Monthly Archives: June 2018

Thoughts

Photography and social media: still a recipe for copyright issues

I think I started posting my own photos online sometime in 2002-2003. During all this time, two things have remained the same: the overall ignorance of most web users about photographic copyright and the duplicity of some social media websites in keeping their users ignorant about the topic. Most images uploaded to social media are immediately resized and stripped of their metadata and copyright information, rendering them into multiple pieces of “media” ready for the consumption of the public unaware of their origin. This is strangely similar to food processing when you think about it. You probably don’t want to know where your hot dog’s from, and the vendor is more than happy not to tell you. But back to photos…

It started innocently enough: in a period of much slower internet than today, there was a need to compress images uploaded to websites, in order to serve up smaller, “optimized” versions to those with slower connections. The argument photographers heard then went along the line of, “We need to strip every piece of data except for the visual part, which we also compress, in order to save size and also to optimize the use of space on our servers, but we’ll continue to work on this and see what our options are down the road.” Well, we’re 15 years down that road now, so I thought I’d stop and look around to see where we’ve arrived.

The short of it is this: not far. It’s hard to believe that an ethical solution couldn’t be found in this past decade and a half, as online tech has advanced so much in other ways. A simple, workable solution is surely within grasp for a determined engineer in the land of tech. A pessimistic person could make the case that it’s to the advantage of social media websites for the copyright information to be lost along the way. From a legal point of view, not being able to assign the blame to anyone is better than being able to assign it to someone while it also turns out that you were an accomplice. Say someone reuploads an original photo created by someone else to social media, and that photo gets reposted over and over and over, either through reshares or reuploads. Say the original photographer gets mad and wants to do something about it. We all wish him or her good luck in hunting down all of the unauthorized uses of his or her photograph and trying to get recompense out of anyone. Blame can’t be currently assigned; there is no easy-to-access “chain of custody” for photographs that get used without being licensed or even credited. The media company might say, “But we resize and compress images on upload, we don’t keep any metadata, how are we to know whose image it is?” and the users will say, “But I saw no copyright information, no source, no photographer’s name, how was I to know?” or “It was a popular photo, everyone was posting it, I just wanted to post it for my followers, too.” Works out great, doesn’t it? Guess what? Most people have done it. I’m guilty of it as well. I save photos from all over the web. Then, when I look at them weeks, months and years down the road, I have no idea who took them. I mean I know my own photos, and I know the photos of a few photographers whose style is familiar to me, but good luck with everything else. When I look at the metadata, most of the time, there’s nothing there.

The only one getting screwed here is the photographer who took that photo. Probably worked hard to take it, too. Had to take time off for his or her passion, drive somewhere, hike up a mountain, suffer wind and cold and rain, freeze his or her butt in a flimsy tent during the night, get up at an ungodly hour and find the best place to set up the equipment for the shot then wait for it — no, seriously, wait for it, like another half hour at least — nope, still waiting for it… “Hold on, the sun’s just cresting the ridge, okay, it’s go time, now, now, now… goddammit… wtf, now the card malfunctions?!” After more trials like this, the fellow or damsel goes home, processes that photo to perfection, uploads it to his or her social media account and gets about 2 likes. But someone else sees it in a friend’s feed and goes, “Wow, that’s a nice photo, hold on, let me download it.” Easy enough, right? If it can’t be downloaded, you can always just take a screenshot and crop it as you like… So that someone else decides to post the photo to his feed, “Check this out, peeps!” and everyone’s like “Wow” and “Awesome shot, dude” and “One thumb, two thumbs, three thumbs up” or whatever, and the photo gets over 100 likes or faves or pluses or hearts easily; well, maybe not that many pluses… And it could be that the photographer didn’t have to go to all that trouble to get it, maybe only worked all of 2 minutes for a photo that turns out to be popular, and that’s with counting the time it took to edit it, but that shouldn’t matter. The point is, does anyone ask whose photo it is? Can they even find out out? Can anyone easily look up that information?

Shouldn’t those vital bits of information remain stored with the photo, through all its resizes and compressions, no matter what? It’s only a few bytes of data, dammit. You have (1) the photographer’s name, (2) the source (that’s typically where we put our website), (3) the title of the photo and (4) the caption. How hard would it be to keep just those bits, in every version of the photo, on all of the social media websites? Actually, that question shouldn’t even be asked. It shouldn’t even be a question. It should be a statement, as in, “Of course we’ll keep in those pieces of metadata. They’re vital information as far as photographs are concerned. Now let’s make it happen, people.”

