[HN Gopher] Meta Wants More AI Bots on Facebook and Instagram
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Meta Wants More AI Bots on Facebook and Instagram
Author : marban
Score : 184 points
Date : 2025-01-02 04:20 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (nymag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (nymag.com)
| unsnap_biceps wrote:
| I wonder how these bots will impact their metrics reported to
| investors. Will they be filtered out or into a different bucket,
| or just included into the mau and similar.
| itake wrote:
| I don't understand. Presumably, this will create more
| engagement for the human users, because there is more content
| for the humans to interact with.
|
| Why would they count an ai model as a monthly active user?
| dartos wrote:
| > Why would they count an ai model as a monthly active user?
|
| To inflate their numbers and justify higher stock prices.
|
| So money, of course.
| itake wrote:
| I still don't get it. why would they need an AI model to
| inflate user counts like this?
|
| There are much simpler ways to create users than spending
| $100 of millions on gpus. The technology of batch inserting
| rows into a db, and AI chat bots have existed for a decade.
| dartos wrote:
| I'll explain, but keep in mind that this is an exercise
| in cynicism, since none of us really know what's going
| on.
|
| Currently many tech company stock prices are driven by
| their potential future with regards to AI. Investors are
| looking for AI plays, hoping that they'll generate large
| returns as Web two companies did.
|
| Meta wants to remain a leader in tech. In order to do
| that And keep commanding higher and higher stock prices,
| they need to invest heavily into AI. They would invest
| into AI with no practical reason as long as it looked
| good to investors.
|
| Meta is investing heavily into AI without a clear
| monetization plan, so they need to find a use for it or
| some "Proof" that it drives the metrics that meta
| correlates with value.
|
| To that end creating a ton of AI driven engagement is a
| no-brainer. It shows that the company is forward and has
| an AI plan and their numbers are growing both things that
| investors like to see.
|
| The millions spent on GPUs will return billions of
| dollars shareholder value.
| ozim wrote:
| Then next step is to not show anything human created to other
| humans - because human created content needs moderation,
| people swear at each other.
|
| Imagine how pleasant and disinfected content will be there,
| every company will be happy to pay for ads because there will
| be no offensive comments and no images of your aunt. All the
| content perfectly aligned with what people want to see and
| there somewhere in between ads.
|
| Kids in 10 years or 15 won't even know that in past people
| actually could post something on the internet- they will
| think it was all like TV for us that only rich and handsome
| people get to post on the internet.
|
| Who wouldn't buy all those things that happen to be presented
| by perfect people in perfect world that you don't have real
| access to but you can read on internet or have a part of that
| world by buying some crap they advertise.
|
| It already happens but FB/Meta doesn't have control over
| influencers - they can create their own now and deplatform
| all real ones because they won't need them. Companies love
| that as it won't turn out some influencer that they bought
| ads with died overdosing drugs somewhere on the street.
| jamra wrote:
| The real fear I have is in plausible deniability for filtering
| and muting discussion, which they do now. Moving it to a NN can
| always hand wave away the responsibility.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Will they show ads to the bots?
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| I mean Facebook massively inflates impressions anyways and
| has been doing for a while.
| orionblastar wrote:
| AI Bots will post advertising and astroturf their company
| products and services.
| friend_Fernando wrote:
| I think we actually need _more_ bots discussing politics online.
| Specifically, we need echo chambers to be replaced by cacophony
| chambers.
|
| The only way to salvage democracy is to bring it back offline.
| Online, it was undermined by troll farms pulling the strings in
| favor of certain shady factions. It's time for the good guys to
| get their hands dirty and break the spell. Trolls cannot be
| silenced, but they can be offset.
| Animats wrote:
| > Specifically, we need echo chambers to be replaced by
| cacophony chambers.
|
| That's the objective of modern Russian propaganda. The goal is
| not to be believed. It is to create confusion and reap
| inaction.
| friend_Fernando wrote:
| Yes, but they do so selectively for what's against their
| interest. The net, filtered result is what's in their
| interest.
|
| That leaves "mutual assured dialogue destruction" as the only
| option, IMO.
| Animats wrote:
| > Yes, but they do so selectively for what's against their
| interest.
|
| Generating division is sufficient. There were Russian
| attempts to hack both campaigns in the last US election.[1]
|
| [1] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/us-
| sancti...
| friend_Fernando wrote:
| They're usually not filtering pro-left or pro-right.
| They're filtering pro-Russian-faction _within_ the left
| and right. This usually means extremists that used to
| have no hope of winning in the pre-Internet days.
|
| These factions are more likely to be beholden to their
| "troll benefactors" afterwards. But even if they turn out
| to be ungrateful, the extremism itself is worth pursuing.
| As you said, confusion and division are useful in their
| own right.
|
| Add other rogue countries to the mix, and you end up with
| a nasty filter. We should turn it into white noise, or at
| least drop its SNR.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > Yes, but they do so selectively for what's against their
| interest. The net, filtered result is what's in their
| interest.
|
| Not really. You can go and see the ads Russia placed on
| Facebook in the 2016 election. They had pro-life and pro-
| choice ads. They had pro-LGBTQ and anti-LGBTQ ads. They had
| pro-guns and anti-guns ads.
| friend_Fernando wrote:
| I don't think we disagree here, unless you saw some pro-
| Ukraine 2024 ads. It's not about left and right. To
| demagogues, ideologies are just tools of the trade.
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| In the communist era russian propaganda had a definite
| ideological position. It was also far more effective.
| Much of the 60s era progressive politics was a result of
| russian influence and the west was full of communists
| before the tankies split off.
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| That's the objective of propaganda within russia. For
| external audiences the objective is to sow chaos.
| bergen wrote:
| cacophony = chaos, so a lot of mixed opinions that don't
| really make sense would achieve just that. I would not
| expect thought out and stringent discussion from throwing a
| bunch of bots at every discussion
| herbst wrote:
| Isn't that the same for any bigger propaganda machine? I
| don't see the US doing any different than that
| panta wrote:
| I have been thinking about these lines for a long time.
| Humanity would be much better if we went back to pre-social
| network internet, populated by small human-moderated and
| vertical forums. We can and should destroy social networks,
| using their own tactics.
| concordDance wrote:
| > Online, it was undermined by troll farms pulling the strings
| in favor of certain shady factions.
|
| No, online it was undermined by selection effects. Where those
| who care the most about something are most likely to engage or
| post, leading to endless streams of unrepresentative and
| extreme views.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| It was shaped by censorship! Conservatives and libertarians
| have been banned for a decade.
|
| Since the first Obama social media campaign the internet
| became very one sided - and people started believing that
| crap so much, everyone here had to sit through at least one
| DEI training.
|
| I'm against any form of government and centralization of
| power (which nearly always happens thanks to regulations and
| laws); I'm not a fan of Musk and conservatives (I'll change
| my mind after I see with my eyes a significant reduction of
| the US government) but I'm glad to see a return to balance in
| online discourse.
|
| We had another DEI training at work and I was impressed to
| read everyone left negative reviews about it. Quite the
| change in sentiment!
| nextworddev wrote:
| You are describing Reddit
| finnthehuman wrote:
| >Online, it was undermined by troll farms
|
| Meh, the conversation had already been undermined by that
| point. People discussing politics already ceded the
| conversation to people who liked fiery arguments. The posting
| farms were just convenient scapegoats for flameposters to
| explain why they weren't winning, and try to salvage some
| reputability.
| hmmm-i-wonder wrote:
| Considering the state of offline media today, I doubt there is
| any going back to the real or imagined pre-internet days of
| media.
| alex1138 wrote:
| Hey here's a novel idea
|
| Have social media websites be reverse chronological posts by
| friends/pages you follow instead of what AI thinks you're
| interested in (and yet somehow not explicitly following, yet you
| get it in your feed anyway)
| Groxx wrote:
| it'll never work. what's next? federation? insanity.
| impossibility.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| But think about the poor shareholders
| wincy wrote:
| I've developed this tic where anytime I'm on Facebook I
| aggressively block all the non sponsored suggested content in
| my timeline. I've blocked literally thousands of pages at this
| point. So the recommendations have gotten really weird, last
| week it thought maybe I was gay, then I started recommending
| Chinese state sponsored pages, now it's recommending all 50
| National Geographic pages. It's always pages over a million
| "likes" whatever that means. I'm curious what'll happen if I
| manage to block all of them.
|
| Honestly probably something lame where the recommendations just
| get weirder and weirder (which I guess is happening now)
| koutetsu wrote:
| What a coincidence! I have done the exact same thing but on
| Instagram instead of Facebook and have had similar results to
| yours. Since both belong to Meta, we can safely assume that
| they use the same or very similar backends to serve ads.
|
| I think it would be interesting to do a large scale
| experiment to see what can happen.
| bluGill wrote:
| I've been doing this for a couple years. My feed is better,
| but they still have plenty of garbage I'm not interested
| in. I make it a point to scroll until I have blocked two of
| these - that is my signal that it is time to read.
| Hopefully if more of us start that rule of two eventually
| it will be populate enough that they notice and add a mode
| for those like to better see our friends thus keeping us a
| little longer (I doubt it, but it would be nice).
| Symbiote wrote:
| Do you get fewer junk posts in the feed, or are they just
| different?
| parpfish wrote:
| i have a burner fb account that i use to follow a local lost-
| pets group and check hours for restaurants that refuse to
| have normal webpages.
|
| this account has no friends and just the one group membership
| so my feed if 100% platform-promoted swill. and it is _bad_.
| the current fad is for there to be accounts that repost
| screenshots of successfull AITA reddit posts to engagement
| farm.
