Mark Zuckerberg, the overlord of Facebook, recently announced some changes the site would be making to the newsfeed on people’s profiles that would keep them from seeing content from businesses, media, and other pages in favor of being able to see more posts from friends and family.
While on the surface this might seem like Facebook is only looking to improve the user experience and to look out for the “mental health” of people who frequent the site, the reality is something totally different.
They want to prevent people from seeing content that might offend them or challenge their belief system, believing this causes distress, when in reality they should be encouraging people to learn to disagree with each other in a civilized manner.
But that’s not all they are up to. They also want to make a pretty penny by forcing pages to buy Facebooks ads in order to have their content seen by their followers, which defeats the purpose of having a fan page to begin with.
Well, as a result of these changes and the apparent lack of care this company has for the principle of free speech, Facebook has lost billions, and things might be even more bleak in the future.
Why?
A new social media site is picking up steam and it’s unique angle is that it pays users to post.
Free Thought Project is reporting:
While the future of social media may seem bleak on the side of Facebook, there is also amazing news on the side of innovation and free thought. To those who’ve been paying attention, they saw the problem presented by so many people using a similar system that is ultimately controlled by those who have an interest in mining your data for profit, controlling the political narrative, and essentially creating a personal database on billions of people, the likes of which corrupt governments salivate over.
Instead of trying to change the system of Facebook from within, several individuals came together to build a new system—which showed the obsolescence of the old. Thus, Steemit was born.
The general concept of Steemit is similar to other blogging websites or social news websites like Reddit, but the text content is saved in a blockchain. Using a blockchain enables rewarding comments and posts with secure tokens of value.
Instead of becoming hubs for censorship and the centralization of power and wealth like other social media platforms and make hundreds of billions of dollars off content created by its users, Steemit bucked the system. Instead of leeching off the wealth created by user-generated content like Facebook does, Steemit returns most of its value back to the users by rewarding them with cryptocurrencies. As a result of this system, many people have begun to sustain themselves from the value created entirely on this platform.
In essence, Steemit creates an entire economy out of social media in which everyone—not just the platform owners—benefit from the creation of content. It is a beautiful model that is constantly being improved and its future is bright.
If you’re interested in finding out more about Steemit or joining it yourself, you can visit the site here.
What this site is doing is absolutely needed and necessary as Facebook and Twitter both attempt to exert total control over user experience and cherry pick what kind of information gets spread to its audience.
While Facebook is certainly not under obligation to allow all speech and they can choose who they allow to have a platform and who not to give one to, the bottom line is free speech as a principle ought to be practiced by all people, including Zuckerberg and company.
It’s foolish for Facebook to believe their company can and will last forever. If they continue to silence the worldview of certain users, they will suffer for it in the long run.
Contrary to popular leftist belief, no one is too big to fail.