Those four bits of information should be sacrosanct. Here’s another word for it: sacred. Here’s another: untouched. Here’s another: don’t fuck with them. What I don’t understand is why this hasn’t happened yet across the board, everywhere, especially when so many software engineers are also photographers. Yes, that’s an odd coincidence, but an ungodly number of coders and engineers of all sorts also love taking photographs and they also work at social media companies. Somehow no one’s put two and two together yet. It hasn’t clicked in their minds yet that they could be part of the solution, that they’re right there and could be advocating for this, heck, not just running their mouths but actually coding the fixes.

Let’s look at specific examples from social media websites.

Facebook

Here’s what goes on with photos uploaded to Facebook: they get renamed, compressed and resized. And they get a special identifier code written to one of the metadata fields; I think FB uses this code to track internally what happens to the photo on its platform. I don’t know how well they can identify images based on those codes when they’re downloaded and re-uploaded, but perhaps that’s one way to help photographers keep track of the images they upload to the platform in the future. Now, here’s the part that baffles me. For my own photos, the ones I upload to my page, such as this one, I see that FB keeps my copyright information. When I download it from the platform and look up its metadata, my info is right there, even when I download it from another browser and I’m not logged into FB.

However, that info isn’t there for the photos posted by other people and other pages. I don’t get it. Is it that they don’t specify it, or that it’s not kept for most? Could someone enlighten me on this? Here’s a photo I downloaded from the Olympus Europe FB page. There’s no such info available.

When I looked at a photograph uploaded by someone to a FB group, again I found no metadata. So even though the photographer identifies herself in the caption of the photo, that caption isn’t in the metadata, and should the photo be downloaded and re-uploaded, it’s easy to see, in spite of good intentions, how easy it would be to lose track of the photographer’s information.

I also looked at photos uploaded by other photographers to their FB pages. I couldn’t see any identifying metadata. Here’s one such example. That’s a beautiful photograph which I’m sure will get downloaded and possibly re-uploaded. The photographer’s placed a watermark on it, but that’s not going to be necessarily helpful if someone’s not well-intentioned. The same software that helps you place watermarks on photos can help you remove them without trace, and I’m talking about Photoshop, of course.

Can anyone tell me what’s going on with Facebook? Do they or do they not keep photographer information for the photos uploaded to their platform?

Instagram

There’s no way to check what happens with photos uploaded to this service, because you can’t download them after you’ve put them on there. Supposedly that’s done to protect your intellectual property, but actually that’s more so the photos you see on Instagram stay on Instagram and you have to use their platform. Congratulations, you’ve just uploaded your photo to a platform that keeps it prisoner. Not that it helps you with your copyright problems, because discouraging downloads just means people take screenshots and crop out the offending information. Good luck getting copyright info from a cropped screenshot…

Clearly a much better way of doing it would be to keep all of the metadata intact and if it’s not there, to write the original uploader’s account name to the copyright field (that would be the responsible and ethical thing to do), and to allow people to dowload these photographs and to view the metadata and thus see who took the photo. It would probably be asking too much to also do a bit of education of the viewing public about the importance of knowing who is the creator of the image they’re enjoying…

Bad job, Instagram! Bad job!

Google+

G+ is a revelation when it comes to keeping photographers’ information intact. I downloaded a recent photo of mine from another G+ account (my wife’s) and was pleasantly surprised to discover that they keep all of the relevant metadata. I would have been happy if I’d seen just the four bits of data I wrote about above, but they keep everything. Bonus: they also keep your own filename for the photo. Beautiful!

A bit of an aside here: if you’re not renaming your photographs after you download them from your camera, you’re missing out on a great opportunity to store bits of data right in the name and also to organize your photographs. There are many tutorials on how to do it and multiple pieces of software that let you do it in bulk. Have a look at this tutorial from Adobe, for example.

Twitter

I typically don’t upload photos directly to Twitter. I feed my Flickr feed to it. For the purposes of this article, I uploaded a photo to test things out. I then downloaded it to see what they kept. I’ve got bad news for you. They don’t keep a damn thing when it comes to your own information. Not an iota. Not a 1 and 0, if you will.

Bad job, Twitter! Bad job!

