far more than anything we would pay for a service like this. It’s the primary reason why all social media adopts this same “free” model, not subscriptions

The only way to solve this problem would be to focus on revenue sources that don’t involve manipulating your customers for profit. But none of those models would be remotely as profitable as the current predator/prey relationship they have with us today unfortunately.

At the end of the day the only way anything changes is if enough bad things are made public about these companies true actions that their ad revenue drops through the floor until they do something about the primary issues. Like “Adpocalypse” did to YouTube multiple times now!

Like when @GFuelEnergy was fully made aware of by thousands of people that they were funding drama creators that lead mentally ill people to suicide & self harm (Etika) but chose to ignore it because of the huge sales from these relationships & not enough people knowing about it.

Only when @h3h3productions & other huge creators came forward did @GFuelEnergy take a huge PR hit & they dropped the bad creators fueling the suicide & self harm because now it was hurting their sales so bad it forced them to change. But they ignored it while it was profitable!

These social media companies are honestly no different. They profit from engagement and human nature drives us to engage more on negativity out of fear & self preservation so of course all the algorithms are going to push what is most profitable which is also much more dangerous!

I don’t have all the answers but I felt it’s time for a brain dump on this so people at least understand that they are being manipulated & why they are being manipulated. At the end of the day it’s all about transfer of wealth & we’re just the mules moving the cash around 😎

Never stop thinking & keep your eyes open 👁 No for-profit business is ever going to do anything that makes them less profitable. Anything positive they do is only because we discovered evil & exposed it making it more profitable to address it rather than continuing to ignore it.

I’m taking this weekend to rethink a lot of things after dealing with some family drama on Veterans day that made me realize just how evil humans can be to each other when money is involved. I want to challenge myself to stop ignoring bad things just because I may benefit from it

I hope this lengthy tweet inspired you to explore and think about things you haven’t before & triggers something in you to desire change over convenience & you share your own observations & stories with others so hopefully we can better understand the internet & how it impacts us

Please share this with anyone you think might gain something from it. I often get inspired to examine & study things that otherwise exist passively & unnoticed & realize there is a lot more going on than what meets the eye. I just want to fuel more observation & analysis 🧐

I love you all and I’m sorry I had to miss 2 live streams in a row but I had a bad mental health episode triggered by Veterans day that I’ll open up about when the time is right but it gives me a new drive to explore & draw attention to innocuous things that try to manipulate us!

I think the key to our future as humans requires understanding the subconscious slight of hand trick that is the internet as it exists today. We ignore what is really happening because we’re focused on the other hand holding the shiny red ball offering convenience, security & fun

While the other hand is reaching in our pockets and taking our money, identity, photos, fears & insecurities to incorporate into the next magic trick to further trick & excite us! Always remember, we are the products & we work for these companies for free & thank them for it 🤦‍♂️

But the scariest thing by far is that we’ve created the internet in our own image meaning it’s subject to the same flaws & manipulation we fall prey to like chasing greed & power so each iteration of it gets smarter at manipulating humans into unknowingly serving its goals!

For example internet companies don’t need as many employees or testers since software can easily be changed after its deployed meaning any bugs that exist can be found by the end users who the company doesn’t have to pay. Microsoft is one company that heavily abuses this trick

Why pay trained physical experienced testers to find the bugs before you ship software when you can just label anyone as an “insider” to make them an unpaid tester with no skill set other than volunteering their PC to crash & potentially losing data to do Microsoft’s job 🤔

Many bugs cannot be easily fixed by just analyzing telemetry. To truly understand & confidently fix a bug without introducing new ones you need experience, debugging, repro steps, etc. They don’t get that from most insiders unfortunately because they aren’t real engineers.

But Microsoft saves an insane amount of money by pushing the potential stability & data loss issues onto the end user knowing only the first few waves will die to save the majority of users in the end if they are lucky. This also leads to non-insiders getting taken out also.

Because many insiders will just reboot if something happens before telemetry is uploaded or have firewalls blocking the telemetry or the telemetry system itself can’t report the specific issue and end user doesn’t want to report it or doesn’t even know how to report it 🤦‍♂️

This means many bugs can be hit in insider builds and still make it out to the rest of us because the bugs were being seen but users just worked around it & telemetry didn’t provide enough actionable data so it just slips until it hurts tens of thousands of real customer’s 🤦‍♂️

This all comes back to the internet, it’s the collective consciousness that connects us all but not without many layers of manipulation between us. Companies unfortunately have learned that by controlling those layers they can shape and manipulate us to their own benefit.

In a way the Matrix movies are actually coming true except instead of us providing the power as batteries to sustain the Matrix (internet) we are providing the content (bait) to lead others to participate & ultimately do the same thing making these companies more powerful.

The more I think about it the more the internet is starting to feel like a giant MLM (Multi Level Marketing) scam with the ISP’s on top & social media right under them followed by companies selling products & services through influencers like myself 😉

The deeper I go the more questions I have. But that’s not a bad thing when you’re trying to understand what the future might look like on our current technological path. But I think it’s fair to say at this point the internet isn’t just a fad technology, it’s how we all interact

That is why all the richest companies in the world are internet based selling internet products. Turns out human attention is the single most profitable resource on the planet so just like the Gold Rush everyone is staking claims & trying to destroy anything that slows them down.

I guess it’s nice to know that our attention is worth infinitely more than what is in our wallets. But it’s unfortunate that we all sell it for way less than its worth because a used car salesmen in a fancy suite keep reminding us that we’re getting the better deal over & over 😎

Have a wonderful night & thank you for reading the longest random tweet thread I’ve ever posted. All typed out on my iPhone that ultimately makes Apple, Twitter & many Advertisers even more money because our interactions are more valuable than anything on the periodic table 😎

… wow 3 people so far made it to the end. That is honestly more than I thought since our attention spans as humans had also dropped dramatically since we gave constant distractions 24/7 with the internet.