The Culling

The Culling: Facebook

There have always been good reasons to delete your Facebook account, but my inactivity over the last few years pretty much made the issue go away. If I ain’t using it, what harm is there letting the account go fallow?

This changed in the past few weeks, when Mark Zuckerberg decided to become macho or something (tip: You will never ever be macho, Zuck), pay fealty to God King Trump, and then decided to:

  • Stop most moderation and fact-checking on Meta sites, such as FB.
  • Replace moderation with “community notes”.
  • Kill all DEI initiatives.
  • In the name of “free speech” allow more slurs, name-calling and such to be permitted, especially and specifically against LGBTQ+ folks.

This is all in addition to the already running:

  • Endless, perpetual “Suggested For You” that never stops. It’s a useless sludge waterfall, and you are nailed to the bottom of it.
  • Reels, reels, reels! The “See less of this” when you click the X to close one is a jokey kind of placebo. Like the vampire kids in Salem’s Lot, they’ll be floating outside your window and scratching on the glass again soon enough. And forever.
  • Terrible, low-rent ads, but now with terrible, low-rent AI-generated crap in them.
  • A lot more AI sludge in general, including cringe-inducing (at best) AI people you can interact with (or rather, the ones they haven’t pulled yet after the not-insignificant backlash to them).
  • And not forgetting that FB executives have always been OK with people dying in exchange for increased engagement (revenue).

Today, I requested all of my FB info (mostly bird photos and various doodles). I already made a post letting actual human people know I’m deleting the account and pointing out I am easy to find elsewhere. The next step will be to request the deletion once I have my big ol’ FB info bundle (UPDATE: Shortly after I posted this, I got the info, just under 400MB worth at “medium” quality), then probably wait some period of time, probably 30 days, similar to the Instagram deletion.

It seems obvious now, but corporate controlled social media can probably never work. Mastodon might be a bit clunky, but there’s no billionaire or VC money behind it, just a bunch of federated servers relying on donations from individuals.

UPDATE: My Valentine’s Day gift to myself will be going Facebook-free.

The Culling, 2024 summary

It feels like more, but the total amount of culling this year has been relatively small, though a few major sites/services are included:

  • Instagram. The platform is garbage, the company is worse, and I stopped posting more than a year ago. This one was easy.
  • LinkedIn. I barely used LinkedIn at all, so nuking it was also easy.
  • Substack. Their stance on actual Nazis made me move my newsletter (which then died of neglect) and also unsubscribe to about half a dozen newsletters, including several I paid for. The platform is also clearly working to entrap writers into their “ecosystem”. Those that stay may ultimately regret it, Nazis or not.
  • verge.com. I normally wouldn’t include a mere website, but The Verge decided to offer an optional subscription, but also decided to just arbitrarily block content at random (?), which annoyed me enough to just remove the bookmark. I’ll miss David Pierce’s gushing over every terrible tech company’s latest thing.
  • Posthaven. In my quest to find a WordPress alternative, Postahaven was a finalist. But if you don’t pay for a full year (month by month) they nuke your site, which was enough for me to give it a pass.

Dumping Substack and The Verge have saved me the most time, purging LinkedIn also provided some relief for my inbox.

What will get culled in 2025? We’ll know soon!

The Culling: The Verge

Yep, it happened.

Yesterday I went to the Verge homepage, but never clicked on anything. I appear to have not looked at any articles in the last few days, judging from my browser history. This makes sense, because I’ve de-prioritized the site since it added an “optional” subscription.

Today I clicked on the lead article and got this:

Yes, a paywall on the feature article, which was–hold onto your hats–about rearranging your home screen app icons. I did not get a Verge subscription, nor did I try any trickery to allow me to read the article. Instead, I closed the tab, removed the Verge from my new tab page list of bookmarks and will rarely check the site in the future.

I don’t begrudge the Verge wanting to extract money from its readers–you gotta cover expenses! But the way they are doing it sucks, and I’m not going to reward them (apart from the volume of clickbait junk opinion pieces is still too high, as well) with my money.

A partial/ambiguous paywall is bad design. It just is. I’ve barely looked at the site in the past week, so I don’t know if I’m getting hit by the paywall at random, if I reached my limit of “free” articles, or the feature article is paywalled by design. The pop-up doesn’t say, and I’m not going to dig around on my own to find out.

Asking people to fork over money and still serving them ads is also bad design. And tacky.

I don’t care about the newsletters. It’s not an enticement.

In a time when subscription fatigue is a real thing, the Verge has taken probably the second-worst approach to adding one (the worst would just be a complete paywall. I wonder if they’d still have ads then? Maybe!)

