For Mastodon-enabled folks, this is me:
☛ https://ottawa.place/@shadowspar
☛ @shadowspar@ottawa.place
I haven't decided how or how much I'm going to use it yet, but in the face of the continuing catastrophic collapse of The Bird Site™, I figured I'd link this here.
Douglas Crockford whines that people have baggage.
Isn't it kind of hypocritical, or at least wilfully ignorant, to build a social media website -- something of which people are a central component, and getting them in the door key to its success -- and then complain that these damned people don't behave deterministically and don't fit neatly into the system like nice little cubes?
Well, surprise! People are mushy bags of mostly edge cases, and if you're building social software, you're going to bloody well have to deal with it.
Damn users, getting to have opinions about software, instead of just using it or not!
⁰: Self-loading cargo: airline industry slang for passengers.
(Cross-posted from my "professional" DW.)
As you may or may not have already heard, LinkedIn recently added a new "feature" that allows them to use your name and image in their advertising. It is turned on by default, with no direct notification to the user that it has been added and activated.
This is an abuse of your trust. It is wrong.
You have authorized LinkedIn to do a certain set of things with your data, but they have gone and done something else with it; something to which you haven't consented. It is as though someone had asked to borrow your car to go grocery shopping but then took it bar-hopping instead.
It would be bad enough for any website to do this, but LinkedIn isn't just any social networking site -- it's a professional networking forum. Your presence on it is a living résumé. LinkedIn is the custodian of your professional reputation. Shouldn't they be handling it a little more respectfully than this?
What they should have done is to ask first, with the default being 'no'. Presumably, they knew that most people would either answer no if presented with this choice, or not answer at all -- thus removing the majority of their user base from this program and largely eliminating the additional ad revenue it would bring. This is a move that smacks of desperation; of a company that is ruthlessly trying to wring every possible cent of ad revenue out of its subscriber base.
I'm participating in one event that's using LinkedIn to organize, but after it's done, so is my LinkedIn account.
Thanks for coming out, LinkedIn.
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