Transpondster

parislemon:

More rational thinking from Mike Masnick on the Instagram TOS changes:

Furthermore, even if the terms are worded poorly (it’s mostly boilerplate, and you’ll find somewhat similar terms in lots of places) if Instagram really went out and started selling your photos to appear in, say, a big magazine or TV ad, there would be significant public backlash over that, such that it’s probably in their own best interest not to do that without direct permission.

Exactly. Does anyone believe Instagram or Facebook would be stupid enough to do this? Why? Because they’re “evil”? Only an extremely paranoid or insane person would believe that. To make money? Sure, but that money would quickly fall to $0 when everyone left over actually justified outrage.

Despite what everyone would like to believe, these companies are neither stupid nor evil.

Just dismal analysis congratulating itself for its miserable inadequacy. Not shocking, considering the source, but still ridiculous. There are times when Siegler exemplifies the sort of inbred imbecilism that is rampant these days in Silicon Valley. He’s wrong about a lot of things, a lot of the time, but that doesn’t stop him from displaying an unearned arrogance when he decides to throw everyone (or ‘no one’) into a single pot, just because they disagree with him.

Like a lot of people, I know what’s wrong with the new T’s & C’s, and it’s not that Instagram might ‘sell’ my photos. (who would buy them anyway?) I’ve never suggested they would do that. But there are serious problems with the new verbiage, and with the people behind both IG and Facebook. It’s the most ignorant, smug thing in the world to close his dumb post with the assertion that these companies are neither dumb nor evil, when there is plenty of evidence demonstrating that they are, in addition to a lot of other qualities and attributes, sometimes both dumb and evil. 

For what it’s worth, I don’t think MG Siegler is evil.

New web profile pages. I liked it better when they were all-mobile, but they did a good job with these profile pages.