181–190 of 516 posts
LinkedIn is a social network and I wish there was an alternative.
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Their use of LinkedIn is for local and semi-local professional networks. It's like if you use Nextdoor for your street. And of course those Europeans use LinkedIn for the network effect (even though LinkedIn is just a pathetic sad dead mall now, so most are doing so for an illusion), because other prior waves of Europeans also used LinkedIn, and so on. Domestic or regional alternatives falter because everyone demands…
I would prefer to live in a free country, where I can choose my services from among a couple of options. But the government you appeal to should install and execute laws to protect citizens by forcing foreign players to abide by local rulse or be forced to declare that they are not, in large red letters so no-one can say they did not know (legalese small-print does not suffice as we know).
What you want is the social graph, but you are forced to also use FBs shitty app to access it. These social media apps never had a single useful feature besides the graph itself.
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That response reeks of astonishing arrogance. It doesn’t surprise me that nearly 50% of Americans voted for Donald Trump he perfectly embodies that mindset. Do you genuinely believe you are superior to the rest of the world? What you call “innovation” or a “better product” is often nothing more than the creation of dominant market positions through massive, capital deployment, followed by straightforward rent extract…
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The reason we didn't was critical mass. Everyone was already on linkedin and there wasn't really a reason to pick something else until the US started becoming a nuisance. It's marketing, not technical.
I'm sure an EU alternative will come up now that the US is no longer a trustworthy partner. A lot of people like myself now have ethical issues with using american products (especially from big tech) and there's a lot of demand for EU-local stuff that wasn't there before.
If you fly to US, Singapore, and many other countries these days, your face will be photographed and the photo will be matched to your passport photo via facial recognition (the machine tells you that outright, and does the action on the spot). They also take your right hand fingerprints.
I think flying to a country is a whole lot different than a little tickmark on a website, sorry. Don't forget that if you fly to a country you are also bound by their laws. They can do anything to you as long as they can make it stick under their laws. It's one thing that people often don't realise when flying somewhere, you are basically giving a blanket submission to their laws! For this reason I have a long blackl…
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That response reeks of astonishing arrogance. It doesn’t surprise me that nearly 50% of Americans voted for Donald Trump he perfectly embodies that mindset. Do you genuinely believe you are superior to the rest of the world? What you call “innovation” or a “better product” is often nothing more than the creation of dominant market positions through massive, capital deployment, followed by straightforward rent extract…
> That response reeks of astonishing arrogance. It doesn’t surprise me that nearly 50% of Americans voted for Donald Trump he perfectly embodies that mindset. Do you genuinely believe you are superior to the rest of the world? What you call “innovation” or a “better product” is often nothing more than the creation of dominant market positions through massive, capital deployment, followed by straightforward rent extra…
Because the US had so much venture capital, during the time of the low interest rates it was basically free money so they could afford to throw it to the wall and see what sticks. 90% of them would sink but it didn't matter. That doesn't fly here.
Then, they used that money to subsidise adoption, and then once the users were hooked into rent extraction as the OP mentioned. We call this process enshittification these days, and it's a really predatory business practice.
European companies don't do that as much because we have more guardrails against it, and more importantly we didn't have random cash sloshing up the walls. American could do that especially because of the petrodollar. Once the dollar loses its international status it will be a lot harder to do (and it already is due to the rising interest rates).
It was no surprise that exactly with the rising interest rates all the companies started tightening up their subscriptions. Netflix, amazon, all exploding in cost and introducing ads. Same with meta's platforms.
"Your European passport is one quiet subpoena away"
Why does the subpoena need to be quiet? If I search my chats with ChatGPT for the word "quiet", I get a ridiculous number of results. "Quietly this, quietly that". It's almost like the new em dash.
There's many others all over this blog post I won't bother calling out.
"Understanding what I actually agreed to took me an entire weekend reading 34 pages of legal documents."
Yeah I'll bet it did. Or it took an hour of back and forth with ChatGPT loaded up with those 34 pages.
I get it, we all use AI, but I'm just so tired of seeing the unmistakable mark of AI language all over every single thing. For some reason it just makes me think "this person is lazy". The CEO of a company my friend works for used Claude to write an important letter to business partners recently and we were all galled at her lack of awareness of how AI-sloppified the thing was. I guess people just don't care anymore.
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Thank you so much for sharing this. Not only is it a great post, but the site invokes such warm feelings of an internet long lost.
True, I love the little cat chasing the mouse in particular.
A good reminder of how things actually work, but the article could use some more balancing… > Let that sink in. You scanned your European passport for a European professional network, and your data went exclusively to North American companies. Not a single EU-based subprocessor in the chain. LinkedIn is an American product. The EU has had 20 years to create an equally successful and popular product, which it failed t…
The "pull yourselves up by your bootstraps" advice has more weight when the person saying it hasn't taken control of all bootstraps for a good 75 years. This is this toxicity in the toxic relationship between the US and EU. Foot in our faces telling us to pick ourselves up. Ditto South America.