No, this isn’t my idea: Reed Allman used a version of this in his Medium post about de-Googling.
Looks like Iâm not the only one writing about de-Googling, even if this piece in Medium is many years after I wrote about my efforts in 2009â10. (Here’s an even earlier one.)
It does mean that others are becoming warier of Googleâs privacy intrusions, if itâs now a mainstream issue. Reed Allmanâs piece is very good, and it was interesting to see that it took him 36 days and upward of US$1,500 to get free of Googleâs clutches. Iâm sure it can be done for less with some judicious use of certain services. It’s far better having it all in one place (unlike my documenting nearly a decade ago), and his guide is bang up to date.
I will recommend Zoho ahead of others as a Gmail alternative, only because of personal experience and Zohoâs excellent customer service. I havenât used Zohoâs office programs but I assume they are the equal of Google Docs et al.
He does conclude that he didnât feel others were convinced about following suit, which is sometimes how I feel when these warnings fall on deaf ears. (And youâve already heard me go on about other Big Tech players elsewhere.)
A rebrand should be done with consultation, and that should be factored in to any decision-making. In the 2010s, it should consider out-of-the-box suggestions, especially in an increasingly cluttered market-place. It should be launched internally first, then externally. A new logo would surface after months of exhaustive design work. The result should be something distinctive and meaningful that resonates with all audiences.
Meanwhile, hereâs one done by my Alma Mater amongst false claims, poor analyses, and considerable opposition, with the resulting logo appearing a mere week after the powers-that-be voted to ignore the feedback. In branding circles, any professional will tell you that there’s no way a logo can appear that quicklyâunless, of course, Victoria University of Wellington had no inclination to listen to any of its audiences during its “feedback” process. But then, maybe this was done in a hurry:
The result is flawed and lacks quality. Without even getting into the symbol or the typography, the hurried nature of this design is evident with the margin: the text is neither optically nor mathematically aligned, and accurately reflects the lack of consideration that this rebrand has followed. The one symbol I like, the ceremonial crest, does away with the type, and judging from the above, it’s just as well.
I like change, and my businesses have thrived on it. But this left much to be desired from the moment we got wind of it. It supplants a name sourced from Queen Victoria with the name of an even older, white, male historical figure, creates confusion with at least three universities that share its initials if it is to be abbreviated UoW (Woollongong, Wah, Winchester; meanwhile the University of Washington is UW), and offers little by way of differentiation.
Yes, there are other Victoria Universities out there. To me thatâs a case of sticking with the name and marketing it more cleverly to be the dominant oneâand forcing others to retrench. Where did the Kiwi desire to be number one go? Actually, how bad was the confusion, as, on the evidence, Iâm unconvinced.
If itâs about attracting foreign students, then alumnus Callum Osborneâs suggestion of Victoria University of New Zealand is one example to trade on the nation brand, which rates highly.
There were many ways this could have gone, and at each turn amateurism and defeatism appeared, at least to my eyes, to be the themes. #UnWell
I like apples. So youâre anti pears then. No, I just prefer apples. So you hate pears. I never said that. Fucking pear hater. I donât hate pears! Yes you do. You make me sick. Scum.
Then, within days, it played out pretty much exactly like this when Frank Oz Tweeted that he did not conceive of Bert and Ernie as gay. Or how Wil Wheaton can never seem to escape false accusations that he is anti-trans or anti-LGBQ, to the point where he left Mastodon. In his words (the link is mine):
I see this in the online space all the time now: mobs of people, acting in bad faith, can make people they donât know and will likely never meet miserable, or even try to ruin their lives and careers (look at what they did to James Gunn). And those mobsâ bad behaviors are continually rewarded, because itâs honestly easier to just give them what they want. We are ceding the social space to bad people, because they have the most time, the least morals and ethics, and are skilled at relentlessly attacking and harassing their targets. It only takes few seconds for one person to type âfuck offâ and hit send. That person probably doesnât care and doesnât think about how their one grain of sand quickly becomes a dune, with another person buried beneath it.