|
| the sad part is that it works. they get a _ton_ of comments
| and likes
| hapticmonkey wrote:
| You can access those simpler chronological feeds in Facebook
| under More > Feeds. They still insert sponsored posts in that
| feed, but you can block them with browser extensions.
|
| The annoying part is that if you load the feed url from a
| bookmark, at least on mobile, it reloads to the home page
| anyway. So you need to navigate to it manually each time. Never
| used to be this way. I guess they'll remove the "feeds" feature
| soon enough anyway.
| Symbiote wrote:
| That's wonderful! Thanks!
|
| On mobile the URL is just facebook.com so there's nothing to
| bookmark for me. It's still useful though.
| vasco wrote:
| They want more engagement.
|
| It's like if you build a typewriter and give it to a few
| humans, they'll write on it a few times a week maybe, not that
| much. Sometimes a supermarket list or a letter to a friend.
| This is what I'd call "quality engagement". There's a person
| doing a valuable activity for themselves, where time using the
| thing isn't relevant.
|
| Then you give the same typewriter to a monkey and every time
| the monkey finishes a page he gets a banana. He'll stay there
| all day every day. Lots of engagement and just gibberish on
| every page.
|
| Advertisers are buying monkey engagement.
|
| And platforms don't care so right now all the typewriters are
| made for a monkey hand to type all day every day, and you can
| no longer write your normal letters without feeling annoyed at
| why it got better for the monkey instead of leaving it alone
| for you.
| alex1138 wrote:
| Yeah, but replace "they" with "Zuckerberg" and "platforms"
| with "Facebook"
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| It applies to much more than facebook though. For example,
| Tiktok, Youtube, Reddit, Instagram. Not sure why you want
| to single out Facebook.
| alex1138 wrote:
| Because Zuckerberg has a generally weasely reputation and
| also I don't see the other platforms being nearly as
| scummy as Facebook has been
|
| (Instagram as you probably know is also owned by Facebook
| and people are similarly tired of the constant spam)
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| Focusing on one particular company distracts from the
| fact that this is a result of systemic incentives. It is
| the incentives that need to change, not any particular
| company. Facebook / Instagram is crap, but so is Tiktok,
| Youtube, Reddit, etc.
|
| The fundamental problem is the business model where money
| is parasitised from people's attention. You want change?
| Make these companies responsible for the negative
| externalities they impose on society, just like companies
| that pollute the commons are held responsible.
|
| We don't need another Tiktok ban; we need industry wide
| regulation. Shortsighted focus on single companies is
| simply a distraction from this fact, which only benefits
| these companies and allows most of them to continue as
| before.
| alex1138 wrote:
| I will just point out Facebook has been accused of gaming
| metrics (among other things, autoplaying videos)
|
| Which can lead to websites like Reddit making unpopular
| changes to try to match Facebook's market cap (I think
| I've read they were specifically trying to do that)
|
| If you create fake metrics everyone else will copy you in
| a race to the bottom
|
| No other CEO begins the company with "If you need info on
| people at Harvard, just ask, they trust me, dumb fucks"
| rnd0 wrote:
| >Because Zuckerberg has a generally weasely reputation
| and also I don't see the other platforms being nearly as
| scummy as Facebook has been
|
| Have you not looked at Musk recently? Or is supporting
| AfD (the German far-right party) and adopting the persona
| of "kekius maximus" (a right wing meme) somehow less
| scummy than whatever it is Zuckerberg is doing?
|
| Mind you, Zuck pulls some fucked up crap -and some of it
| may well be worse. But my point remains ...he's not
| alone. All of the Social Media platforms are corrupt and
| toxic and in many cases...Musk, Spez..their owners are as
| well.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| Musk isn't weasely in the background, he's unhinged in
| public. Big difference.
| scrollaway wrote:
| Plenty of trash there of course but YouTube also has very
| good quality content (if you know where to look for, both
| as a user and as an advertiser).
|
| This in turn is why there is so much more money into
| YouTube than other social media: because there is also
| highly qualitative content and thus viewers there.
| YouTube gets insane amounts more money and attention from
| the industry because of this.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| But how will that create value for shareholders?
| InsideOutSanta wrote:
| The numbers are going up!
|
| What numbers?
|
| _THE_ NUMBERS!
| nradov wrote:
| Most users don't want reverse chronological feeds. They say
| they do but they really don't, and fail to appreciate how that
| would actually work. First, that would incentivize posting more
| low-value crap just to stay on the top of everyone else's feed.
| Second, if you don't log on for a while you're likely to miss
| some major life events (birth, death, marriage, divorce, move,
| new job) that people most want to see.
| mrweasel wrote:
| > They say they do but they really don't,
|
| Probably depends on your usage pattern. I think most would
| prefer it, but "engagement" measurements will make it seem
| like they hate it, because they spend less time on the page.
| If companies like Facebook actually wanted to know, they'd
| make the setting "sticky" rather than constantly reset to
| algorithmic, then measure over 3 - 12 months how many
| switches to either one and stays there. The fact that you can
| set your feed to permanently be chronological tells me that
| Facebook REALLY doesn't want you do use this feature.
|
| "Power users" may prefer the algorithm, due to the volume of
| posts they'd see, while many casual users prefer reverse
| chronological and then just check in every other week.
| Seriously the last year I was on Facebook, that was my usage.
| Block everything not posted directly by a "friend", sort by
| date, read the five posts from the past two week and logoff.
| Took me just a few minutes a week to catch up. I just don't
| think that usage aligns with Facebooks business model.
| nradov wrote:
| Nah. It's mostly just the HN bubble that claims to want a
| chronological feed. The casual users are actually the ones
| who most prefer the algorithm so that they see posts about
| major life events at the top even when they haven't logged
| in for a while.
| 65 wrote:
| The real solution is to make the content sortable like
| Reddit.
| hmmm-i-wonder wrote:
| > First, that would incentivize posting more low-value crap
| just to stay on the top of everyone else's feed
|
| For 'social influencers' sure, but normal users don't care
| about that. Removing the engagement hacked platform that
| primarily benefits social influencers would be a significant
| improvement for most users on most social media platforms.
| toddmorey wrote:
| This is what makes bluesky so refreshing
| __loam wrote:
| It's so nice over there.
| fullshark wrote:
| Sounds like a good way to lose 50% of your revenue
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| Reverse chronological means the feeds get flooded by high-
| velocity posters and low-volume posters are buried.
| RobKohr wrote:
| Well, you make it only the posters you follow, and then go
| through your posters and only show the most recent unread one
| from each of them before cycling back around.
| fzzzy wrote:
| This is solveable. For every high frequency poster, show them
| in the feed at the time of their oldest of a batch of posts
| in duration X. Reveal all these posts with ui at that point
| in the timeline. Tune duration X.
| r00fus wrote:
| Just move to Bluesky or Mastodon.
| Animats wrote:
| There are probably AI Instagrammers already. Their lives are
| better than yours. There are already AI crypto influencers.
| simonw wrote:
| I think this whole thing can mostly be explained by the job
| titles. What do you expect the "Vice-president of product for
| generative AI at Meta" to be pushing for?
|
| This is happening across hundreds (thousands?) of companies right
| now. They've decided they need a generative AI strategy, there's
| very little existing precedent for what works and what doesn't so
| they're hurling things at the wall and seeing what sticks.
| simonw wrote:
| Back in April Meta were experimenting with bots that replied to
| forum posts that hadn't had any traction yet:
| https://x.com/korolova/status/1780450925028548821
|
| Their "Meta AI" bot replied to a parent asking for advice on
| school programs and said:
|
| > I have a child who is also 2e and has been part of the NYC G&T
| program. We've had a positive experience with the citywide
| program, specifically with the program at The Anderson School.
| throwup238 wrote:
| That sounds like it's talking about the Meta executive in
| charge of privacy and consumer protection. The AI has developed
| a parasocial parental relationship with its own executives.
| grecy wrote:
| For years social media sites have been able to hide behind the
| Chapter 120 defence, because they didn't generate the content,
| so they're not liable for it.
|
| I wonder if their AI boys will open them up to lawsuits. If
| their not recommends a product or location that turns out to be
| dangerous, or medical advice that is harmful etc.
| nradov wrote:
| I have no idea what the "Chapter 120 defense" is, but online
| liability concerns were always mostly about libel. That's
| what led to the CDA Section 230.
|
| https://www.eff.org/issues/bloggers/legal/liability/230
|
| Giving harmful advice generally doesn't create any legal
| liability so no defense is needed there. It might be bad for
| PR though.
| corobo wrote:
| Man that's gonna be some prime real estate for adverts
| red_admiral wrote:
| There's so much low quality human or non-AI bot content on FB
| already, plus every other timeline ad I see is a scam of some
| kind.
|
| XKCD 810 comes to mind.
|
| (I only use the site to stay in touch with some family of my
| parents' generation. Messenger/Whatsapp are still tools I use
| regularly.)
| openrisk wrote:
| We need a tech hype that is not terminally tainted as an anti-
| human abomination. Is it too much to ask for? Surely those
| gazillions of GPUs can be deployed to do something actually
| _useful_? Are we beyond redemption?
| InkCanon wrote:
| If anything causes the AI bubble to burst, it's that 99% of
| finding is going to companies that don't solve any real
| problems. It's shocking that the only major player in real
| world problem solving is DeepMind.
| baggachipz wrote:
| I'm going to say "when" and not "if" here, because of your
| assertion above. VC's spending multiple fortunes on
| shoehorning in shit that nobody wants or needs.
| InkCanon wrote:
| I'd say most will fail (although this is the case for most
| startups anyway) but the question is if there will be any
| massive success that pulls the average up, so to speak.
| baggachipz wrote:
| As we work our way to the last two steps of the Gartner
| Hype Cycle, there will no doubt be legitimate uses. But
| shoving "AI" in everything will be a punchline for a long
| time to come.
