YSK: While you're on Lemmy/Kbin/Fediverse, you're not "the product" but you're also not "the customer".locked
Why YSK: Getting along in a new social environment is easier if you understand the role you've been invited into.
It has been said that "if you're not paying for the service, you're not the customer, you're the product."
It has also been said that "the customer is always right".
Right here and now, you're neither the customer nor the product.
You're a person interacting with a website, alongside a lot of other people.
You're using a service that you aren't being charged for; but that service isn't part of a scheme to profit off of your creativity or interests, either. Rather, you're participating in a social activity, hosted by a group of awesome people.
You've probably interacted with other nonprofit Internet services in the past. Wikipedia is a standard example: it's one of the most popular websites in the world, but it's not operated for profit: the servers are paid-for by a US nonprofit corporation that takes donations, and almost all of the actual work is volunteer. You might have noticed that Wikipedia consistently puts out high-quality information about all sorts of things. It has community drama and disputes, but those problems don't imperil the service itself.
The folks who run public Lemmy instances have invited us to use their stuff. They're not business people trying to make a profit off of your activity, but they're also not business people trying to sell you a thing. This is, so far, a volunteer effort: lots of people pulling together to make this thing happen.
Treat them well. Treat the service well. Do awesome things.
If i'm not mistaken, the original saying was more along the lines of "The customer should always feel he's right". Anyway, the gist is that any side is "always right" should never be the mindset of any sane business or service.
Not entirely related to the topic, but something that I think everyone shold be aware of
The old saying is that "the customer is always right in matters of taste."
If you just love making green widgets but your customers buy blue ones 10x more than green, you should make blue widgets, not green ones.
I think its better summed up as "sell what sells."
I heard it was shortened from "the customer is always right in knowing what they want"
The version I like is "the customer is always right in matters of taste". You can't tell them what they should want, but they can't get it for a penny.
"The customer is always right" is a very popular saying, usually uses by managers to tell their front-facing employees that they must prostrate themselves before the customer on behalf of the corporation.
This is to create a false feeling of entitlement and service in the customer while the corporation seeks to squeeze all value from both employee and customer.
None of those relationships fit into the fediverse scheme.
I don't really think there's a risk of a business having an abundance of deference to the customer. Would be a nice problem to have, these days.
Karen demands to speak to your manager