Flickr

I’ve been using Flickr since 2004. As a matter of fact, it was one of the first websites (if not the first) to trigger discussions about the way it handled photographers’ metadata back in those days. There were also heated discussions about the way it handled filenaming and unauthorized access to original photos. I wrote about that issue back then. And yet, in spite of its flaws, I and many others continued to use the service, because we love it. I wonder how it’s doing now, so let’s have a look.

Here’s one of the photos I uploaded. I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is that in about 14 years, it’s managed to make progress on this front. The bad news is that it’s very little progress.

When I look at the metadata for my original photo, after I uploaded/downloaded it from the service, I’m happy to see that it’s kept it intact. But remember, this is the original photo. It had damn well better keep it in there. Granted, 14 years ago, it used to clear the metadata from the originals as well. So that’s some progress…

The bad news is that it clears it out of every other image size, even from the large size (2048×1536).

Flickr, what kind of example are you setting here? You are the original photography sharing website. You should be standing up for photographer’s rights. And yet here you are, trampling all over them. If you don’t keep the metadata, who should? So what if it’ll add a few bytes or kilobytes to the size of each image. Isn’t it worth it?

Bad job, Flickr! Bad job!

WordPress

We may not consider WordPress a social media website, but the fact of the matter is that a great deal of us love and rely on WP to share our lives and our content, whether that be text, image or video. So how does WP handle it? I’m glad to say that they’re the most forward-thinking of the group. Not only do they preserve all of the metadata, but they also present it right off the bat to the website visitors. For example, should you click on one of my image galleries (such as this one, for example), you’ll see the copyright information right away. It’s displayed in the bottom-right corner. You see, that’s not only preserving the data, but also educating the public.

And should you want to download a photograph (which you can do, btw), it’ll have all of the metadata in it, so you’d have to be mal-intentioned in order to re-post a photo published with WP elsewhere and not even credit the photographer.

Now that we’ve made the social media rounds, so to speak, let’s talk a bit about watermarks and about not allowing people to download photographs.

I don’t believe in watermarks. You ruin a photo’s aesthetic appeal when you watermark it. It just ends up looking like shit. I’ve experimented with all kinds of watermarks over the years and no matter how big or small they were or how good they looked, in the end I regretted putting them on my photographs, because they take away from a photograph’s artistic merit. The good-looking watermarks, the ones that I tend to tolerate visually, tend to be stylish and unobtrusive, but they’re also easy to remove, and the bad watermarks… well, you might as well crap all over your photo. The sad part is, when you look online, the people who take the shittiest photos are the ones who use the biggest and uggliest watermarks to “protect” them. You almost want to comment and say, “Dude, no one would steal this shit even if you printed it on thick glossy paper and left it on the street,” but it would be unproductive for all.

Some sites (Flickr, Instagram and others) don’t allow people to download photographs, not even the smaller, compressed versions. On Flickr, you can choose if you want to enable or disable this feature. While I think it’s a great idea to lock down access to the originals (I upload my photos at original resolution on Flickr and certainly wouldn’t want people to have access to them without my say-so), I also think it’s a great idea for people to be able to download smaller versions of my photographs. Disabling the “right-click to download” feature in browsers is lame. You can always take a screenshot. But letting someone download a smaller version of your photo, provided your identifying metadata is in it, is a great way for them to remember you down the road. But you gotta keep that metadata in there!

I believe the public needs more education on copyright and no one is better positioned to provide it than social media companies and software companies. Make it easy and obvious for people to see who took a photograph and where they can be found. Don’t ever mess with that metadata. Always keep it in the photo and make it easy for people to see it, both on the web and on the desktop/tablet/phone! It’s that simple.

And for those who still favor watermarks, I would propose an alternative that doesn’t visually alter the image but lets the viewer know who took it right away. I’ve been asking the people at Lightroom to make it easy and automatic to do this as an export preset with their software for years, but they haven’t been listening. You still need Photoshop to do it at the moment. It’s this: a simple, white border at the bottom of the photograph, where you can put your name and website.

It’s not rocket science, it’s not glitzy, but you’re also not crapping on the image and it’s very easy to see whose photo it is. Yes, you can crop it out, but you can also wipe out the metadata and you can also get rid of watermarks. Those with bad intentions will always skirt the legalities. But good, law-abiding people will be glad to know right away who took the photo, and also to know that the information can’t be wiped away by mistake and will remain there even if the photo is resized or compressed.

I hope this has been helpful and, if you are one of the people positioned to take action, please do.

