We watched the movie Jobs last night and my Silicon Valley days all came roaring back to me. So it was interesting to read that Woz is also joining the #DeleteFacebook movement, something I did last year for the last and final time!

The truth is, everyone who uses social media is a content provider and if it’s true that “content is king,” then users should be paid for their contribution. Not just Facebook, but Twitter and Instagram, etc. All social media.

I remember talking with a co-worker at Cadence in Silicon Valley in the early ’90s. We were one of the early creators of online documentation. I remember Barb saying, “In the future, we’ll all be transferring information from one brain to the other.” We also foresaw getting paid for this information, intellectual property. Why not? We were getting paid to deliver documentation.

Facebook CEO says that people would have to pay to use their service if they did not reuse their information. Well, that’s probably a good idea. The internet was much more valuable when web sites were something you had to pay for in order to deliver that content. The internet wasn’t as cluttered because content providers had to pay for a web site.

Once free blogs and, later, social media took over, it was harder to stand out and, not only that, but so much “crap” clutters the internet now, impacting the value of the internet. I use it sparingly now because it is full of useless crap – I won’t even call it “information,” because it’s such a mess. So much of these social media sites are used by political mudslinging and other hate spreaders – what value is in that? If people had to pay to do it, I doubt they’d be all that interested in doing it. As for getting paid for delivering content, nobody’s going to pay you to write that, unless the site is set up for just that, and I would hope that hate cites wouldn’t be allowed.

What we all do know is that something major has to change with Facebook and other social media. This isn’t working for ourselves, our country, our world.