We’ve known for a while that Facebook/Meta is a horrible company — for the world, to work at, and ethically awful. The evidence is everywhere; if you are like, “Where’re the links” then you aren’t looking. But fine, a reminder of why Facebook is bad. Then came Twitter’s demise, where the turmoil and degradation of an already problematic service somehow got worse under Musk. But fine, here’s a reason to dislike anything Elon Musk, I know you like your Tesla, but it’s a shit car, deal.

There’s no excuse to add content to Twitter, Facebook, or Reddit right now. There are only shitty justifications like “I need to promote my site so advertisers pay me more to do my podcast” or “Oh, but I’ll miss it; it has valuable information I use all the time.” Both are correct statements; no debating that. But what is the price of letting egomaniacs ruin unique little businesses, destroy trust, mistreat workers, mistreat society, and break apart core democratic values? Or letting them dictate politics in even the slightest way? Or even working for them for free as all users are, but also moderators on Reddit — providing all the valuable content for “their” platforms?

Totally fucking bullshit.

We used to know this. You used to create a website if you wanted to be on the web — it was big advice when I was a kid: get a website so you have a presence on the internet. We got worried about pushing it back into things like MySpace and others.

And Tech bloggers used to care about this shit a lot. It is currently a sad state of affairs in the last remnants of the blogging community (most of who have moved to Podcasts, which are far less accessible and far more short-lived). These groups are talking about this in the sense of “reporting” with mild derision instead of calling it like it is.

This is a bunch of rich profit-hungry assholes taking advantage of users and abusing those who helped build their companies at no, or minor, cost to the companies themselves.

I bet these same bloggers run around saying, “I love local bookstores, shop small y’all.” Hypocrites. For the record, I shop at Amazon. I’d love to find a way to tell Amazon to fuck off. (Second side note: there are many great local menswear stores you can shop online with; that’s great. I do it all the time.)

The bottom line here: I’m out of Facebook, Meta, Twitter, and Reddit. You should be too. Fuck those guys.

If you want change to happen on anything, ever, you must take a stand somewhere.

Taking a stand isn’t upvoting, liking, favoriting, reposting, or whatevering. Taking a stand is taking an entire community “dark” until change happens, removing/pausing a hugely valued thing for both users and the companies being dicks. It’s deleting the content you gave these companies and your accounts.

It’s saying no, and walking away.

You don’t quit smoking by saying, “Yes, I know it’s awful, I liked a post on its health effects last week, but I can’t imagine going without a pack a day.” You know? You have to stop at some point; you can’t wait for cigarettes to become healthy.

The fact that Reddit infrastructure nearly (or did?) collapsed under the protest shows they don’t offer a unique value without us, not in the same way Netflix does. When Netflix said no more password sharing people ponied up because Netflix itself has value to people. Because people aren’t creating the fucking content, but that’s not Reddit/Twitter/Facebook. We are the content, and we are creating the content for free. They should be paying us or, at the very least, listening to us.

I’m saying: u/spez fucking sucks hard, and I hope this is accurately reflected in business classes from here on out. I’ll be deleting my account as soon as I can delete my content before I do that. I deleted Facebook/Meta years ago, and Twitter has been gone for a while now, too; sad to see Reddit go as well, but it must.