Battle with bots prompts purge of Amazon, Apple employee accounts on LinkedIn

I disagree in that I think that a lot more people should be doing this. The problem is that it is a lot harder to do this than to speak to the entire world. Private networks have been discouraged, not facilitated. Or more accurately, people were pulled into social networking with the promise of small private networks, and these companies wait until they reach a particular size to start a constant push towards opening up the networks and hiding the statistics about them.

Myspace was entirely a bunch of interlinked small private networks of friends. Everybody presented themselves as they liked to people that they knew (maybe barely knew, if you were an extrovert.) This was compromised by the networks deciding to automatically broadcast unrequested information, obviously like Facebook Beacon, but also "Bill just joined the group Guys Who Like Beer" and resetting/redesigning everyone's privacy settings every time they added a new beacon.

It was a very short step to exercising full editorial control over everyone's presence, which is the product. So they manipulate User A's presence to motivate User B whose presence they're manipulating to motivate User A. All in the service of increasing time browsing and the amount of information shared, hopefully maximizing the value of selling a few inches of the screen during that time browsing.

There will never be a significant incentive to stop intentionally alienating User A from User B. It would take away the primary tool that they use to maintain and grow the business and be a phase change in profitability. These are not companies providing real value, they are companies that hope to disrupt the production of real value and extract it. They only work as protected monopolies or trusts, because if there were commodity services that did what they do as a dumb pipe, their sites would be wastelands.

> most people just need to get the hell of the Internet instead of starting a blog or posting on social media.

No, people need a quiet, secure, consistent presence on the internet that does what they want and no more, doesn't try to hurt or confuse them for money, and doesn't need to be constantly futzed with to combat incursions by the host.

If I put a poster on the wall, I just have to dust it once or twice a year, and it will never decide to start associating my medical information to my Amazon purchases. That poster will tell my friends the types of paintings I like, without trying to tell its clients who my friends are (i.e. who would be friends with people who like the kinds of paintings I like), or even testing that poster for misinformation and removing it from the wall without telling me (or waiting to remove it and counting how many people put it up on their own wall as a result.)

People deserve a place to be safe on the internet. Instead, the motivations seem to be to make everything on the internet dangerous and constantly in flux so it a) constantly has to be engaged with, which serves eyeballs, and b) incursions of companies into your private life and your pockets can be successful.

Self-hosted blogs are a bad solution because they are hard to create, secure and maintain. Getting off the internet is a bad solution because it's a request to drop the cheapest, most comprehensive communications system imaginable because if you're a normal person you have nothing worth saying. My grandmother disagrees.

In other words, in a perfect world, the government requires LinkedIn and similar services to put users through KYC (i.e. demand proof-of-identity+income for sign-up)... and poof! These services cease to exist, because nobody's going to give them that for only the small amount of value LinkedIn provides people.