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Places

A foggy autumn morning

One foggy autumn morning, I took some photographs… and here they are 😁. I love fog almost as much as I love thick snowfall, and for the same reasons: the air of mystery, the white shroud enveloping everything, the quiet, the timeless quality and mood… oh, I could go on and on… This particular morning, we were driving to Sibiu and we were atop the hills between Slimnic and Șeica Mare. I have to confess that I don’t typically plan these things out, but when I encounter them, I have a camera with me and I take advantage of the opportunity to capture those beautiful moments. We parked the car and I walked around those hills, taking in the atmosphere. I hope you’ll enjoy the photographs!

Near Slimnic, Transilvania, Romania
Shapes recovered from a thick fog using Lightroom’s Dehaze function. The photograph was mostly white beforehand. I love how the background looks, with those barely-visibile sihouettes. I know there’s a lot of noise but I love this image.
Somewhere between Slimnic and Agârbiciu, Transilvania, Romania
Ruși, Transilvania, Romania
In the countryside between Slimnic and Agârbiciu, Transilvania, Romania
Near Șeica Mare, Transilvania, Romania

I have a surprise for you. It’s going to be a surprise for me, too, because I’m going to try something new. I’m going to use this nifty payment button that WordPress has recently introduced, and I’m going to let you purchase all these images as a pack. There are 24 images here, which I’m going to deliver to you as a download at their original resolution once you purchase them. The terms outlined here will apply to how you use them. Here are a few ideas: make prints at a local lab, use the whole pack as a screensaver, use them as desktop backgrounds, use them in your artwork, use them on your website, etc. The price is $25. That’s a little more than $1 per image. If there’s demand, I may extend this same sort of deal to other photo galleries of mine published in the past or photos I publish in the future. A generous image pack, an affordable price for the whole thing, simple, easy, done.

Image Pack 20180608

You are purchasing the photographs from this post: a set of 24 images of a foggy autumn morning

$25.00

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Reviews

A follow-up to my review of Google’s Backup and Sync

I reviewed Google’s Backup and Sync service back in December. There were several issues with the service that I outlined in there, such as the app backing up files that it was not supposed to back up, the service counting files toward the quota even though it was supposed to compress them and allow unlimited free storage, etc. I thought I’d do a follow-up because, as you may have guessed already, there are more issues I want to point out and also a few pieces of advice that might help you in your use of the app.

One issue that occurs over and over is that the app crashes. It gives an error message popup and says it needs to quit. Which is somewhat okay, but when you start it back up, it does a re-check of all the files it’s supposed to back up, and that is an energy-hungry process. You can see it at the top of the active apps in Activity Monitor (on the Mac), eating up all the processor cycles as it iterates through its list of files. And even when it does its regular backup in the background, it’s still climbing toward the top of the active apps. To be fair, Flickr’s own Uploadr is also an energy-hungry app. Neither of the apps allow you to make them use less energy (to work slower, etc.), so they churn away at your computer’s resources even though they’re supposed to work quietly in the background.

Another issue that still occurs is that the app backs up files that it’s not supposed to back up. I have it set to back up only photos and videos and yet it backs up a lot of files with strange extensions that end up counting toward my storage quota on Google Drive. Have a look at the screenshots taken from my settings for the app below.

I had it set on backing up RAW files too, but it wasn’t backing up anything but CR2 (Canon RAW files) and DNG (Adobe RAW files, or digital negatives). And it had problems backing those up as well, because when the size of a DNG file was over a certain limit (it’s somewhere around 50 MB I think), it backed it up but it didn’t compress it, so it counted toward the storage quota.

It wasn’t compressing ORF (Olympus Raw files) while backing them up, so they counted toward my quota. Since I shoot only with Olympus gear these days, that was no good to me. So what I did is I chose not to let it back up any RAW files and I set my camera to shoot in ORF + JPG format. I work with the ORF files in Lightroom and the unedited JPG files get backed up with the app.

Here’s a list of files whose extensions it might be helpful for you to add to its settings, so the app won’t put them on your Google Drive. Of course, as mentioned above, the app backs up all sorts of files it’s not set to back up. It’s like it ignores the settings and just does what it wants, so ymmv.

