I am of two minds.
A large part of the problem with social media of any kind is the interests and agendas of the organizations who fund the service are often opaque and definitely not innocent. Also the fact that as a user of a service that makes their money from selling advertising against the data you provide – you are not the customer. 1
The bigger issue, at least in my opinion, is that social media is not a healthy thing for any individual to consume.2 The psychological impact of seeing the perpetual “highlight reel” of everyone you remotely know – and comparing it to the “behind the scenes” of your individual daily life – is not healthy. These companies have built features to be addictive. The dopamine drip of notifications, updates, chat, ads, video, etc. all lead to an entire populace of people inundated with distractions from much more important things.3
Distraction is good, I enjoy playing video games as an example, but building something to purposefully prey on human behavior is the worst.
I’m not saying the Wikimedia moment couldn’t do it better, with more transparency and with the users as the customers. What I question is, should they?
But, to have a space to talk to like-minded Wikimedians that isn’t controlled by a terrible silicon-valley douchemobile would be very welcome. Something that would foster a healthy, ongoing community to talk to other contributors. A place to discuss the meta-work of Wikimedia projects in a space removed from the content. Not a talk page on-wiki, where the talk still feels like talking about the work, but in a separate venue. 4 There are Facebook groups already, but that’s not ideal. Not every is on Facebook and we’re giving more eyeballs – and predatory data collection practices – to a for-profit company. We do have in-person events which fulfill some of this need. But I feel our movement largely relies too much on these rare, expensive, and often inadvertently exclusionary in-person events.
A man can dream.
Inception for this post via: https://www.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/comments/87bupa/imagine_that_jimmy_wales_and_the_other_good/
Be sure to read the linked article for more context. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/opinion-kuttner-facebook-regulation_us_5ab7ec8be4b054d118e41c76
Footnotes
- http://www.rushkoff.com/you-are-not-facebooks-customer/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Facebook#Psychological_effects
- https://blog.bufferapp.com/psychology-of-facebook
- I could make a water cooler vs bowling alley analogy of spaces to talk about work stuff that isn’t a conference room or an office. That seems a little to obtuse. :)