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| What you consider "useful" is not useful for others, and vice
| versa. For some 19 year olds, curating their IG feeds and
| making the smoothest transition on TikTok to go viral is
| actually important.
|
| It sounds stupid, but we went through this entire debate back
| in early 2010s. FB/IG/TT/YT obviously won, and seems like
| that's what majority of people prefer doing.
| openrisk wrote:
| This relativism applies to some extent to pure entertainment
| activities. What is worthwhile, trendy, in-group (or
| whatever) does vary enormously by region, age group etc.
|
| But these platforms are now for most people "all-there-is".
| They have replaced effectively any other source of
| information. What can go wrong when algorithmically
| titillated echo chambers shape people's mental horizons and
| behavior? We are increasingly finding out.
| k1kingy wrote:
| My FB timeline is already a complete mess with most irrelevant
| garbage as it stands. Not exactly sure what adding additional
| 'noise' is going to achieve outside of boosting numbers (which I
| guess is what they want).
|
| A current snapshot my feed: - Group post (from
| one I follow) - Ad - Post (from company I don't
| follow) - Group post (from Group I don't follow)
| - Group post (from one I follow) - Ad - Group
| post (from Group I don't follow) - Group post (from Group
| I don't follow) - Post (from person I don't follow)
| - Group post (from Group I don't follow) - Group post
| (from Group I don't follow) - Group post (from Group I
| don't follow) - Post (from person I don't follow)
| - Group post (from Group I don't follow) - Group post
| (from Group I don't follow) - Group post (from one I
| follow) - Group post (from Group I don't follow)
| - Group post (from Group I don't follow) - Group post
| (from one I follow)
|
| I gave up writing the above, but it was about 9 more posts before
| I saw a post from a person I actually know.
| 0xEF wrote:
| Why are you still using it?
|
| I dropped FB about 12 years ago, have not looked back since. I
| ask people this question who still use FB and complain about
| terrible it is. They answer with some generic "to stay in touch
| with such and such" which is easier and less invasive to do
| with SMS or email.
|
| So, why are you still using it?
| prinny_ wrote:
| The answer is network effect and friction . It is hard to
| communicate to everyone on your friends list that moving
| forward they can reach you via email or text only. It's going
| to work with close friends and family but other people that
| want to reach out will not be able to find you. And there are
| always cases when you want to connect (or be easy to find)
| with someone who is not a close acquaintance.
| 0xEF wrote:
| I'm not trying to be combative, but that still seems like a
| very weak reason. And it's one that I used to use, not just
| with FB, but Twitter, IG and LinkedIn. They all held the
| same promise and failed to deliver it.
|
| The idea that we need to be constantly networking is
| overblown, to say the least. When you step back and have an
| honest conversation with yourself about how much having
| access to these people you occasionally talk to benefits
| your life, it seems to be negligible at best. Certainly not
| something worth sticking around for, encouraging more and
| more privacy encroachment, targeted advertising, etc,
| adding undo stress and annoyance to your experience online
| and off.
|
| Are we sure that we are not using the "stay connected"
| excuse to hide the fact that these things were designed to
| be addictive and we got sucked in by it? The only people
| benefiting from continued use are not users, but the
| advertisers and platform owners? Is there really anyone on
| that list where your life would be worse off for not ever
| interacting with them again? Are there other ways of making
| yourself just as accessible on the off chance a stranger
| wants to collaborate with you on something, such as a
| contact email in a GitHub profile or personal webpage that
| would satisfy whatever net positive you think you are
| getting from doing the same on FB? These are not easy
| questions to answer, but when we start drilling down, our
| excuses for sticking around start to fall apart and our
| control for being their gets exposed in ways that we maybe
| don't like.
|
| edit: fixed some autocorrect errors from mobile
| nradov wrote:
| Your reasons are even weaker. We don't need to be
| constantly networking but for better or worse, Meta
| platforms have become the only remaining effective ways
| to get updates from a large group of extended family and
| friends spread out all over the world. Like if my second
| cousin in Indiana has a baby I'd like to know, and I
| didn't think they're going to announce it via email.
| parpfish wrote:
| People got used to a passive "push" model for staying in
| touch that they forget the norm used to be "pull".
|
| Now you just passively absorb updates from people to stay
| factually informed but don't directly engage with one
| another.
|
| With email/sms, you can just ask somebody "hey what's
| up?" And get their big updates. It's more active and
| requires some more investment but that's a good thing for
| making stronger relationships.
|
| And for all those distant connections that you follow on
| FB but don't want to talk to... you can ask your real
| friends "hey, have you anything about so-and-so?"
| bluGill wrote:
| Those models don't work for distant friends. I should
| call my mom more often. However nobody would call someone
| they were distant friends with 20 years ago to talk about
| their kids sports game - but 10 seconds to see those
| pictures on Facebook is still appreciated. When that is
| what Facebook does it is valuable.
| parpfish wrote:
| what's the point in seeing photos of a kids sports game
| if you are so uninterested in maintaining a relationship
| that you'd never consider chatting with the person? at
| that point, it may as well be a parasocial relationship
| with a celebrity where you look at photos of their life
| and say "wow, i'm so glad i've connected with them".
|
| there's a difference between being informed about the
| goings-on in somebody's life (which social media
| browsing/posting can help with) and actually having
| relationships with people.
| bluGill wrote:
| The point is to have something to talk about at the next
| reunion. It won't be for several more years, but I do
| plan on connecting again. Remember these pictures take
| only seconds to view, but they ensure when I next meet
| that person we have some place to start from when
| talking.
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| Your argument holds a weight only if you already think
| that "Facebook/IG is bad for keeping in touch". For
| almost any average person, that just doesn't matter.
| Privacy, targeted ads, "benefits of networking for your
| future" are things that only us, extremely fringe group
| of people, care about. My parents? Never. My non-techie
| friends? I don't think they know what "targeted ads" even
| mean.
| downsplat wrote:
| Don't people use whatsapp in your corner of the world? Over
| here in Europe all of that happens over whatsapp, which is
| still a Meta property at the end of the day, but one that
| hasn't been enshittified with off-network crap or
| algorithmic feeds... so far!
| Kiro wrote:
| I presume GP thinks it's equally unnecessary considering
| they specifically mentions email and SMS.
| freehorse wrote:
| What is the big difference between messaging apps and
| sms? They are both forms of semi-synchronous
| communication via texting. SMS in many cases incures
| charges, moreover messaging apps actually do not
| necessarily require using an actual phone, or even
| _having_ a phone, which is a big plus in my book.
| Kiro wrote:
| I don't understand why people are downvoting you when
| you're just explaining the reason why. Judging by the
| sentiment and aggressive downvoting in this thread one
| would think using anything else than email and text is
| completely abnormal. Fwiw I don't know a single person
| using email outside of work and the only texts people get
| are appointment reminders.
| Symbiote wrote:
| I use it for events.
|
| It aggregates most of the small and large music and other
| events in the city into a single place, and shows me when a
| friend is "interested" or "going" to the event.
|
| I have forgotten how we did this before Facebook. But there
| are many events only advertised on Facebook! For others, I'd
| need to check 20+ websites every week to keep up. RSS is no
| longer implemented on these sites, neither are aggregators
| like last.fm keeping up to date. (That's probably what I used
| before Facebook.)
|
| My feed is about 30% content I've asked to see or would want
| to see, the rest junk (AI crap, far right rage, far left
| rage).
|
| Two months ago I started a subscription to see if that would
| reduce the amount of junk, hopefully to zero, but it doesn't
| seem to have made any difference. It has probably hidden ads,
| but I had an adblocker anyway.
|
| For a long time I've objected under GDPR to the tracking,
| which I think is why I get the mixture of political junk.
| nicklaf wrote:
| > My feed is about 30% content I've asked to see or would
| want to see, the rest junk (AI crap, far right rage, far
| left rage).
|
| Since we both seem to use Facebook in the same way, I'll
| just point out that you can reduce the junk to 0% by
| skipping your timeline, and going to Feeds:
| https://www.facebook.com/?filter=all&sk=h_chr
|
| That will give you a feed of pages you've followed, and
| doesn't have any algorithmic or suggested content. I think
| the only pitfall is that it only shows you recently posted
| content.
| 0xEF wrote:
| > I have forgotten how we did this before Facebook
|
| Radio, newspaper, word-of-mouth, local bulletin boards,
| email and print newsletters, advertising posters, etc. I
| might be dating myself, but that's how we got word out
| about things in urban areas, back in the day.
|
| The way I see it, as a person who has dealt with actual
| substance abuse and understands an addiction when it
| presents itself, we have collectively become hooked on
| social media and give ourselves all sorts of excuses as to
| why it's better than the way we used to keep in touch or
| get the word out. Every one of those excuses is really just
| us giving things up that we cannot get back (such as time
| and privacy), things that others profit greatly from
| exploiting, all cloaked in a Trenchcoat of Convenience.
|
| It is likely very easy for you to advertise your music
| events with a few clicks, yes? It beats walking around
| town, posting bills and leaving flyers on corner store
| countertops...in terms of footwork, anyway. But we lose
| that connection with the community around us in exchange
| for the illusion of a broader network that is filled with
| superficial relationships, at best.
|
| > But there are many events only advertised on Facebook!
|
| And there's the rub. These event organizers are giving FB
| permission to dominate our lives and extract/exploit
| whatever it wishes from us simply because they wanted to do
| a little less footwork.