  • cmap
  • data
  • db
  • db-wal
  • graphdb
  • graphdb-shm
  • graphdb-wal
  • heic
  • heif
  • ithmb
  • lij
  • lisj
  • orf
  • plist
  • psd
  • skindex
  • tif
  • tmp
  • xmp
  • zip

You may have noticed HEIF and HEIC in the list above. Those are the new image and video standards used by Apple because they offer much higher quality and compression than JPG and H.264. And even though it’s not logical that Google wouldn’t know or want to compress them and back them up properly, they don’t. The app will simply copy them to Google Drive, uncompressed, and they’ll count toward your quota. So all of you who have iPhones and iPads and use the Backup and Sync app or the Google Photos app, you are currently backing up the photos taken with your devices on Google Drive, but they count toward your storage quota even if you don’t want them to. Keep in mind that this may be a temporary thing and Google may choose to rectify this issue in the coming months.

The storage options on Google Drive are another issue I want to talk about. I had to upgrade my storage to 1 TB because of all these issues. At one point, I had over 400GB of unexplained files taking up space in there and I had to upgrade to the 1 TB plan, which costs $10/month. Now I don’t know about you, but that pisses me off. It’s one thing if I choose to upgrade my storage plan because I want to do it, and it’s another thing altogether to be forcibly upsold because the Backup and Sync app might be used as a funnel to generate gullible leads for Google Drive’s storage plans. Notice I said “might be”; I have no proof of this. It could be that the app is just full of bugs and not well-maintained.

So I did two things: one was to downgrade my storage plan to the minimum of 100 GB at $2/month, and the second was to start looking through my Google Drive in order to see what files were taking up space. I found them but let me tell you, getting rid of them is like pulling teeth. It’s like Google doesn’t want you to get rid of them, so they keep on taking space there and you keep on paying. It’s not right. Let me show you: first you go to Google Drive, and at the bottom of the sidebar on the left, you’ll see how much space you’ve got. My storage quota is under control now, but this is my second day of working on this. Can you believe it? Google has made me waste almost two work days in order to correct a problem that it created.

If you click right on the space used, in my case the 76.6 GB, it’ll take you to a page where it begins to list all of the files that are taking up space on your Google Drive, in descending order based on file size. Here’s where it might be confusing for some: the files that are compressed and don’t count toward your quote are listed with a file size of 0 bytes. This is not an error, those files aren’t really 0 bytes, but they’ve been compressed and as far as your quota is concerned, they’re okay. The files that do count toward your quota will be listed at the top. That’s how I found out that Google doesn’t compress PSD files or TIF files or large DNG files. I had images that were over 100 MB in size, some close to 1 GB in size, that it wasn’t compressing, so I had to delete those. If you want to bring down your storage requirements on Google Drive, you’ll have to do the same. Here’s a screenshot of the page I’m talking about, but keep in mind that I’ve already done the work, so I have no more uncompressed files taking up space. Whatever’s left, it’s in the Trash.

So this part is like pulling teeth. Even though I was using Google’s own browser, Google Chrome, and working on Google’s own service, Google Drive, it was excruciatingly slow to list the files I needed to delete. The page would only pull something like 50 files to display, and if you wanted to see more, you had to scroll down and wait for it to pull up more… and then the browser would almost freeze and give you a warning to let you know the page was eating up too many resources… ugh… what a nasty thing to do to your customers, Google!

Have a look at the resources Chrome was eating up during this whole thing:

This “fun activity” took up most of my two days. Not only did it work like this when I needed to identify the files that I needed to delete, but once they were in the Trash, that page also worked the same way. In the web browser, it would only pull up about 50 files or so for me to delete at once. Even though the “Empty Trash” option was supposed to clear the Trash of all of the files in it, it would only delete the 50 or so files that it pulled up. Sure, you can scroll down, wait for it to pull up 50 more files, scroll down again, etc. until Chrome gives you a warning that the page isn’t working properly anymore, then you can empty the trash, deleting a few hundred files, then go again and again and again. I tell you, I suspect that Google is doing this on purpose so you don’t clean up your Drive and are forced to upgrade your storage plan…

I looked this thing up, and some people had more luck emptying the trash by using the mobile app (for iOS or Android). I tried it on my iPhone and it hung, then crashed. I tried it on my iPad and it would hang, the little Googley kaleidoscope wheel going on and on for hours, and then it would either crash or keep on twirling. I left my iPad with the app open all night after issuing the Empty Trash command and when I came back to it in the morning, it was still twirling away and the files hadn’t been deleted.

