Comment by nobody9999

>If you want to have a private conversaion, social media doesn't seem to be a good vehicle for it. Much like airing your dirty laundry in the town square has been considered bad etiquette, airing personal greivances on the internet seems to be in poor taste.

An excellent point. Although not a new or particularly profound one.

When the large corporation I worked for back in the mid-1990s connected their email system to the larger internet, all employees were sent a memo discussing the advantages and issues with this.

It was recommended (paraphrasing) that employees shouldn't "put anything in an email that they wouldn't want to see on the cover of their local newspaper." That was back when local newspapers were a thing, but the principle still applies.

In fact, it applies even more strongly to the current social media environment. And it's still good advice.

That said, the rise of online communication and social media have reduced the personal and private interactions that people have.

Many on HN (and everywhere else too) won't answer phone calls at all, instead relying on SMS/Slack/WhatsApp, etc.

And formerly private conversations about one's personal life now take place on online platforms like Facebook, which ruthlessly exploits every bit of information they can get to "optimize the ad delivery experience."

One of the worst offenders is GMail, of course. They read all of your emails as a matter of course. Again in an effort to "better target advertising."

Which is why I'm surprised that anyone with even a passing interest in privacy would use either of those platforms. I certainly don't.

When I have a voice conversation (whether that be on a phone call or in person), as long as I'm cognizant of who is in hearing distance of my voice, I can be relatively (unless I'm being specifically targeted for close surveillance) sure that my conversation is private.

But any text-based communication that utilizes a centralized resource to route such communications is incredibly vulnerable to exposure and can't be trusted to provide a private communications channel.

Yes, this is oversimplified. No, I don't discuss encrypted voice/text mechanisms like Signal, PGP, SMIME, etc. here.

I didn't do so because most folks are unaware/unwilling/unable to use such secure communications mechanisms anyway, so their utility is severely limited.