Linus Torvalds Says Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram Are 'A Disease'

I used to be quite active in a guitar forum. It was almost like a family - complete with crazy fights and arguments too! I bought and sold several guitars, amps, pedals, etc too. Not cheap stuff either, I would send £500+ to a random stranger and trust them to send me the guitar. That was how well the community integrated. People built up real respect, and you could rely on the fact they didn't want to lose it. That forum (probably the biggest in the UK) doesn't exist anymore.

I wouldn't even dream of having a Facebook account, nevermind participating in a community on there to that degree. I wouldn't even send £1 to a random person on Facebook!

Every subreddit is constantly in the process of eternal September, which kills the dynamics of getting to know one another that were common on forums.

Social media that is good cannot have advertising and cannot be an algorithmic Skinner box that maximizes engagement.

I am starting to think of competing with Facebook as creating online tribes that are costly, perhaps even financially very costly, but full of rich directed action. Sometimes like the dynamics of a church, where users are collated into tribes of limited size.

Bob: If you had to fix one thing about the networked world, what would it be?

Linus: Nothing technical. But, I absolutely detest modern "social media"—Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. It's a disease. It seems to encourage bad behavior.

I think part of it is something that email shares too, and that I've said before: "On the internet, nobody can hear you being subtle". When you're not talking to somebody face to face, and you miss all the normal social cues, it's easy to miss humor and sarcasm, but it's also very easy to overlook the reaction of the recipient, so you get things like flame wars, etc., that might not happen as easily with face-to-face interaction.

But email still works. You still have to put in the effort to write it, and there's generally some actual content (technical or otherwise). The whole "liking" and "sharing" model is just garbage. There is no effort and no quality control. In fact, it's all geared to the reverse of quality control, with lowest common denominator targets, and click-bait, and things designed to generate an emotional response, often one of moral outrage.

Add in anonymity, and it's just disgusting. When you don't even put your real name on your garbage (or the garbage you share or like), it really doesn't help.

I'm actually one of those people who thinks that anonymity is overrated. Some people confuse privacy and anonymity and think they go hand in hand, and that protecting privacy means that you need to protect anonymity. I think that's wrong. Anonymity is important if you're a whistle-blower, but if you cannot prove your identity, your crazy rant on some social-media platform shouldn't be visible, and you shouldn't be able to share it or like it.

Oh well. Rant over. I'm not on any social media (I tried G+ for a while, because the people on it weren't the mindless usual stuff, but it obviously never went anywhere), but it still annoys me.