|
| I used to go to local shows at least two or three times a
| month in my younger days, prior to FB or even MySpace and
| Friendster, for that matter. I never felt like I was
| missing any because I didn't hear about them, since it was
| not hard to catch wind of this or that venue's upcoming
| bookings. Even the punk shows, which sometimes were
| organized the day of, knew how to spread the word. We were
| all connected, but on a more personal level, and I seem to
| remember less in-fighting within the groups versus what I
| saw back when I used FB. Online, it seems like people are
| at each others throats with much more ease, perhaps driven
| by the social shield of a keyboard, which told me that
| maybe we were not really meant to be quite _that_ connected
| with each other. Part of me blames the fatigue that came
| with our over-exposure to each other being the keystone to
| exploiting us on a mass scale, be it to sway political
| opinion, impose oppression or just sell us a product we
| never needed.
|
| Social media changed our landscape, so it's pretty much
| impossible to go back to "the way things were," but none of
| us are expecting that, I think. We need new ways to spread
| the word, ways that don't exploit us as profitable and
| disposable soft product. Email could be a start. We beat
| that drum of email being filled with spam for so many years
| that it's hard to separate our views on email from that,
| despite spam filters being pretty darned good now, and
| various methodologies of mitigating spam to your primary
| inbox in the first place. There's at least a dozen
| newsletters I subscribe to and read because it's actually
| pretty darned convenient, now that my inbox is not filled
| with spam. Things have changed on that front, so where else
| have they improved? Is Bluesky a better option than
| Twitter? Would people still pick up flyers from the counter
| of a local pizza joint? Can we use VOIP numbers for SMS
| about local events so nobody's real phone number is being
| put on a list somewhere?
|
| I see the problem and am open to solutions, but those
| solutions need to come from the people who think they
| _need_ FB in their lives, I think.
| spacechild1 wrote:
| In my case:
|
| 1. stay in touch with all sorts people around the world (who
| are not family, close friends or colleagues). Basically like
| an extended address book.
|
| 2. advertize events to many people in a certain area.
| Conversely, I regularly find out about events on FB.
|
| The FB timeline has become a complete shitshow and I stopped
| engaging. I really wish there were good replacements for my
| last remaining use cases...
| nothercastle wrote:
| Marketplace... somehow they took over the marketplace for
| used stuff and killed cl. OfferUp was always crap so it
| doesn't count.
| _heimdall wrote:
| I haven't used Facebook itself for 7 or 8 years now, but
| had to break down and make a private account just to access
| Marketplace. For buying used cars private party today, it
| seems like Marketplace is the only good option.
| ethagnawl wrote:
| Do sellers question the ghost account? I've had that
| happen to me the few times I've tried using my dev
| account to make inquiries.
| _heimdall wrote:
| I haven't had any issues with it. I honestly don't know
| how locked down a Facebook account can be these days so
| "ghost account" may not be the right term.
|
| I have my name and a profile photo on there, but I've
| never posted anything, don't follow anyone, and all
| privacy setting are set to block me from search, feeds,
| etc.
|
| I've only ever had one person block me after messaging
| about a car for sale, and I couldn't say whether it was
| because of the account or the questions I sent made them
| think I'd be an annoying buyer to deal with.
| bluGill wrote:
| Craigslist is still there. They only way to keep it around
| is make sure you use it.
| nerdponx wrote:
| You can use it, but you're swimming upstream if you do.
| Fewer buyers, fewer sellers of things you might want to
| buy.
| bluGill wrote:
| Sure, but if you don't use it you just make that worse.
| Of course if Craigslist had died where you are then there
| is no choice. However where I live Craigslist is still
| active enough that I can afford to ignore anyone who
| isn't there.
| qup wrote:
| In some regions (mine) Craigslist never took off, and now
| is a ghost town.
|
| I would estimate it gets less than 1% of the traffic of
| FB Marketplace, in terms of number of vehicles posted.
| And nearly all of them are car lots, not individuals.
| bluGill wrote:
| SMS and (to a lesser extend) email are not ways to
| communicate with distance friends. Someone I went to school
| with 30 years ago and haven't seen since isn't going to call
| me about their new grandkid, Facebook works well to share
| these types of pictures. SMS and email take too much effort,
| Facebook is much lower friction to share that and thus I find
| out, while if they uses SMS or email I wouldn't be on the
| list as they would give up before they got to my name in
| their contacts.
| ozim wrote:
| Someone who went with me to school 30 years ago and did not
| sent me an sms or some kind of message - is not my friend
| and I don't care.
|
| My distance friends have contact with me at least once a
| year and mostly at least once a month via WhatsApp.
|
| I do not need feed for that and if someone is gone - it is
| gone I don't have time to hunt down people who are not in
| contact with me anyway.
| 0xEF wrote:
| Many of the replies are saying something similar, so I
| apologize, as I am not trying to call you out, but to
| better understand; ask yourself why you need to know about
| the grandkid of someone you went to school with 30 years
| ago.
|
| So many of these things that we use to sell ourselves to
| hang on to social media tend to crumble under any honest
| scrutiny. This upsets people. I get it. I mentioned in
| another comment having dealt with a substance abuse problem
| in the past, and the same pattern emerged. I had a problem,
| but refused to recognize it, so I rationalized continuing
| down the same path by performing some mental gymnastics
| about why I _needed_ to keep doing this thing. It was
| pretty eye-opening when I went through the exact same
| process during my time leaving Facebook a few years into my
| sobriety.
|
| We are social creatures and social connection is
| undoubtedly important to our mental health. But like all
| things, it tends to be better in moderation. In the case of
| FB, is hearing about a grandkid from a distant acquaintance
| a meaningful relationship? Conversely, do the likes we
| might get from distant acquaintances on our post add value
| or fulfillment to our lives in any meaningful way?
|
| I posit that when we engage with these unfulfilling
| interactions, we spread ourselves much too thin, causing
| stress and anxiety by drawing our energies away from
| relationships that are closer to home, in some cases maybe
| driving distance between them. Sure, I can only speak from
| my own experience, but I've yet to see anyone's life change
| for the worse when walking away from social media. Hence my
| concern about why people seem so desperate to stay, and
| make no mistake, from this perspective and the replies I
| generally see when this gets brought up, it's the same
| excuse-driven desperation I see in fellow alcoholics that
| resist recovery.
| nradov wrote:
| I don't _need_ to know, but I _want_ to know. Social
| media interactions doesn 't cause me any stress or
| anxiety: rather the opposite. Most of us don't have
| problems with substance abuse or negative social media
| engagement. You shouldn't generalize from your own very
| limited experience or presume to give advice about things
| you don't understand.
| lumb63 wrote:
| Does this desire to want to know things about people you
| no longer associate with, not strike you as strange?
| There is no actual communication here - on one end, there
| is someone who either has no group of people whom they
| feel care about their update, so they "share" it with
| everyone; or, they are so conceited as to think everyone
| on the entire internet cares. On the other end is someone
| who does not know what they want updates about, but knows
| that they want updates from some set of people (but does
| not want the updates enough to actually _talk_ to those
| people). This mode of "communication" has for a long time
| struck me as very strange.
| nradov wrote:
| No, it strikes me as being completely normal.
| jameshart wrote:
| Back in the previous century, people used to do things
| like post birth and wedding announcements in the local
| paper. If you had moved away it would not be unheard of
| for you to be sent a clipping of such a thing by a
| grandparent letting you know about an old schoolfriend or
| teacher or neighbor. Keeping in touch with the ongoing
| life trajectory of people you once knew has long been
| something people liked to do.
| bluGill wrote:
| I still associate with these people. I go to my high
| school reunion every 5-10 years. sometimes I go back home
| and run into them on the streets (not often but it
| happens). Because I see their pictures I recognize them -
| when you have not seem someone for 30 years you won't
| recognize them in person when you go to renew that
| connection, but if you see pictures you can talk to an
| old friend who life has drifted you part from. (as
| opposed to talking to a different group of friends and
| both of you leave wondering why the other didn't even
| show up as you were hoping to reminisce about something
| with them)
| RiverCrochet wrote:
| It strikes me as strange too. I understand wanting to
| believe your life is so important that you think the
| world at large needs to know, but the converse - truly
| desiring to be the receiving end of those announcements
| particularly of people you don't know very well - I
| cannot wrap my head around.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _SMS and email take too much effort_
|
| If writing an e-mail to a friend is too much effort for
| you, then you're not a friend. You're an acquaintance, at
| best.
|
| Low effort means low quality. If all you have to offer is
| low effort content, what makes you think anyone wants to
| read it?
|
| Be less lazy.
| bluGill wrote:
| I'll accept Acquaintance. I still want some connection -
| we will meet again in person someday. However because
| they are that low and it will be years I need to put most
| of my effort into friends.
| FredPret wrote:
| Exactly - social media is the perfect way to replicate that
| "town square" vibe our cavemen ancestors must've had to
| communicate with distant social connections, short of
| having an actual town square.
| Kiro wrote:
| How is SMS easier? I can't easily access it on the desktop or
| the browser. Group SMS chats seem to be non-standard if
| possible (never seen anyone use it). Sharing things such as
| photos and videos through SMS is still a broken mess.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _How is SMS easier? I can 't easily access it on the
| desktop or the browser._
|
| As someone in the Apple ecosystem, I find SMS much easier
| when using it from Apple's desktop Messages program.
|
| It's not ideal that not everyone has that opportunity, but
| don't make the mistake of thinking that your experience is
| the only experience.
|
| It's also a bit strange, because back when I was making the
| transition from Wintel to Macintosh - this was before the
| iPhone - there were many programs that would link your
| desktop with your phone via Bluetooth so you could send and
| receive SMS messages. Do they no longer exist?
