The other social networks are designed to manipulate users into maximum engagement. They take manipulation as gospel. Their logic is as follows: We are a business that makes money from advertising. Advertising is manipulation. We're just doing what our users accept is happening.
That's how you justify yourself into a nice home and a sick Audi.
This is not the internet that I signed up for. What I saw back in the '90s were people that wanted to build an internet for everyone. I hate to say it now, but I believed in that internet.
We wanted to make knowledge available so that everyone could feel what it's like to live an intellectually engaged life. That future seemed thrilling to me – a poor kid, with nowhere to go.
We don't have that world today, do we? Even though the best and the brightest have had a generation and a half to figure it out. They just went for that advertising money and told us our music was worth 0.086 pennies a listen. – hoarding all the opportunity for themselves; shrinking the pie so that they can get a bigger slice.
I don't want my social network to use my desire for connection against me.
I don't want to be socially engineered. I don't want to become a walking resume. I don't want a social network overflowing with anxiety where the most dramatic people have the loudest voices.
I want a social network to tell everyone that I am okay, That I need time alone, but I love them and that our time together buoys me.
I want to use my social network to know where to be and when to be there. I want genuine feelings being shared between people that I know. And I want them to feel that even when we are alone we can be together.