I don’t know how their two markets compare, but the way Ars Technica does subscriptions feels right to me:

  • If you don’t subscribe, the site is plastered with ads. Gotta pay the bills!
  • If you subscribe, you get some perks:
    • Article PDFs to download
    • A better layout for articles and the site in general
    • Customization options for text size, width and additional themes
    • No ads

Notice the last one? You get an ad-free experience and, knowing it is ad-free, subscribers get a layout that flows nicely without having to accommodate ads.

No content is locked behind a paywall. The sub is reasonable–as low as $25 per year. I like supporting the site this way and I get a nicer experience (to be clear, I do subscribe to Ars Technica).

Anyway, I suspect the Verge will do fine, since subs or not, they are still running ads. I’ll miss some of their content (but not their awful comments system). Having culled the site, I now have a tiny bit more time to devote to cat pics, so in a way, it’s win-win for me.

The Culling: Posthaven

Posthaven was not bad and was a finalist in my “replace WordPress” quest/fool’s errand. But I just wasn’t using it, so even $5 a month was too much. It turns out if you stop paying before having made 12 monthly payments, they nuke your site, posts and account. But you get a thank-you message for trying them!

I assume they figure you won’t be back.

I guess I probably won’t be, if I have to commit to a full year to avoid starting all over from scratch again. I’m curious how well this model is working for them.

(And yes, this particular culling was inspired by the IG culling. It’s cullings all the way down.)

The Culling: Instagram

It turns out the last time I posted to Instagram was July 30, 2023, over 16 months ago. That seems to be a good indication of how much value IG brings to my life currently.

I downloaded my data–786 MB worth–then made a post today, announcing I would be nuking the account (more precisely, I used the metaphor of sending it into a black hole). Yes, I could just leave the account alone, “just in case” but I looked over the last few notifications and it appears that sexy bots with strange names are liking my posts. That makes me feel a bit icky. I’m pretty sure I do not need validation from sexy bots with strange names. I will not miss the site.

In a few days, I’ll go back and delete the account. I’m giving the handful of people I had “friended” there a little notice. Do I miss their posts? I mean, maybe a tiny bit, but not enough to keep me active and willing to post on a platform and through a company that sees genocide as a fair trade for engagement.

If I really want attention for my photos, there’s always Pixelfed or some other site or service. But I am finding a kind of unnameable pleasure in stripping away these sites and platforms that attract billions (of sexy bots). Maybe I’m regressing to my teen rebellion stage, pushing off the man, or the mainstream, or whatever. The mental headspace it clears up is nice, and the bonus is I no longer have that insufferable teen angst to go along with the rebellion. It’s just pure rebellion now, baby!

Here’s a photo of the sun-dappled Brunette River I took yesterday that you won’t find on Instagram:

The Culling: Further considerations

Maybe the cloud isn’t all that. A few years ago I got a Synology NAS and it works pretty well. All of my photos from my phone are backed up effortlessly and I can access them from mobile using Synology apps. I can easily backup my camera photos, too, if I took the time to set it up. Right now I pay for the family plan for Microsoft 365, so Jeff and I can each get 1TB of OneDrive storage and access to the Microsoft Office apps.

But Word still drives me crazy, its permissions often create problems where none should exist, and there are free alternatives, like LibreOffice and OnlyOffice. My next renewal is in April, I’m thinking I might go with the NAS and open source apps instead. I just need to be prepared to provide tech support for the inevitable friction from making the move!

Basically, I am feeling this urge to pare back everything to The Olden Days of Computing, where everything was mostly local and the internet was for cats. I’m not saying I want to go back to floppy disks, but some things were better way back when.

The Culling: LinkedIn

I realized I hadn’t used my LinkedIn account for many years, and rarely at all.

I came to this realization because news began spreading today that Microsoft decided to use everyone’s LinkedIn accounts to train generative AI–by opting people in without telling them.

So with a few seconds of reflection (all that was merited), I closed my account. In two weeks it will be permanently gone, or perhaps “gone” because I have zero trust that these big tech companies actually purge data or honour the requests made by users.

Lifehacker story: LinkedIn Is Using Your Data to Train AI (but You Can Stop It)

And now, a cat:

I am changing email accounts yet again (confirmed)

This is just for my primary email account, which is used mostly for receiving newsletters and such. I have various others I use for various other things, but they get little in the way of messages. They mostly just sit idle in Thunderbird, just the way I like it!

