Comment by lrvick
8 days ago
No Hypothesis needed. I lived it. I have at various points made a living with various combinations of PC repair, electronics recycling, museum displays, day labor, retail, trucking, telemarketing, street and restaurant entertainment, food service, mailroom work, vending machines, factory assembly lines, craft sales, construction, home AV, and I have probably forgotten a few. And those are just the low-tech gigs.
I called people, met people in person, sought out classified ads, made sure I was in the right parking lot at the right time to run into the right people.
I hustled to survive for most of my life, and I sure as hell did not need Zucks help to do it. In fact my web design clients were mostly small businesses that wanted to host their own websites to get them SEO and visibility that Facebook pages could not offer.
Again, everyone loves to make excuses for their dependence. I prefer independence.
And things have changed.
People don't answer cold calls! They increasingly don't read emails. There are no classified ads worth a damn. They work from home! They ask AI more than they google.
The remaining stuff is on Facebook.
It is pointless arguing people shouldn't look to Facebook to find these kinds of jobs and get those recommendations, and preaching the morality of independence to, say, a gel nail technician who makes all her money from friends recommending her and social media photos of her work, is nonsense.
I hope you're not the guy who tell people who are on the breadline that Facebook is bad and they should use classified ads. Because that guy sounds old and out of touch.
It doesn't matter what we think of Facebook (and instagram, and to a smaller extent other social media); it is crucial to networking.
I did all those jobs when Facebook usage was at its peak. It is not crucial to networking, and engagement is plummeting in these walled gardens as content is mostly ragebait, spam, and scams now.
I know the breadline well. Worked my way up from living in my car and eating out of trash cans. I do not personally know anyone who has come up from a lower place than me, and my advice remains constant because people are still the same even as technology evolves.
You can network at meetups, giving talks, trade shows, workshops, classes. Nothing converts higher than meeting people in person. That was true 20 years ago and may be even more true 20 years from now as human generated content on the internet drops to near zero.
Never build a business on hoping an algorithm someone else controls is nice to you.