A Piece of Data - How the Internet Forgot About Humanity
The recent Hugging Face and Bluesky debacle has stirred up quite a bit of controversy. On one side, you have AI bros who believe that any public information is theirs to scrape. On the other, Bluesky Social is facing backlash as the transparency of its open AT Protocol comes back to bite them in the ass. For a deeper dive into this issue, check out this excellent piece: Privacy Disasters: Facehuggers Are Eating Your Skeets.
This whole situation, along with my reading habits (more on those below), made me realize what those AI bros remind me of - and it’s a cycle as old as time. Steve Jobs’ key point was that Xerox failed because the people who truly understood the product and its potential (engineers and innovators) were sidelined in favour of management and executives who lacked both vision and a deep understanding of the technology.
I believe the same pattern is unfolding with social media and the internet at large. But instead of a product, it’s about people and data now. Let me explain.
Social networks didn’t begin as machines for extracting data. They were about people - actual, living, breathing people.
Facebook? It was a place to connect with friends and family, a digital space to check in and see what was happening in their lives over time. It was all about sharing milestones, funny moments, and the small, personal details that made us feel close to one another, even across distances.
Instagram? Essentially the same idea, but it focused on visual storytelling. It allowed you to follow your friends and acquaintances through raw, unfiltered snapshots of their lives. Back then, it wasn’t about influencers or polished aesthetics. It was about seeing a friend’s blurry photo of their dog or a poorly lit dinner they were excited about.
MySpace? It was all about you. Your page was your playground, where you could showcase your personality (or your terrible music taste) with flashy layouts and an autoplay track that made visitors instantly regret clicking.
We all look back fondly on those days because they were focused on actual people. That’s what made them great. Social media wasn’t about optimizing engagement or tracking your every move - it was about connections, personalities, and messy, beautiful humanity.
Times have changed, and the focus on people and humanity has been sidelined in favour of data. Now it’s all about data. Everything is data-driven.
What are the metrics? Which A/B test option will maximize engagement? Where can we scrape more data to train the next iteration of the model?
Enter Threads - a product of its time. At its launch, Meta’s focus was clear: algorithms, Instagram’s social graph, engagement metrics, and so on. The human element? Barely a mention. It wasn’t until Bluesky gained traction that Meta began paying attention to user feedback. Only then did they begin testing features like allowing users to set their “Following” feed as the default view.
That’s why Threads feels so artificial. It’s not about people; it’s about engagement and brands. And it’s only going to get worse when ads roll out in early 2025.
Let’s take a different example. I’m currently reading Play Nice by Jason Schreier, which dives into the rise and fall of Blizzard Entertainment. And honestly, it feels like exactly what Steve Jobs was warning about in the video I linked earlier. Take these quotes from the book (source):
“It was just Bobby’s continued sense that we were not ‘extracting enough value’ out of the IP,” says Gio Hunt, a former executive at Blizzard. “Even the way he’d say something like that would just make everyone at Blizzard upset.””
“Suddenly, finance people who’d otherwise been relegated to the background were fixtures in strategy meetings, asking why Hearthstone, a Magic: The Gathering-esque mobile game, wasn’t pushing players to buy card packs more often, and why Overwatch, an online shooting game, wasn’t selling maps and heroes to generate extra revenue.”
Bobby Kotick and Armin Zerza perfectly embody that shift - leaders more focused on metrics, data, and monetization than on the people who create the games or the players who enjoy them. They’ve transformed what was once a studio built on creativity, passion, and player trust into a relentless numbers game. It’s no longer about crafting worlds that spark imagination and immersion. Now it’s about extracting as much value as possible, pushing revenue streams over experience. Blizzard’s story is a reminder that when data and metrics take precedence over people, even the most beloved creative spaces can lose their soul.
The details may change, but the story remains the same: this data-driven shift is everywhere. From games to social networks and across the entire internet, the focus has shifted from people to data. The AI bubble? It’s not about humanity; it’s about hoarding data at any cost.
People aren’t numbers on a dashboard, engagement metrics, or data points to analyze. Stop treating them like they are. Sure, this might not scale as easily as algorithms or fit neatly into a revenue model, but it’s what makes platforms meaningful. Without it, all that’s left are empty clicks, hollow profits, and a slow erosion of trust and connection.
P. S. If you shift your perspective - treating individuals as people rather than data - you’ll find that many of the so-called “compliance headaches,” like GDPR, become non-issues. After all, GDPR is fundamentally about one thing: respecting people, their rights, and their humanity in the digital world.