Aardvark Daily

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People are stupid

No, I'm not kidding. The sad truth is that there are a lot of really stupid people out there and I'm one of them.

What am I talking about?

I'm referring to the number of people who build incomes or entire businesses that are almost totally reliant on a third party company over which they have no control. Even worse, those third party companies have no phone number or other useful contact mechanism and no customer support.

Yes, you'd have to be really stupid to put yourself in a position where another company on which you are totally reliant, could shut you down in the blink of an eye and give you no means to even contact them when they do.

How could any sensible person or business take such a risk and why, despite so many tales of woe, do they continue to do so?

I am of course talking about the huge number of businesses that build their empire based on a social media presence.

There are millions of traders, small and large, to whom their Facebook or Instagram presence is crucial to their marketing, and thus their sales.

While everything is working smoothly there is no problem. They promote themselves through these social media platforms and customers beat a path to their door and the virtual cash-register attached to it.

Everyone is happy, the sun shines.

However, what do you do when something like this happens?

The business mentioned in that story is just one of the huge number that get destroyed every year by rogue moderation on the part of platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok and YouTube.

Sometimes, for no apparent reason, pages and accounts get suspended or totally deleted and in many cases, those affected have zero way of actually contacting someone in authority to have ths situation addressed.

At best you'll find an online form that allows you to file an appeal against the suspension or deletion but there's a 99.9 percent chance that they'll simply run that through the same AI system which issued the shutdown and the appeal will also be denied. Once that happens, you're stuffed.

By relying so heavily on these fickle and non-responsive platforms, businesses are taking on an enormous risk and simply hoping that when they open their doors in the morning, they still have access to their customers.

Such is the power of the social media tech-giants that people and businesses accept this situation without hesitation and risk the total destruction of what may be years of hard work -- in the blink of an AI's eye.

Now as I said, right now I'm one of these stupid people. I have three YouTube channels and if they were to be deleted it would effectively disconnect me from my over half a million subscribers and millions more casual viewers.

Fortunately I'm not as stupid as some so I'm still working hard to get my own video-server platform online and working. This won't replace YouTube but it will provide at least a fall-back position such that if YT's AI decides to get the huck with me, my regular viewers will know where to go and I'll still have an (albeit much reduced) audience of watchers.

I certainly wish that more individuals, organisations and businesses would also consider self-hosting, at least as a backup. Only by doing this can we create pressure for the mainstream social media platforms to lift their game and offer even a tiny modicum of support to those on who they rely for their content. Until then things look rather bleak for anyone who offends the AI gods that now have full control of these things.

Carpe Diem folks!

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