But at some point, there will be no skip button. You know it, I know it, we all know it. This is like the creepy uncle who starts out by giving you candy and playing football in the yard. Then he wants you to sit on his lap before candy or football, but you can jump off whenever, until the day, he won’t let you. That is what these companies have been doing. I still remember the arm twisting they did when they took over youtube and we all liked youtube so much, we ended up giving in to it.
The end game for them is to own all your personal information and have total control over your online activity. Them giving you a skip button is a fake comfort. They probably already know where you live too.
For my part, I have just accepted that my basic bitch info is out there. Whatever I haven’t shared myself, have been shared either by a phone book service in my country or by databrokers who have sold my info to random companies and scammers.
Anonymity online is an illusion unless you are a very tech savvy which most of us are not.
It took them less than a decade to make us accept this new order online. From 2010 to 2015 more or less.
Personally, I miss when online communities were places where you shared things you found online. I miss when it was a place where you could personalize your profiles and where people still enjoyed reading blogs and things like that.
I miss when the internet was for people and not for corporations.
It was scary back then too, with pedos, hackers and so on, but it does hit differently when corporations are in control of how we interact with one another and they get to set the rules for what they can demand of you before connecting you with their platforms.
I do hope that someday this corporate chokehold on the internet will collapse and we will see a revival of true free and creative “social media” like it used to be. I miss the blogs and the forums and the art sharing sites that didn’t suck ass like they do nowadays.