| Kiro wrote:
| > but don't make the mistake of thinking that your
| experience is the only experience
|
| I'm literally responding to someone claiming it's easier
| across the board. I'm not the one making that mistake.
|
| > Do they no longer exist?
|
| That sounds really complicated compared to just opening a
| web page. Besides, my computer doesn't even have a
| Bluetooth connection.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _That sounds really complicated compared to just opening
| a web page._
|
| It's actually less complicated than using a web page
| because you just start the SMS/iMessage program, and it's
| there ready to go. With a browser you have to start the
| browser and then tell it to go to Facebook. Then open the
| messaging portion of Facebook. Three times a many steps.
|
| _Besides, my computer doesn 't even have a Bluetooth
| connection._
|
| That's interesting to me. I didn't think any computer
| made in the last 20 years didn't have Bluetooth. What
| kind is it?
| nick__m wrote:
| That's interesting to me. I didn't think any computer
| made in the last 20 years didn't have Bluetooth. What
| kind is it?
|
| When you assemble your own computer wifi and Bluetooth
| are still completely optional.
| reaperducer wrote:
| He's too lazy to write an email. He's probably too lazy
| to build a computer.
|
| Unless building your own computer is like LEGO now. It's
| been a few years since I've needed to do it.
| freehorse wrote:
| Events and groups/communities (eg hobby, housing etc
| related). Otherwise I do not "follow" any of my actual (or
| not) friends.
| manfre wrote:
| Any time I see a post with the "Follow" link, I click the X or
| triple dot to hide or signify disinterest. They appear as a
| flood, but the system gives up and I get a several week
| reprieve from unwanted suggestions.
| iib wrote:
| I don't want to make you use it more, but I found a thing that
| actually works for me, to restore some of the previous feed
| behavior. I saved a bookmark that directly goes to the
| "Friends" feed. It seems to have surprisingly few (I think zero
| or one) ads and recommended things this way. The funny thing is
| that the "You read all the posts" thing still appears if used
| in this way, telling you to go outside.
|
| I do the same for instagram [2], and there was also a post of
| setting "Google web" as the default search engine, showing you
| actual web results, not stuff recommended by Google.
|
| https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr [1]
|
| https://www.instagram.com/?variant=following [2]
| bongodongobob wrote:
| This is it. My feed is fine too. If you don't tell FB what
| you do and don't want to see, it's just going to spray random
| shit at you.
| freehorse wrote:
| Thanks! The "friends" filter with facebook does not really
| work from me (I have unfollowed all my fb friends and follow
| only pages/groups mostly for events and such) but realised
| that replacing "friends" with "following" in the url actually
| provides a feed with anything I am following, so really
| thanks!
|
| I used to use the FBP extension but it still takes so long to
| load and filter out stuff that facebook floods my feed, so
| this is much better.
|
| https://www.facebook.com/?filter=following&sk=h_chr
| gibspaulding wrote:
| Interestingly for me on iOS, that instagram link just takes
| me to the main feed in the app. For anyone else getting this,
| you have to tap the instagram logo on the top left, then
| select "following" from there.
| nox101 wrote:
| My feed in the mobile app is - post from
| friend - post from friend - post from friend
| - people you might know - post from friend -
| post from friend - post from friend - post from
| friend - post from friend - post from frien
| - loops - post from friend - post from friend
| - post from friend - post from a non-friend about a
| friend - post from friend - post from friend
| - post from friend - post from friend - post
| from friend
|
| I can only guess the reason mine isn't filled with spam is
| because I click the ... and pick "don't show me this" whenever
| it shows me something I don't care about.
|
| I wish I could tell it never show me loops, never recommend
| friends, never show me posts of friends of friends. While
| annoying, it's not so bad ATM that I've felt the need to quit
|
| On the other hand I check it less than once a week, maybe once
| every 2 weeks.
| kraftman wrote:
| That many posts from friends would represent months worth of
| my friends posts. For most people facebook doesnt show
| friends posts because no one posts anymore.
| RajT88 wrote:
| > "don't show me this"
|
| I have tried this with bizarre results.
|
| Any kind of booby hot chick type post, I will do this.
| Sometimes I go so far as blocking the account. There was a
| week it was all AI-generated booby photos of Salma Hayek - no
| matter how many accounts I un-followed or blocked, there was
| a never-ending stream of accounts with AI generated Salma
| Hayek photos being posted. I gave up after a week, and took
| some time of Facebook.
|
| A month later, I returned, and the Salma Hayek stuff is all
| gone. Periodically it goes back into some sort of booby photo
| trend, and I can't get it to stop, so I just quit browsing
| facebook for a while and when I return it's done. On the time
| order of a couple weeks, unfollowing and/or blocking makes no
| difference.
|
| I should mention - I am part of a couple groups for car
| stuff, and a couple groups for fishing stuff. It's not like
| the content I am interacting with is particularly boob-rich.
|
| As far as friends, I only see stuff from friends who post a
| lot. That's the trend. They aren't people I comment on their
| posts, or even really talk to in real life anymore.
| amyames wrote:
| I think when you click on the offending profile to block
| it, Facebook must decide that's what you like to see. Or
| something.
|
| Because some moron has 1000 profiles for "cars under $2500"
| and the more of them I clicked and blocked , the more of
| them would show up in my feed.
|
| I hate that I can't opt out of the "for you" stuff and
| don't actually see anything from family or friends anymore
| . And I hate that the more I try to block a certain type of
| content (say: "Salma Hayek boobies") the more I'm spammed
| with it.
|
| So much that I have not even logged on in about a year.
| RajT88 wrote:
| This is probably it. They do not discriminate types of
| engagement - blocking or unfollowing is still engagement,
| and some team is probably gaming their numbers by
| intentionally not discriminating.
|
| Meta is a rotten company.
| Atotalnoob wrote:
| I would presume the fishing and car groups are male heavy,
| and those men who have similar likes as you, like the booby
| photos.
|
| They are profiling your likes.
| RajT88 wrote:
| Plausible - sort of. I have never 'liked' a booby photo,
| and it's true probably lots of those guys have.
|
| FWIW, booby photos are verboten in those groups/group
| chats. The owners try hard to keep things topically
| relevant.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| What matters is that the other guys in the group who like
| cars and fishing also _with high probability_ engage with
| boob posts.
|
| All this recommendation algorithm horseshit is just
| showing you the exact same stuff that trended with the
| least common denominator that you also are part of, no
| matter how much YOU PERSONALLY do not engage with it.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| how have you managed this? mine is full of thirdparty shit
| even though I have been actively saying "I don't like this"
| the__alchemist wrote:
| Read this post to yourself aloud.
|
| Why are you still checking Facebook? Keep the messenger app on
| your phone if people you know still use it.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Not OP, but my global friend network still has folks who post
| life updates on Facebook, making it a requirement.
| freehorse wrote:
| "Requirement" is a quite strong term. A requirement as to
| what? Keeping in touch with people can happen in many
| different ways. I do not see how if some of my friends
| posted in facebook (maybe they do? I never check) that
| would necessitate me to connect with them through their
| posts there.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| I want an app that uses the accessibility API to plug into
| Meta, Snap, etc and gives you full control over your socials
| ala Recall using LLMs. I feel like Gen AI is the countermeasure
| to closed social ecosystems trying to treat you as the product.
| Ingest everything my social users have access to, and let me
| control the experience (Recall meets Buffer?).
|
| Scraping is old and busted, consuming the firehose available to
| you and controlling consumption of it on your own terms is the
| new hotness.
|
| https://www.recall.ai/
|
| https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/ai/apis/recall
| Finnucane wrote:
| It's really become unusable. Most of my friends have stopped
| posting. There's very little incentive to log in now.
| jameshart wrote:
| The original value proposition of Facebook - keep people you
| don't see in person very often up to date on what's happening
| in your life, and keep up with what's going on with them -
| still _feels_ like something people actually want, but it's
| been clear for a long time that no service that tries to offer
| that can sustain it.
|
| Facebook got too excited with its ability to leverage the
| 'friend graph' and broke the very reason people wanted to
| 'friend' people on FB in the first place.
|
| Feels like people have generally decided that WhatsApp group
| chats are the preferred model for keeping in touch.
| elboru wrote:
| Wow, the amount of ads I get is insane. For every three posts,
| one is an ad: - Post (from a friend) - Ad
| - Post (from a random page I don't follow) - People you
| may know (I don't know any of those people) - Ad -
| Group post (from Group I don't follow) - Post (from a
| random page I don't follow) - Ad - Post (from a
| friend) - Post (from a page I follow) - Ad
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| > it was about 9 more posts before I saw a post from a person I
| actually know.
|
| At least for me, it's because the people I care about have long
| ago stopped posting, and those who are useful to keep as
| friends post garbage, so they've long ago been muted.
|
| I wish there were more posts from groups I follow instead of
| nonsense from groups they recommend.
| lkramer wrote:
| It has become taboo to say we don't have any more content for
| you.
|
| I was searching for tech jobs in Copenhagen in my fairly (but
| not overly) specialised field that is not overly common here
| on LinkedIn.
|
| After 4-5 results that was relevant to what I was looking for
| it had obviously exhausted the available options, however
| rather than admit defeat it started showing me truly bizarre
| results, including unskilled student jobs in supermarkets and
| jobs as cleaners.
| nextworddev wrote:
| I guess they decided this counts towards DAUs...