Oh goodness, what fun twitter was in the early days, a secret bathing-pool in a magical glade in an enchanted forest ⌠But now the pool is stagnant âŚ
To leave that metaphor, let us grieve at what twitter has become. A stalking ground for the sanctimoniously self-righteous who love to second-guess, to leap to conclusions and be offended â worse, to be offended on behalf of others they do not even know ⌠It makes sensible people want to take an absolutely opposite point of view.
Not that long ago I was blocked by a claimed anti-Zionist Tweeter who exhibited these very traits, and I had to wonder whether he was a troll who was on Twitter precisely to stir hatred of Palestinians. With bots and fake accounts all over social media (I now report dozens of bots daily on Instagram, which usually responds with about five messages a day saying they had done something, leaving thousands going back years untouched), you have to wonder.
Years ago, too, a Facebook post I made about someone in Auckland adopting an American retail phrase (I forget what it was, as I don’t use it, but it was ‘Black’ with a weekday appended to it) had the daughter of two friends who own a well known fashion label immediately jump to ‘Why are you so against New Zealand retailers?’ I was “unfriended” (shock, horror) over this, but because I’m not Wil Wheaton, this didn’t get to the Retailers’ Association mobilizing all its members to have me kicked off Facebook. It’s a leap to say that a concern about the creeping use of US English means I hate retailers, and all but the most up-tight would have understood the context.
This indignant and often false offence that people take either shows that they have no desire to engage and learn something, and that they are in reality pretty nasty, or that they have one personality in real life and another on social media, the latter being the one where the dark side gets released. Reminds me of a churchgoer I know: nice for a period on Sundays to his fellow parishioners but hating humanity the rest of the decade.
Some decent people I know on Twitter say they are staying, because to depart would let the bastards win, and I admire that in them. For now, Mastodon is a friendly place for me to be, even if I’m now somewhat wary after the way Wheaton was treated, but the way social media, in general, are is hardly pleasing. Those of us who were on the web early had an ideal in mind, of a more united, knowledgeable planet. We saw email become crappier because of spammers, YouTube become crappier because of commenters (and Google ownership), and Wikipedia become crappier because it has been gamed at its highest levels, so it seems it’s inevitable, given the record of the human race, that social media would also descend with the same pattern. Like in General Election voting, too many are self-interested, and will act against their own interests, limiting any chance they might have for growth in a fairer society. To borrow Stephen’s analogy, we can only enjoy the swimming pool if we don’t all pee in it.
Above: I must report and block dozens of Instagram accounts a day, not unlike getting over the 200-a-day mark on Facebook in 2014.
For the last few days, I made my Twitter private. It was the only time in 11 years of being on the service where I felt I needed that level of privacy; I only made things public again when I realized that I couldnât actually contact people who werenât already following me.
However, it was relatively blissful. Accounts with automated following scripts were blocked as I had to approve them manually. I had far fewer notifications. And I only heard directly back from people I liked.
It actually reminded me of the âold daysâ. Itâs why Mastodon appeals: since there were only a million people on there at the end of last year, it felt like Twitter of old (even if it has already descended far enough for actor Wil Wheaton to get abused, compelling him to leave).
The quieter few days also got me thinking: I had far more business success prior to social media. I was blogging at Beyond Branding, and that was a pretty good outlet. I emailed friends and corresponded like pen pals. Those werenât fleeting friendships where the other party could just âlikeâ what you said. If I really think about it, social media have done very little in terms of my business.
Iâm not saying that social media donât have a purposeâa viral Tweet that might get quoted in the press could be useful, I supposeâbut I really didnât need them to be happy in my work and my everyday life.
Since giving up updating my Facebook wall in 2017, I havenât missed telling everyone about what Iâm up to, because I figured that the people who needed to know would know. Twitter remained a useful outlet because there are some people on there whose interactions I truly value, but as you can surmise from what I said above, the number of notifications didnât matter to me. I donât need the same dopamine hit that others do when someone likes or re-Tweets something of theirs.
