orblivious

tech support survivor

  • she/her

๐Ÿ‘ต๐Ÿป older than the internet
๐Ÿง longtime linux nerd
๐Ÿง  eternally brain fogged
๐Ÿณ๏ธโ€โšง๏ธ trans woman
RIP Cohost - you will be missed

Last.FM Recently Played


adorablesergal
@adorablesergal

All of tech right now is a war of attrition. Nagware and stealthware is now life's default experience.

If you aren't terminally online and constantly checking version notes, these corporations will steal your data (and let's be honest, they'll steal it even if you are proactive in preventing it).

They won't take the hint. Google Photos and Microsoft OneDrive beg me regularly to let me create "memories" in their cloud storage even though I tap "NO" every single time.

Except it's never "NO"

They're like sex pests. They don't even know what the word "no" means. It's always something non-committal like "Maybe Later". There are no longer any absolutes.

I can't simply go offline in apps like Discord. I can only be invisible. "Why not just quit out of the app?" Except most don't use Ctrl-Q anymore. Who uses keyboard shortcuts these days? And forget dipping out on your phone.

Clicking the "X" in the corner of your Discord window only minimizes the app, and not even to your taskbar. It tucks itself away in your system tray, still happily pinging you with notifications, trying to sucker you back into pulling it out again. Discord Mobile is always pushing notifications to you. This is the default experience. Almost no one has enough tech savvy to even be aware they're getting sold upstream. Almost no one is going to dig in labyrinthine app settings to find the one toggle that turns off getting milked.

Realize that the vast majority of humanity using tech is not a power user like you are.

Stop guilting people for not being paragons of rugged digital individualism

What we need right now more than anything, more than even leaving Discord for some other platform that is probably just going to do the same thing in a couple years, is comprehensive privacy protection laws. That's the bare minimum we should be striving for. It's a losing battle trying to convince everyone to go back to IRC, and it does nothing for the countless individuals left behind.

And I'm fully aware that "just get a law passed" is easier said than done, but that's where the battle really is, if you even care.

Do what you want, of course. If you want to return to IRC or some Jabber client or whatever, be my guest. You don't get to be smug about it, though, especially since you're probably leaking data in plenty of other places. However, if you think using Mastodon and Matrix or whatever grants you some kind of saintly privacy aura that everyone should "get gud" and aspire to, fuck you. You're a dumbass, and an asshole.


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