The first four words you see are...
“Profile yourself gratis. NOW”.
Facebook and other social networks are full of playful quizzes and riddle like this:
Or this:
and almost nobody, or at least none of the people taking or sharing those tests, seems to realize what are the REAL questions they answering.
Amazing, isn’t it?
It’s amazing to which lenghts people will go to work for free for the already extremely rich stockholders of social media companies. Yes, the mere act of having and using a social media account today is equivalent to sending money to them. But this is another level.
Look at those quizzes again. No technical skills needed. With the right attitude, it should take just a few seconds with the right attitude to see that they are made to order for one real purpose only (or, in any case, that they undeniably have one, not good, practical effect):
to make whoever answers self-categorize themselves in boxes that are extremely useful for advertising, or creating filter bubbles of any sort.
What those quizzes really say
The real questions all those funny tests are asking is:
OK, dear social network products, listen up: would you please be so dumb, sorry, I mean: friendly, to self-profile yourself for free, even more than my own software already did, much better than it could ever do?
Signed: The benevolent owner of the worldwide shop shelf on which you all ran to place yourself for sale.
Who writes this, why, and how to help
I am Marco Fioretti, tech writer and aspiring polymath doing human-digital research and popularization.
I do it because YOUR civil rights and the quality of YOUR life depend every year more on how software is used AROUND you.
To this end, I have already shared more than a million words on this blog, without any paywall or user tracking, and am sharing the next million through a newsletter, also without any paywall.
The more direct support I get, the more I can continue to inform for free parents, teachers, decision makers, and everybody else who should know more stuff like this. You can support me with paid subscriptions to my newsletter, donations via PayPal (mfioretti@nexaima.net) or LiberaPay, or in any of the other ways listed here.THANKS for your support!