I’m slowly pulling data into the new HybridLogic. In the process I’m realising a. how many other services I use, even after culling them a few years ago, and b. how many services now are complete and utter data prisons.

I’ve always known sites like having their own little silos but I hadn’t quite realised how bad the whole “you don’t own your own data” had gotten. Remember RSS and APIs and Web 2.0 hippie love? None of that now. Try and scrape and you’ll get captcha pages (despite it being ruled legal).

I’m slowly getting there but it’s definitely made me consider which services I will keep on using (Smashrun) and which ones are utter dumpster fires (Letterboxd).

It doesn’t matter what the value you provide is if I can’t take my data elsewhere.