Interestingly, during this time, I logged into Whatsapp, an app I load once every three months or so since I have a few friends on it. I saw a video sent to me by Stefan Engeseth:
When I look at my Instagram stats, theyâre back to around 2015 levels, and with these current trends, my usage will drop even further as we head into 2019.
And I really donât mind. The video shows just why social media arenât what theyâre cracked up to be, and why they arenât ultimately healthy for us.
I can add the following, that many of you who read this blog know: Facebook is full of bots, with false claims about their audience, and engages in actual distribution of questionable invasive software, charges Iâve levelled at the company for many years, long before the world even heard of Christopher Wylie. Twitter is also full of bots but actually disapproves of services that help them identify them; they have double standards when it comes to what you can and canât say; and, perhaps most sadly, those people who have viewpoints that are contrary to the mainstream or the majority are shat on by disorganized gangs of Tweeters. Thatâs not liberty. Instagram is also full of botsâlike when I was on Facebook, when I reported dozens to hundreds of bots a dayâand there seems to be no end to them; it also lies when it talks about how its advertising works. Given all of these problems, why would I provide these services with my precious time?
I engage with these social media in more and more limited fashion and I wouldnât be surprised if Iâm completely away from these big tech names in due course.
Itâs not as though young people are active on them, so the idea that they are services where you can get the next generation of customers is bogus. If you say youâre on Facebook, you might be considered an old-timer now. I asked a Year 11 student here on work experience what he used. Facebook wasnât one of them. He said most of his friends Snapchatted, while he was in to Reddit. He didnât like Facebook because it wasnât real, and we have a generation who can spot the BS and the conceit behind it.
It does make the need for services such as Duck Duck Go even greater, for us to get unbiased information not filtered by Googleâs love of big corporations, in its quest to rid the web of its once meritorious nature. Google is all about being evil.
As we near the 2020s, a decade which we hope will be more caring and just than the ones before, itâs my hope that we can restore merit to the system and that we find more ethical alternatives to the big names. I canât see as great a need to show off fake lives on social media when itâs much more gratifying, for me at least, to return to what I did at the beginning of the century and let the work speak for itself.
This post was originally going to be about Facebook lying. It still is, just not in the way originally conceived.
Those who follow this blog know that, on Instagram, I get alcohol advertising. Alcohol is one of the categories you can restrict on Facebook. Instagram claims that it relies on your Facebook ad preferences to control what advertising you see. That is a lie, and itâs still a lie even as of today (with an ad for Johnnie Walker in my feed). I turned off alcohol advertising in Facebook ages ago, and itâs made no difference to what I see on Instagram.
What it doesnât tell you is that Instagram keeps its own set of advertising interests, which can be found at www.instagram.com/accounts/access_tool/ads_interests, but itâs only accessible on the web version, which no one ever really checks out. When I last checked on August 18, you could still see a snippet of these interests, and they are completely different to those that I have on Facebook (where I go in to delete my interests regularly, something which, I might add, I should actually not have to do since I opted out of interest-based advertising on Facebook, which means that Facebook should have no need to collect preferences, but I digress). You cannot edit your Instagram ad preferences. They are, like the Facebook ones, completely laughable and bear no resemblance to my real interests. Advertisers: caveat venditor.
As of now, Instagram no longer lists ad interests for me, though those alcohol ads still show up.
So, Instagram lies about Facebook ad preferences affecting your Instagram advertising, because they donât.
And as late as August 18, because Instagram kept its own set of preferences, it was lying about its reliance on Facebook ad preferences.
And today, Instagram might still be lying because while it doesnât show your preferences on Instagram any more, Facebook ad preferences still have no effect on Instagram advertising. As far as I can tell, even though the Instagram ad preference page is blank, it still relies on a separate set of preferences that is now secret and, as before, not editable.
But we are talking Big Tech in Silicon Valley. Google lies, Facebook lies. You just have to remember that this is par for the course and there is no need to believe anything they say. Even in a year when Facebook is under fire, they continue to give ammo to its critics. This makes me very happy now that there is a bodyâthe EUâthat has the cohones to issue fines, something that its own countryâs authorities are either too weak or too corrupt to do.