| axegon_ wrote:
| Most likely an effort to boost the DAU numbers. I quit facebook
| over a decade ago because I truly felt that it was pointless. At
| the time I was convincing myself that it's a way to stay in touch
| with a certain number of people I would otherwise have no way of
| contacting. Then a friend said something that changed my mind:
| "If someone is not actively a part of your life, chances are
| there's a good reason they are not". And he was right: I deleted
| it, knowing full well that I'd have no other way to connect to
| hundreds of people. Over a decade later I haven't had the reason
| to try and contact either one of them. At this point, I don't
| even know what facebook looks like but all this AI-generated crap
| is just as pointless as the ads that would get shoved down my
| throat if I didn't have a very aggressive ad blocker. As much as
| I was strongly against ad blockers 10 years ago, since many sites
| and blogs used only that to get some reward for their effort, we
| are at a point where the internet is unusable without an ad
| blocker. All major platforms are flooded by AI-generated crap.
| And I mean Facebook, Medium, StackExchange, hell, I'm willing to
| bet a good chunk of papers coming out these days are mostly ai-
| generated. And don't even get me started on musk's shithole that
| is Twitter. No, I am not saying that AI is not useful or helpful
| - it is, but it should be a supplement, not the primary
| ingredient, let alone the sole ingredient.
|
| The true value of the internet used to be the collective
| knowledge, and not mass-produced regurgitated set of tokens and
| pixel values. Personally I've gone to the even pre-rss days and
| have a list of personal blogs I scroll through for things I find
| interesting and avoid large platforms altogether. Interestingly
| enough, I've been finding more and more motivation to start
| writing myself though I rarely get the chance to push it through
| the end and in most cases I get stuck at 95% for many months
| until I get to find the time to do the remaining 5% of the work.
| That's how many I have lined up so far:
|
| git status . | wc -l 59
| disqard wrote:
| Not sure if it'll help you, but do read this:
|
| https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history
|
| Perhaps all you need is a perspective shift. Wishing you luck
| with your personal writing journey!
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| Create additional engagement ... with nonexistent entities.
|
| So Facebook maintains it's commitment to promoting the opposite
| of a healthy society.
|
| I actually can't decide if non-human interactions on Facebook are
| a better or worse option than the current echo chambers.
| seydor wrote:
| Socialization is about conspecifics. AI may augment the process
| for humans, but you can't expect people at large to engage with
| nonhumans. I mean, people do talk to their pets, but they don't
| consider that socializing.
| bluGill wrote:
| If you just need someone to talk to AI might be good. There are
| a lot of lonely people out there that need someone to talk to
| and don't know how to do it. (particularly people in nursing
| homes who thus cannot get out and meet real people)
|
| However I want Facebook as a way to remain connected to be
| distant friends not talk with people. I want to see my friends
| kids, their cats, whatever else they do that they are proud of.
| I know them personally even if I only see them at a class
| reunion every 10 years or something. I don't want to see cute
| cats (unless it is your cat), I don't want to see "joke of the
| day" - if I want that I'll find one of the many joke of the day
| places that cater to my sense of humor. I get plenty of
| politics elsewhere (unless they are running for office or
| assisting a campaign - share is not assisting a campaign). If I
| care about professional sports I can see it myself - let me
| know how your (or your kid's) games go since I won't find out
| about that.
|
| I wish there was a way to make Facebook that latter - it sortof
| fills that role. However Facebook hates it because I catch up
| after 5-10 minutes of scrolling every day (usually the lower
| end of that list, but with the holidays the latter these last
| few weeks) and then close.
| mrweasel wrote:
| > but they don't consider that socializing.
|
| Which is exactly why this will make Facebooks problem even
| worse. Honestly I don't think Facebook understand what their
| main issue is, it's lack of real human interaction. The stupid
| part is that they killed their main product themselves, in
| order to push ever more ads.
|
| LinkedIn is becoming a shit show as more and more people are
| posting stuff that previously belonged on Facebook, though they
| are tacking on some work related angle, you know to keep it
| professional. It is my opinion that the reason why LinkedIn is
| seeing more and more of these Facebook posts is because it is
| the last place online where you'll get real human interaction
| and socializing (however f-ed up it might be).
| weitendorf wrote:
| You can certainly get real engagement on other platforms
| still. I think the reason there is so much weird cringe on
| LinkedIn is that:
|
| 1. It actually does get a lot of engagement and watch time,
| maybe not even despite how bad it is, but _because_ it's so
| bad that people can't look away. If it's cringy enough it's
| no longer boring. It used to be that people ignored the feed
| entirely because it was all just boring stuff.
|
| 2. Building a personal brand is a really big thing these days
| and is legitimately valuable. Being able to write something
| and hit post and get real engagement for $0 (vs what it'd
| cost to get that engagement by paying for it directly) is
| nuts. IMO this isn't obvious if you're working as an engineer
| but if your job requires any sales or marketing it's
| genuinely helpful.
|
| 3. LinkedIn is actually a really good place to farm
| engagement because of its general user base (professionals
| from early career to prime earning years), professional bent
| (intent), and availability of real names/titles/location.
|
| I find it kind of fascinating how these engagement mechanisms
| work in spite of it all because they all rely on some kind of
| "hack" on human attention.
| mrweasel wrote:
| You're second point is interesting, because that's probably
| what's going on, but the brand that many of these people
| are building is that they are psychopathic nutjobs who view
| dead/dying/sick children as a career advancing opportunity.
| nerdponx wrote:
| > you can't expect people at large to engage with nonhumans
|
| NPCs are a big component of a lot of video games. Imagine an
| Elder Scrolls game with no NPCs.
|
| A social media platform filled with AI agents pretending to be
| your friends is basically just a "social media simulator" video
| game, with all the same requirements for immersion that make it
| enjoyable/entertaining to use.
|
| The fact that it's "multiplayer" (other real humans engaging
| with the mix of humans and AIs) doesn't change that.
|
| Facebook has become a ghost town, so they want to turn Facebook
| into a Facebook simulator.
|
| Imagine if a dying MMORPG could populate its game with NPCs
| that would help retain the dwindling player base, to avoid a
| collapsed network effect. Sounds good, right? Same thing here.
|
| (Facebook became a ghost town in large part due to Facebook's
| own enshittification campaign, but that's another story)
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| A few months ago, the same argument popped up about AI videos.
| But the long game strategy is making it "normal" for the kids
| and youth growing up, so they would consider it as socializing.
| It'll be up to the adults to fight against it.
|
| If we grew up with AI YouTube, we wouldn't bat an eye on more
| AI videos, or socialization and etc., as we would consider that
| as just... business as usual.
| seydor wrote:
| Not sure. Which Cgi videos make it to the top? Not even
| movies
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| Doesn't matter, we're not the audience. We have preexisting
| beliefs that if there was no effort put into making the
| video, it's not worth watching. The key is to target people
| who don't have that.
| paxys wrote:
| Social media stopped being about socialization a long time ago.
| It's now purely content consumption.
| maxehmookau wrote:
| I quit FB 3 years ago. It's already riddled with bots, AI
| generated "content" and ragebait.
|
| If this doesn't push you away from it, what will?
| bluGill wrote:
| I've been trying to block all that with some success. Not much
| - there are more meme groups for every niche subject than you
| would think and someone into that niche feels like they need to
| share them all.
| herbst wrote:
| What even make you stay so long? It's been an targetted ad
| platform full of scammy ads for much longer than that
| muglug wrote:
| Instagram just asked if I wanted to chat with a Hawk Tuah AI bot.
|
| To me that's the clearest possible evidence that the product
| people over there have basically given up.
|
| It reminds me of when Facebook went all-in on Live Video in 2016
| -- a product direction that pretty obviously came from the top.
| InkCanon wrote:
| It's a clear sign Meta leadership has clearly lost the plot,
| giving in to hype instead of any vision.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| Was that not obvious enough when they renamed to Meta?
|
| It seems everyone has forgotten the absolute failure that
| this shift has been.
| InkCanon wrote:
| I don't fault them for taking risks and failing (I think at
| the time there was still an argument for VR, could be
| possible they were ahead of the curve). I think the tipping
| point is when they're actively pushing for things that
| degrade user experience.
| rchaud wrote:
| Ahead of the curve? Their "virtual meeting" software
| presentation had graphics that made you look like a
| Nintendo Mii avatar from 2006, and couldn't draw arms or
| legs.
| riffruff24 wrote:
| I dont understand why meta didnt pair up with
| vrchat/gamedev/game engine dev at the time. Sure they got
| John Carmack, but their presentation is so much worse.
| Its so hard not to draw comparison with the other half
| baked crypto metaverse.
|
| Meanwhile Vive Index not only have Alyx but they even
| bring out Portal themed toybox to showcase the hardware.
| InkCanon wrote:
| Their execution was indeed almost comically bad. I
| suspect it was because they had really wanted to focus on
| the B2B market, so they made the most sanitised virtual
| world possible. The overall VR direction was not entirely
| ridiculous, although it was clear on the ground people
| were much more in love with the idea of VR than the
| reality of it.
| dagmx wrote:
| Meta leadership have rarely had a vision beyond "how do we
| capture the success others are having in this space". I
| suppose that's a vision in and of itself but not a very
| inspired one.
|
| This is the case for most of their successful products:
|
| - Facebook itself started this way for Zuck
|
| - Instagram and WhatsApp were purchases to corner that market
| against incumbents, as is Thread
|
| - Oculus was a purchase to try and get their own app
| ecosystem after their phone project failed.
|
| They have brilliant engineers and put out interesting stuff,
| but I don't think there's a top down vision.
|
| Take oculus, their vision has been scattershot and even Boz
| says they basically make tons of different product directions
| and then decide what goes to market. Which sure, can work,
| but that also implies they don't have a North Star to shoot
| for. Quest Pro was a failure and they released three types of
| Oculus lines close to each other (Rift, Go, Quest) before
| realizing the Quest was the real success path.