So now it’s back to the browser interface for me until I clean up all the files. See the screenshot below with the twirly blue thing in the middle? That’s me waiting on Google to list those files in the Trash… By the way, I bought a 2 TB storage plan on Apple’s iCloud to back up my phones, tablets and computers, and I can share that plan with my family. It costs the same as Google’s 1 TB plan: $10/month.

Will I keep using the Backup and Sync app? Yes, at least for now. The promise of unlimited storage of all my compressed images is a tempting thing. I realize there’s a loss in resolution and quality but God forbid something happen to my files and my backups, at least I have them stored somewhere else and I can recover them; they might not be their former selves, but I’ll have something.

Just FYI, I back up locally and remotely. For local backups I use Mac Backup Guru and for the remote backups I use Backblaze, which I love and recommend. Their app is amazing: blazing fast, low energy footprint, works quietly in the background and has backed up terabytes of data in a matter of 1-2 weeks for me. And as for my hardware, I still use Drobos and I love and recommend them as well. I’ve been using them since 2007 and while I’ve had some issues, I still think they’re the best and most economical expandable redundant storage on the market. I use a Drobo 5D next to my iMac and two Drobo 5N units on the network.

I hope this was helpful to you!

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Thoughts

Social media and time spent on websites that produce original content

Here’s something I’ve observed in my own use of social media websites: most of the time they’re so sticky that when I click on an interesting article to read it, I tend to skim through it in order to get back to the social media site where it was posted. Why? My rationale to myself is that I want to see what other articles I might discover. But in truth, I think I’ve gotten so used to skimming the news feed for interesting stuff, that I’m more concerned with that instead of actually taking the proper time to read through the interesting stuff. And that’s not right. And I don’t think I’m the only one doing it.

It could be that we’ve gotten to the point where, without realizing it, we’ve become superficial skimmers, and I blame social media. The very websites whose mission it was (in the beginning) to present us with articles and photos and videos because they allowed users to post links to them, have now reshaped our attention span in such a way that we value browsing the news feed stupidly more than we value reading the actual content for which we browse the news feed in the first place.

What I’ve also seen, because I myself am guilty of it at times, is a tendency to form an opinion about an article from the blurb that I can read on social media, before I can read it in full, or to determine whether it’s worth reading from the title alone. And — and this is shameful but worth talking about — I’ve also caught myself giving an article or a link a like/plus/heart based solely on its title, blurb and accompanying thumbnail, without reading it. Again, I rationalized it to myself by wanting to go back to the news feed, because “I had a limited amount of time” to spend on social media and wanted to catch up on the things that were posted. What a crappy rationalization, right? And yet I don’t think I’m alone; I’m fairly sure others are doing this.

I’m curious to find out if anyone out there is doing or has done research on this and can confirm it.

What I’ve also seen from our own site stats is a drop in our visitors’ attention span. In a word, they’ve become more superficial than before. They don’t spend the proper amount of time to read through something; when I post photo galleries, they don’t look at even half the photos; when I post videos, they don’t even look at a quarter of the video. It’s gotten to the point where we’ll post an article and people will start to ask questions related to it on social media (and this happens to my wife all the time) that are so blatantly ignorant of the very article we’ve posted that it’s crystal clear to us that these people haven’t read the article. They haven’t even clicked through to skim the first paragraph, which would have answered their question.

Some will say that’s fine, we can now post our content directly on social media, in full length, along with the accompanying photos and videos. Perhaps, but that doesn’t work either. I’ve seen the same dropoff in attention spans there. I can attest to this. If a post isn’t short enough to fit within 1-2 sentences, or you post more than 2-3 photos, or you post a video that’s longer than 15-30 seconds, most people will simply not see all of it. They’ll click away. And that defeats the purpose of posting anywhere and also defeats the point of creating content. Not to mention that if you choose to post all your original content on social media, you are no longer in control of it, because it’s not on your website and you don’t get to decide if it stays up or not (down the road). You also destroy a viable business model, which is to post on your own site, make it a treasure trove of valuable information and then monetize it in various ways or use it as a stepping stone to various other projects.

I’m not sure how far this trend will go. Will we have to create shorter articles and write them in the simplest language possible? How much can we communicate doing that? To whom will we be communicating? If audiences can’t handle a page-long article and need us to speak to them in first grade or second grade language, what kind of people are we reaching? What kinds of intellects are we nurturing? Is social media contributing to a “dumbing down” of its users?

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