Alternative social media sites
People are increasingly unhappy with the increasing (what they perceive as) abuses some internet companies are employing as part of their use. That’s obvious everywhere in 2018. Just look at any link shared about one of the big companies and the top-voted comments. Part of the issue is that the companies keep changing from the reasons people liked using them. Also, the companies seem to want always to collect more information than people want to give them, even though they could probably make a profit with just the basic amount of information people don’t mind them having.
For example, Facebook is still doing a decent job in many things, including allowing people to share information, links, images, etc. All they have to do is respect (protect) freedom of speech, do not allow trolls to false-report content, do not collect more information about people than they generally offer in public (their hobbies, interests, ballpark economic status, general location, general age, etc), stop forcing people to send them private/sensitive information like picture ID card photos, stop locking people out of their accounts, and just let people use their platform. It would also help if they stopped worrying about “fake news” which it isn’t their job to try to filter – people will have to learn that not all sources are reliable, and all they have to do is look at the source to see if it is, and no one can really do this for them – which is something they are already learning, irregardless of big companies efforts to “reduce fake news.” If they did this stuff, they could still turn a good profit and at the same time maintain their user-base’s good will. Twitter works this way, not really worrying about “fake” accounts or news, because users themselves can follow or unfollow people they want in their feed, which is less work for the company and less aggravation for well-meaning users.
Anyway, since it seems many companies are not willing to do this kind of thing, a lot of people are looking for and suggesting alternative platforms. Here are some we’ve collected from others’ suggestions.
Social media alternatives:
- Voat – Like reddit
- 4chan – sort of like reddit
- ello – sort of like Facebook
- 9gag – for gifs and pictures, kind of like Imgur
- Mastodon – like Twitter
Search engine alternatives:
- DuckDuckGo.com – now has 30m uses and rising
- Searx.me – lots of people recently are using this even instead of DDG
A netizen’s reason for using Searx.me: “When I do a search for a website, searx.me doesn’t automatically slap the wikipedia entry as the top link. I’m looking for the website, not the opinion of a bunch of SJW shut-ins about it.”
\\
