The US government spends a lot of time telling people to fear what Chinese companies could do with the data they get from our phones when we use something like TikTok, but they do nothing about things like this.
I’m online to connect with other real people and the ideas that live in their heads. I write to share those ideas with others, but I also write because writing helps clarify my thoughts and ideas. It’s practice for the many times I find myself needing to go into more detail and flesh out ideas in front of other people. Asking a chatbot to write this post wouldn’t give me mental exercise. It would remove the challenge of figuring out what I want to say and how I want to say it.
Humans don’t handle uncertainty well. They will seek out the path that has more certainty. You’re either providing that, or you’re not. If you’re not, you’re losing one of the important factors that impact retention. There’s a reason resignations are contagious. There’s a reason they go up right after layoffs or significant managerial change. We don’t like feeling uncertain.
Why did we think anything on the public internet was a place to let kids roam with no training?
Of course, when we create new laws or tools, we focus on the problem in front of us. Whether that be, in this case, trying to enforce an age restriction or requiring identity verification in some odd attempt at making it more difficult for people to engage in anonymous speech, we too often forget the details of how that would work exactly.
Think about it, services that tell you how many times your post has been shared on Twitter, auto-posting from a blog, automation involving automatic sharing of links, and scheduling of tweets, many of these things involve the API. Many of the tools we all use to share content on Twitter with minimal effort could either be gone or become more expensive next week. That will push a lot of excellent content out of the platform.