> a large number of people are required to use those services for their job, so they can get money, so they can put food on the table.

You mean 'influencers'?

Nothing of value has been lost.

> Worse these companies ingrain themselves into a lot of physical locations and data collection from other sources so your not free of them

Please can you provide an example. I can't say I've ever experienced such a thing (and would never GDPR opt-in to such data sharing even if the opportunity was there).

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tygon 4 hours ago | parent [-]

While, yes, influences of course use social media, most companies have realized having a social media presence is important today. I would be interested to see stats on how beneficial social media has been to, say, Wendy's.

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pixl97 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Yea, I think among a fair portion of HN there is a misunderstanding of how economically connected social media is to businesses and people. For example Meta is one of the largest advertising agencies on earth.

My wife for example has a $200k+ job that involves a whole lot of interaction with social media. For her that would mean ending her job and moving on to god knows what, but probably not anything that pays near as well.

And then you come to the people that represent her customers. They make 70%+ of their income advertising services either on line or social media platforms.

So you end up in a race conditions. These people can't quit social media in one way or another or they stop eating. The customers have to move somewhere else first to redistribute the power the companies hold over those needing to advertise. Mostly what we see is not people quitting social media, but just moving to another social media platform shifting the problem. But also, because these people are advertising and doing tangentially related things on social media it brings their users to social media to get information.

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ericmay an hour ago | parent [-]

Sounds like the coal miners in West Virginia whose livelihoods depend on coal production.

	▲	pixl97 25 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I mean it's also the same thing we're starting to see with programmers and AI too, which is highly ironic after tall the "lrn 2 code" stuff that was posted online around that time. If a programmer says I'm not going to use AI and the company says use AI, the programmer can absolutely walk, but god, I would not want to try to find a new job right now. This is why things like unions and consumers pushing for consumer protection laws are fought by companies so hard. They are far more effective than individual actions because the incentives are against individual success.