Every other week we hear about how social media companies yet again made huge mistakes with the handling of the way they do things. Nobody is surprised by this anymore.
It used to be that some people used social media casually where they would sometimes share things out on the internet, but these days share or sharing is now a dirty word whenever it’s mentioned. As a result, many simply stopped sharing outright.
The middle-ground casual social media user is all but gone
People got their wits scared out of them because of the mistakes web companies made with the handling of user data and stopped posting; it’s going to take years before those users start sharing again, if ever.
Using Facebook as an example, the former casual social media users didn’t stop using their accounts. Rather they just stopped posting status updates, photos and videos. The account is kept because it makes for a good address book of sorts, but that’s all they use it for.
Do you have contacts on Facebook who haven’t posted a status update in months, or their ‘wall’ is now absolutely blank where it wasn’t before when they posted regularly? They either had a bad experience with sharing and simply stopped doing it, and/or because of privacy concerns did a ‘blanking’ of everything and left it that way.
People want to trust, but the damage is done
Most people are willing to trust first, and we did when it came to social media. But then that trust was handled very poorly by web companies, and that’s something people don’t forget.
It’s an unfortunate truth that the way web companies handle trust is with a "shoot first, ask questions later" mentality. In web context, this translates to, "share everything, but don’t ask what we do with you data".
Well, Big Web Company, we’re asking now and the answers you’re giving simply aren’t good enough. In fact, they’re outright awful. You were given all the chances in the world to make good on your mistakes, and you failed. It took government intervention just to get you to fess up, and that doesn’t exactly show good corporate responsibility on your part.
Maybe Richard Stallman was right?
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Dust to dust, ashes to ashes. From zero to hero, and back again – the story of social networks, and many other fads.
Hear hear, well said. I wouldn’t share a thing on Facebook, and I use it as little as possible. But apparently I belong to a small minority as yet.
I do not have even a sniff of that kind of problem. Why? I do NOT involve myself in ANY social media. If I want to “share” something, there is such a thing as a land line telephone!