My recent(ish) email history:

  • After years of using my ISP email, I switched to Gmail back when it was still in beta (to be fair, it was in beta for a very long time). The oldest messages are from June, 2005–nearly 20 years ago! This was so long ago that Google did not yet have a reputation for killing off apps, nor was it known for being an ad monopolist harvesting the data of its user base in order to serve them “personalized” ads and engaging in lots of other questionable shenanigans. I keep the account active, because there’s over 22,000 messages in it and some of it might, possibly, be useful. I do a periodic export of the data.
  • When I decided to move from Gmail, I went to HEY. HEY was kind of goofy, didn’t integrate well with other apps, but did some neat things with email. I also liked the UI. But the leadership of its parent company revealed themselves (as I’ve noted before) to be Musk-supporting tech bros, and I had no interest in sending them my money. I cancelled my yearly subscription and moved again, to…
  • Outlook! I already had a sporadically-used Outlook account, so the move was easy in the sense that the account was already there. Over time, I moved over the various newsletters and things. More recently, it has been revealed that Microsoft, intent to be a kind of Google Jr. when it comes to data harvesting and advertising, “shares” your email with literally hundreds of “partners”. So, just as bad as Google. Maybe worse!
  • After sampling both Fastmail and Proton Mail, I opted to pay for a year of Proton and see how it goes.

Now begins the task of moving the bulk of my mail over to Proton. I suspect my approach will be to do this very gradually, to minimize the drudgery. I’ll report more on actually using Proton Mail soon. So far, the UI is pretty clean, but it is mostly just email, not really trying to break no ground. But it doesn’t share my data with anyone (unless they’re not telling, which would make me sad).

Should I change email yet again?

A few years ago, I switched my primary email from Gmail to Outlook. My thought process was:

  • Google is the avatar for privacy-violating, data-harvesting “you are the product, not the customer” among the big tech companies. I didn’t want Google to oversee, prod, pry and otherwise harvest my email in exchange for, “But hey, it’s free!”
  • I chose Outlook because I already had an outlook.com account I was nominally using.

The switch took many months, but now virtually all of my email goes to my Outlook account. My Gmail account is largely vestigial at this point, though I do keep in active, in case I need to log in and find something from the Before Times.

You might see where this is going if you look at the first bullet point again. Under Satya Nadella, Microsoft has started turning into Google Jr., with an emphasis on ads, data collection/harvesting and everything I disliked so much about Google.

For example, this, when you use the new Outlook email client (which will eventually be mandatory across all platforms):

That 772 number varies by region (it can be even higher). I can duck some of this by using Thunderbird as my email client, which I do, and I’ve generally been happy with it.

But better yet may be using an independent company for my email, one that treats customers as customers, and not data to be mined. This means paying, of course, which is the primary disadvantage. I did this once before with HEY, and I found it a bit weird, but it brought some innovation to the email space. Then the owners of HEY revealed themselves to be Musk-championing tech bros of the worst sort, so I had to kill HEY. This was a bit painful, so I’m reluctant to do it again.

On the other hand, I write very few messages. Most of my email is in the form of newsletters, updates and things like that. This makes moving my account less painful than it otherwise might be.

The two options I’m considering are:

  • Fastmail
  • Proton Mail

Both can integrate with Thunderbird, both have web clients (Proton’s is prettier, the Fastmail client is more just functional), pricing is similar, though Fastmail offers more storage (30GB vs. 15 GB). Proton offers additional privacy-focused services, though both emphasize privacy and security.

I am currently undecided, but doing a trial of each right now (Proton’s is technically costing me one U.S. dollar for a month).

I’ll have to decide one way or another fairly soon, so I’ll have an update in a few weeks. Whee!

Substack makes the latest chapter of The Culling easy!

NOTE: This post is updated semi-regularly with any relevant news on the mentioned newsletters.

Substack has been in the tech/media news lately, for all the wrong reasons. Their position on moderation can be roughly summed up as:

  • Sex is bad
  • Incitement to violence is bad
  • Everything else, including actual Nazis, is OK!

After re-affirming that they would not actively moderate content on their platform, and only offering to remove a few newsletters specifically brought to their attention, a number of prominent newsletters opted to leave Substack, with most moving to Ghost, which, unlike Substack, is not a platform, just a company that provides a blog/platform service and that’s about it. Others went to Buttondown1My own piddly newsletter, recently renamed Doodlings and Noodlings, is debuting on Buttondown this very month, Beehiiv, other hosts or moved to self-hosting.

My stance on this situation is:

  • Substack is free to choose whom they host on their platform
  • I, likewise, can choose to not have any paid subscriptions on Substack, since my payments are helping to fund a lot of hate. See here for details: All the garbage I found on Substack in 1 hour
  • I also can choose to move my own newsletter elsewhere, which I have done

I’ve gone a step further now, by unsubscribing to all free Substack newsletters. In every case, I have written a polite message to the newsletter author letting them know why I have unsubbed. I’m hoping some of them will switch to other hosts, but at this point I think the ones who haven’t are probably leaning more toward not moving. And that’s their choice–as is mine to unsub!

