I linked to a very good article about enshittification of platforms down below, and this post discusses it further, and adds this:

Whatever sort of technological or reputational capital you build has to exist outside, because on the platform it is whatever the platform managers want it to be this week. Hence the vital importance of things like personal websites and email addresses, both yours and having other people’s. In the simplest terms, having a Twitter subscriber or being highly-ranked on LinkedIn is an ephemeral sort of parasocial capital: you might have worked hard to convince people that you were worth paying attention to, and they might have chosen to, and yet whether that channel can work, or what you can do with that, depends on neither of you. Having somebody’s email is very different from having somebody follow you on Twitter, Substack, or wherever: you can email them, and Elon Musk can’t do anything about that. It’s not a perfect substitute for a direct relationship, but it’s orders of magnitude less susceptible to hyperfast reparametrization to maximize somebody else’s profits. Being in someone’s DMs might be more fashionable than being in their email inbox, but it’s not the same.

And try and have that email somewhere stable and serious (hey: I am sometimes wondering about keeping my main private email with Google? Only that I do not want to ever again manage my own mail server, so the alternative is a paid account with someone like Proton. It is not ruining my sleep — yet? — but I do ponder and wonder).

And don’t use your current work email as your one and only and primary email. The reasons are manifold and should be obvious.


© Henning Bertram 2024