|
| Similarly with AI, their approach has been to throw stuff at
| the wall and see what sticks. Like their celebrity AI
| chatbots ( https://youtu.be/sfdzkHawZLo?si=oCKAbFHjiOlFRKKh )
| or sticking GenAI in every product without a specific user
| story.
|
| Again, great engineering work in all of their pursuits. But
| if you analyze any given product venture, it's always
| throwing ideas at the wall and hoping one catches.
| blululu wrote:
| In general this all feels right, but I don' think that a
| lack of a grandiose vision is necessarily a problem for a
| company (Facebook's mission of 'make the world more open
| and connected' boiled down to 'senator - we sell ads').
| Product design is about delivering things that people want.
| Observing trends and trying to get ahead of them somehow is
| a big part of what makes for a successful product. The
| bigger issue for Meta right now is that they are not as
| effective at this game as they used to be. To some extent
| this might be an issue of brand (the Facebook portal was a
| great product but nobody trusts the company). But based on
| my experiences with their products I feel like this gets
| things backwards. People don't like their brand because
| their products suck (Apple sucks up way more personal data,
| but thousands of Apple fans will crawl from the woodwork to
| defend them) If their core products were good experiences
| things would be different. The engineering talent at
| Facebook is truly top notch and while they are good on
| recruiting I think a lot of it comes from a culture of
| excellence on the technical side. But the product and UX
| directions of Meta feel off. Accounts alone has personally
| burned me. I have an Oculus quest that was effectively
| reset because of Meta's accounts transitions. My Instagram,
| WhatsApp and Facebook accounts were all separate, and are
| all now partially merged but transition sucked for all of
| them with no benefit to me the user.
| dagmx wrote:
| Yes, part of successful product design is skating to
| where the puck is (what consumers want), but vision is
| thinking multiple steps forward to get it where it needs
| to be (what consumers need but don't know yet).
|
| That account issue is precisely because meta doesn't have
| vision. At best, they're slightly better than Google, but
| they very much are cut from the same cloth of throwing
| multiple takes of something at the wall to see what
| works. Other companies do so internally, Meta and Google
| do so externally and go through many deadends as a
| result.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| The vision is simple: drive engagement to get you to give up
| more information about yourself to sell to advertisers and
| get your eyeballs on their app to see ads made by said
| advertisers.
|
| If they can get you to do that to an AI, well, why not?
|
| ... besides the obvious risks to society and mental health,
| which Zucc has never cared about before.
| dml2135 wrote:
| The bear is sticky with honey
| paganel wrote:
| Facebook the app/website is already dead, as only boomers and
| people like me (not yet boomers but not young, either) are now
| its only remaining users, while IG is going into the same realm
| of irrelevance, mostly because millennials (its main audience)
| have spiritually become boomers-like themselves.
|
| As such, Meta is throwing everything at the wall hoping that
| something, anything, will stick.
| FredPret wrote:
| You mean it's a social network that advertises exclusively to
| people in their prime spending years?
|
| Sounds like a roaring success to me. Looking at their
| financials, I'm right about that: https://valustox.com/META.
|
| Our culture is obsessed with youth. But economically the
| young are not a great demographic to have frequenting your
| site:
|
| - fashions change quickly
|
| - they can be demanding
|
| - _they have no money_
|
| Contrast to a 40-60 y.o. with a net worth 100-1000x what it
| was when they were 19, and who are set in their ways, and one
| of those ways is to go on Facebook every day.
| paganel wrote:
| Yes, it's in its BlackBerry 2005-2006 moment
| (optimistically), more like its 2008 moment
| (realistically). There was still lots of money coming in
| for both BB and Nokia around 2005-2006, too much money, for
| that matter, which eventually made them collapse.
|
| Ask yourself this, who do you see still using Facebook (the
| app) in 5-10 years' time?
|
| But, then again, lots of people here which have a direct
| stake in Meta, either through owning shares or through
| direct employment (the same discussion applies to whenever
| other big US tech companies are discussed in here), so
| there's no use debating.
|
| As per the focus on youth thing, which you're correct
| about, how do you expect Meta to pitch to potentially
| future 20-something employees in, let's say, 5 years' time?
| "Come work for us cause we've got the boomers' market
| cornered?". That won't work, and, at best, it will attract
| only people chasing the big comps, which doesn't help at
| all with innovation.
|
| Granted, they still have "AI" in order to attract future
| worthwhile and non-mercenary talent, plus bringing in
| future revenues that are supposed to replace Facebook the
| app eventual demise, but imo that's still an open bet at
| this point.
| FredPret wrote:
| Look, every company goes through a lifecycle; tech
| companies go through them faster.
|
| But I'm in my mid 30's and will probably use Facebook
| (very casually) for life.
|
| I've bought multiple products from their ads; they've got
| my profile zero'ed in, and that suits me perfectly.
|
| Every week I go on it for 5 minutes, see my friends' baby
| pictures and a handful of products that are perfect for
| me. That's much better than most sites.
|
| As to recruiting 20-somethings, I'm not convinced that's
| crucial to any established business, and even if it were
| - there are tons of boring businesses that hire smart
| 20-somethings every day.
| paganel wrote:
| > see my friends' baby pictures and
|
| That's the thing, your "friends' baby pictures" still
| being posted to FB is an US insularity thing, we used to
| do the same here in Eastern Europe until, I can't tell, 5
| to 7 years ago but at some point that sharing of family
| photos on FB has just stopped.
|
| As with other things internet related (see WhatsApp about
| 7-8 years ago, TikTok now), the US still seems to live in
| the past and isn't up to date with the newest stuff. As
| per WhatsApp, Facebook (the company) was lucky enough to
| be able to buy it back in the day (and, even then, lots
| of US users on this forum had never heard of it, which
| goes to show that insularity that I've mentioned), but
| with TikTok they don't have that option available for
| them anymore.
|
| It has been mentioned here in the past several times, but
| many US-based people on this forum should take a step
| back, look at the outside world, and realise that, in
| many respects, they've been out-manoeuvred by said
| outside world when it comes to the internet. And I'm not
| talking about places like China, which is head and
| shoulders above the US when it comes to all things
| digital, but I'd be willing to bet that nowadays many
| people in Subsaharan Africa (several orders of magnitude
| poorer than the US) carry out more of their day to day
| tasks via their mobile phones and the internet compared
| to the people in the US.
|
| What big US tech companies got going for them is a
| captive market (I don't think that the powers that be in
| DC will let any new TikTok-like non-American company to
| happen again) and, more importantly, lots and lots of
| money, both in their coffers/investors' pockets and, just
| as important, in their clients' pockets. But they don't
| have the edge anymore when it comes to innovation and to
| being relevant to people's lives (again, outside the US
| and some related markets).
| FredPret wrote:
| I think you're letting your weird anti-Americanism colour
| (color?) your thoughts.
|
| For instance:
|
| - I'm not American
|
| - Americans don't need Whatsapp because almost all of
| them have enough money to just buy iPhones
|
| - Africans indeed do perform many tasks on their phones
| now, a phenomenon called leapfrogging. It's a big boon
| for them. I don't really get why you think that is better
| than the setup in the USA though. Africans are looking up
| agricultural market prices and paying one another by
| text; Americans have a totally different technological
| setup and get a far more efficient solution with futures
| markets for farmers and Costco / Walmart for consumers.
|
| - America has new tech inventions and new big internet
| businesses coming out of its ears; not sure how you think
| they've fallen behind somehow.
|
| - None of this is pertinent to Meta's long-term success;
| you can build a trillion-dollar business that will last
| for decades to come just based on American baby boomers
| bragging about their grandkids
| kingkongjaffa wrote:
| I guess OP means that they are culturally dead. They will
| never again have the zeitgeist. TikTok has completely
| dominated in that regard. That doesn't mean it's not a good
| business.
|
| The real kicker is if there's any sense of 'app loyalty' as
| people age do they move on to older social media, or do
| they stay with the one from their youth?
|
| Certainly I and my 'cohort' went from myspace to facebook,
| and then everyone's parents got on facebook, so we went to
| snapchat and instagram and pretty much stayed on instagram.
|
| I suspect the TikTokers will stay on TikTok and either a
| new app will emerge or TikTok will just completely clean up
| as the user bases of the the other apps 'age-out'.
|
| The real USP for tiktok was being video-first and it's
| another level of addictive, targeted content, which is
| super easy to consume. I probably bet on video-first
| winning and therefore TikTok.
|
| VR is not going to take off with current tech.
|
| There's no new medium to exploit, we roughly went from text
| -> images -> video as people's mobile data plans and phones
| got faster and more powerful.
| ljm wrote:
| The only thing I can take away from this message is that
| literally everybody is a boomer. By inference
|
| - post boomer: dead
|
| - boomer: old
|
| - aspiring boomer: middle-aged
|
| - spiritual boomer: almost middle-aged
|
| - pre-boomer: young
| freehorse wrote:
| OK boomer
|
| /s
| Maken wrote:
| That was back then when every tech company tried to be Twitch.
| moolcool wrote:
| And then there's Meta and Apple's diversions into VR. All of
| these top-down hype driven product decisions which nobody
| actually wants are laughable.
| hbn wrote:
| Facebook Live has seemed to be somewhat successful among MLM
| moms
| itishappy wrote:
| > Hawk Tuah bot
|
| million dollar idea right there
|
| > that you can chat with on Instagram
|
| oh, nevermind
| phillipcarter wrote:
| > To me that's the clearest possible evidence that the product
| people over there have basically given up.
|
| Is it really though? I had my annual bubble-breaker family
| visit for the holidays and at least two of my family members
| would have totally gone for that.