I’ll update this post with any word back I may hear from these newsletters. The two I most recently unsubbed to are:

  • Austin Kleon (paid)
  • Experimental History (free)

UPDATE, January 29, 2024: Apparently I subscribed to a lot of Substack newsletters! 😛 Here’s more I’ve unsubscribed from:

  • Design Lobster (free–no pay option exists)
  • Links I Would Gchat You If We Were Friends (free–no pay option exists). UPDATE, January 29, 2024: The author wrote me back to say she has been in touch with Substack execs and is looking into moving to a different platform. Good to hear!
  • The Status Kuo (free, paid option exists)
  • GameDiscoverCo (free, paid option exists). I didn’t email to explain why I was unsubscribing, probably because I doubt they will move.
  • I’m Fine I’m Fine Just Understand (free, paid option exists). This one is weird, because it’s a comic about a person transitioning and Substack famously already had an exile a few years back for hosting openly transphobic writers. I also didn’t explain why I’m unsubscribing here.

The Culling: iPhone Live Photos

UPDATE: Despite only being in the Live Photos folder, iCloud managed to select and delete more than 100 non-Live Photos, so I had to recover them. Glad to see Apple's tens of billions in profit is going into making iCloud such a seamless experience!

The number of times I have used Live Photos as intended–to make a cute animated video or something–is zero. Well, not zero, because another use is to select a different frame as the key frame, and this is something I’ve used a few times.

I have over 12,000 Live Photos dating back to 2017. This is not a good percentage.

The real reason I leave the feature on is silly–to mute the irritating fake iPhone “shutter” sound when you take a photo. I’ve railed against this particular design choice before.

A more reasonable solution might be to just use the mute switch on my iPhone 12 to silence the shutter sound, and all others. After all, it’s the 21st century, I don’t need my phone squawking at me like I’m some caveman only capable of responding to audio cues.

While I ponder being sensible and changing my ways, I noticed my Apple One™ plan, which grants me and my partner a combined 200 GB of storage, was getting close to full. What to do?

All of my iPhone photos are automagically backed up on OneDrive, with its much more capacious capacity, so I could safely turf them from iCloud. I figured I could keep them on my phone, since it still has plenty of room, but Apple doesn’t give you this option. Delete from anywhere and the photos (live or otherwise) get deleted everywhere.

Dumb.

But like I said, they are already backed up, so I went to icloud.com and deleted all 12,000+ photos. As it turned out, this took awhile, because you can only delete up to 1,000 at a time and there’s no way I could find to just automatically select 1,000, so I had to adjust a few times, but eventually got it down to zero.

It freed up an impressive 50 GB of storage.

I now must decide if I want to turn off Live Photos altogether. I probably should. Probably.

The Culling continues: Amazon edition

After years of having Amazon Prime, I finally cancelled it today. The process was not terribly difficult, but I did have to wade through several “Please don’t go, look at all the stuff you get!” pages to get to the point where I could actually cancel. I’m afraid their plaintive pitch persuaded me not! I did elect to let my current membership expire on renewal, rather than get prorated the few bucks back by cancelling right this moment in a fit of pique.

Here’s why I’m cancelling, in case other Canadians are considering (American Prime is a bit different, so I wouldn’t really compare the two):

  • Ordering far less often from Amazon
    • Harder to find what I want
    • To the point above, there is a vast sea of knock-offs and junk on amazon.ca now
    • Pricing is often just so-so
    • More stuff not covered by Prime shipping
    • That 2-day shipping? lol, nope! (Well, sometimes, but increasingly rare)
    • 11% off is not a deal, even if you say it is!
    • Everyone else is copying Prime Days now, often with better pricing
  • I can count the number of things I’ve watched on Prime Video on one hand. One was the execrable Moonfall, but that one’s more on me than Amazon, to be fair.
    • The upcoming move to charge more for “ad-free” Prime Video didn’t exactly make my socks roll up and down in delight, either
  • I never listen to Amazon Music, especially after the basic version was turned into a giant shuffle mode. If I want to listen to the radio, I can do that now, for free.
  • Never read anything through Prime Reading. My Kindle still doesn’t know that left-handed people exist, and Amazon is making token efforts at best to control the flood of AI-generated garbage sluicing into the Kindle store.
  • Took advantage of the Twitch freebies maybe twice? I don’t remember what I got.
  • The more information that comes out on how Amazon does business, the more comfortable I am in not sending money to an apparently Very Evil Empire

And that’s it! I look forward to buying local more often! Sort of.