Sunday, August 6, 2017

No pain, no gain: Silos and Socialists

by Angela K. Durden
Technology inventor protecting creator's copyrights. Business writer, novelist, songwriter, and Citizen Journalist.


All social media are simply companies trying to keep eyeballs on their silo in order to attract paying advertisers. In other words, you are the corn they hope the cows will want.

To keep you there, they redesign interfaces and change how they work, changes which often screw with very corn they want to keep. They change APIs so that companies servicing mutual customers have difficulty connecting if that connect has potential to take the corn to another silo.

After that add the scatter shot, please-God-this-time-let-it-work posts that are badly written and poorly aimed, and you then can begin to wonder how it is anybody sees anything at all on these here worldwide Internets.

Next, throw in the PC-Socialist-We-Know-What's-Best-For-You corporate manipulations of post notifications — especially if those posts are from or are connected to any black-listed phrases, words, people, images, sites, or topics they have prohibited by dictate.

Case in point. 


I was looking for an image to illustrate this article using the theme of "no pain, no gain" and went to Google. But all the images I saw were the same old thing. Images of hard bodies beautifully lit pushing the corporate-spreadsheet-driven narrative that painful exercise is good for you but only when you pay big bucks for it.

I go back to redo the search when I notice —


"Report Inappropriate Predictions"?

What the hell did Google/Alphabet mean by inappropriate? And who would I report that to?

You don't even have to ask. I'm way ahead of you on this. Of course I clicked it. I am Citizen Journalist, after all. Here's what came up —



Hateful?

Hateful? Sexually explicit? Violent? Dangerous and harmful activity? How does one report those? What happens then? 

I clicked the Legal Help page link which led me to Lumen Database.

The help page belied its name as it seemed more self-serving than helpful. In other words, Google/Alphabet affirmed over and over their methods were transparent and blah, blah, blah. On the other hand, the Lumen Database was very informative and fun, too.

Still, hateful, sexually explicit, violent, dangerous, and harmful are all adjectives subject to the eye of the beholder. 

For instance, one person's sexually explicit is another person's regular Saturday night. One's hateful is another's righteous dogma, and so forth. Right? Am I lying? I am not.

In other words, the categories above are all based on an opinion, a viewpoint.

Now, Google promises they will only take action if a law is broken, but ask me how much I believe that from them? Go on. Ask me!

"Angela, how much do you believe Google?"

Thank you for asking. I appreciate that. 

Answer: Not at all. 







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