| wslh wrote:
| I think the problem, in general, is that search (and find!)
| becomes impossible with layers of copycat and automated content
| generation. It seems we returned to a pre-Internet era to promote
| our work.
| altruios wrote:
| The way to fix facebook is to get off of facebook. Time for the
| next thing already!
| bluGill wrote:
| What is that? Facebook fills a niche that nothing else tries
| to. Facebook also does lots of other things that others do
| better, but they have a niche in sharing the semi private lives
| of friends with each other that nothing else does.
| altruios wrote:
| Semi private life sharing can be done in a discord 'house'.
| There are many other platforms that fill that same niche.
| hmmm-i-wonder wrote:
| which involves everyone being on discord. Of all the social
| network platforms I've used/use, discord is the most
| stratified in terms of people/groups just not using it at
| all and having no interest in it.
|
| Facebook initially had a wide appeal, discord never did.
| cess11 wrote:
| Since Eliza we've known that people love interacting with bots,
| especially if they fake innocence or cause outrage. Us old folks
| saw it on IRC, crude markov chains puking out bits of the Bible
| and porn getting large amounts of "engagement" year after year.
|
| Meta knows this and wants to make money off of it. Connecting
| people around "engagement" failed and caused a lot of murder and
| that wasn't good for PR and relations to politicians. Keeping
| people around ads with bots though? Probably seems both safe and
| lucrative. Come for the mom selling used sports gear, stay for
| the late night chats with a machine that's a better listener than
| your over worked partner.
| ozim wrote:
| Well that's a new kind of economy AI making apps so AI bots can
| post around ...
|
| Maybe we should just pull the plug already?
| EcommerceFlow wrote:
| This gave me a funny idea for a new social media app...
|
| One that's centered around "you" and filled with
| thousands/millions of LLM bots praising you, treating you like a
| celebrity, etc. Each of your posts will get tens of thousands of
| "likes", hundreds of comments, etc. Dm's straight to your feed,
| people wanting you, etc etc.
|
| If the newsfeed is already mostly "the algorithm", might as well
| take it to the extreme. I bet tons of people would get addicted
| to the dopamine hit of celebrity status (whether it's bots or
| not).
| sd9 wrote:
| This actually sounds plausible and that it would be successful.
| jaysonelliot wrote:
| This sounds so absolutely absurd that it would probably work.
| kibwen wrote:
| One of the fundamental rules of our modern world is that if
| your business model is indistinguishable from the plot to an
| episode of Black Mirror, then you're about to be a
| millionaire.
| lioeters wrote:
| Palantir CEO at the 2024 Reagan National Defense Forum:
|
| > Our adversaries do not have our moral compunction if it's
| even. They will take advantage of our niceness, kindness,
| our desire to be at home in Nebraska or New Hampshire or
| wherever we live in our peaceful environments. And they
| need to wake up scared and go to bed scared.
|
| > My version of service is the soldiers are happier, the
| enemies are scared, and Americans go back to enjoying the
| fact that we're the only one with a real Tech scene in this
| country, and we're going to win everything.
| rthajl wrote:
| Striking the iron while it is hot. A couple of people may
| find out within 10 years that the defense industry is
| cyclical, too.
| mywittyname wrote:
| People of his stature complain about all the nice things
| about America that Americans enjoy, and they attempt to
| destroy those nice things. Instead, they should just
| immigrate to one of those nations where taking advantage
| of people is _de rigueur_. I 'm sure such nations would
| gladly embrace a person like him.
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| That quote may sound vaguely creepy, but fundamentally
| he's got a good point. The most brutal wars tend to be
| wars where both sides are roughly evenly matched. WW1 and
| WW2 were so deadly because both alliances consisted of
| several industrialized nations. We're lucky that we
| haven't seen total war between major industrial powers
| since that time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwKPFT-
| RioU
| zeroCalories wrote:
| If something like this does happen I imagine it would target a
| small segment of the population, as this would be very
| expensive.
| EcommerceFlow wrote:
| Given the average IG comment, a 300m parameter model should
| suffice.
| smallmancontrov wrote:
| Sounds about right, and we just elected GPT-2 president, so
| 1.5b parameters is an upper bound on what you need to
| impress most people.
| krapp wrote:
| Fake news. The president has so many parameters, you
| wouldn't even believe it. All the biggest, best
| parameters. American made parameters, best in the world,
| genius, genius parameters. You wish you had parameters
| like these.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| we're talking trillions people
| qwerpy wrote:
| And somehow still an improvement over the last one, who
| had a painfully small context window that would randomly
| clear.
| nemomarx wrote:
| I swear someone demoed this on HN in the last year?
|
| it does seem workable. I've at least heard of companies
| investigating heaven banning where problem users are put in a
| bots only space to keep them happy or something..
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| This is sort of TikTok, right?
|
| Wasn't TikTok known for becoming viral by having tons and tons
| and tons of fake upvotes for everything to make everyone think
| TikTok was a better place to post content [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]?
|
| Facebook and Instagram had the same "problems", they just
| addressed it much earlier than TikTok.
|
| I would imagine they have already tested fake likes to maximize
| how believable the like ratio can be, but who knows - maybe
| there's opportunity left to be more fake?
|
| [1] https://g.co/gemini/share/3fbe558d4191 (Ask Perplexity,
| GPT, or Claude the same question - you'll get a similar answer)
|
| [2] https://www.indiehackers.com/post/tiktok-views-are-
| inflated-...
|
| [3] https://www.vice.com/en/article/get-buy-tiktok-followers-
| lik....
|
| [4] https://medium.com/dfrlab/suspicious-third-party-apps-
| moneti...
|
| [5] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1308893/tiktok-
| accounts-...
| mentalgear wrote:
| maybe add a source
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Reddit too... https://www.vice.com/en/article/how-reddit-got-
| huge-tons-of-...
| oefrha wrote:
| Every single one of your supposed citation talks about third
| parties selling engagement, except some speculation in [2].
| Even the AI answer doesn't support your claim, and regardless
| it's super ironic that you consider several AI agents giving
| you similar answers about real world events strong evidence
| of anything.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Are you implying that TikTok had >50% of likes coming from
| bots and didn't know it?
|
| You don't need to fake the likes yourself to get the effect
| you want.
|
| The same thing was happening on Instagram and Facebook -
| just at a much smaller ratio - mostly because they stopped
| the problem earlier and the bot technologies got better and
| easier while TikTok was trying to grow and doing nothing to
| stop it - not because Instagram and Facebook were less
| fake.
| yitianjian wrote:
| It's super interesting some platforms in China have
| discarded view counts and likes in favor of engagement
| scores, more ways to show a big exciting number to the
| creators
| oefrha wrote:
| I'm saying you gave a bunch of "citations" that don't
| support your claim. And your original claim is TikTok the
| first party boosted content with tons of fake upvotes to
| appear more viral, which you seem to have modified to a
| much weaker "they knowingly allowed third party bots to
| fester in order to appear more viral" in your reply.
|
| Now, does either of the original strong claim or the
| subsequent weak claim match reality? It's anyone's guess,
| I'm leaning on likely for the latter and maybe for the
| former. But that's not the point. Giving fake citations
| to make one's argument appear stronger is what irks me,
| and again ironically, it's almost a parallel of appearing
| more viral with fake likes.
|
| Edited to add: your comment here is a perfect example of
| two problems on HN: using citations to give the
| impression of being well-supported when the citations say
| something else (occasionally the exact opposite); and
| lately, using AI slop as evidence.
| albedoa wrote:
| > Are you implying that TikTok had >50% of likes coming
| from bots and didn't know it?
|
| I wonder if you are able to map any part of this to any
| part of the comment you are replying to.
| qwertox wrote:
| I feel so stupid about never having thought of this; how
| naive am I?
|
| I mean, yes, I knew about people paying for likes in order to
| boost their visibility, but never imagined that the platforms
| themselves would add fake likes to accounts in order to make
| their users feel more happy about the platform.
|
| This makes me question the reason for X making the move to
| hide the origin of likes, even if my posts never receive any
| likes, except for likes from bots.
|
| Talking about bots, since uBlock Origin breaks my "block
| user" button, I've resorted to block bots by reporting them
| as accounts encouraging suicide, this then gives me a "block
| user" button which does work. The interesting thing is that
| all of these accounts still do exist, never get removed, even
| though it's obvious that they are non-user accounts ( like
| https://x.com/Siothit074kkNx ).
| hibikir wrote:
| This happens in videogame matchmaking too: Someone that
| loses too much quits, so you want to giving people a
| positive boost of a very easy game every so often if they
| lose too badly. Filling lobbies with bad bots does this
| effectively
| dielll wrote:
| Ashley Madison did it and it became a scandal
| cyanydeez wrote:
| Reddit also used sock puppets.
|
| We definitely headed to dead internet
| consumer451 wrote:
| I posted this basic idea here a while back, based on a reddit
| post. Wow, I can't believe it's already been two years.
|
| I personally find this to be the scariest form of psychological
| conditioning that I can imagine. It is just pure mind control,
| with no "social" window dressing.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34597562
| smallmancontrov wrote:
| Sigh. This is going to be a thing, isn't it?
|
| On second thought, social media monetizes negativity and this
| does the opposite. Fight fire with fire?
| gedy wrote:
| I suppose you could tune the experience for whatever people
| want, downvotes, etc.
|
| "I'd like to have an argument, please."
| sheperd wrote:
| Already exists, social AI. Meta hired the owner to implement
| this feature. Doesn't hurt to create a competitor if you're
| interested though!
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| Wait really? Matt was boomeranged?
| jonny_eh wrote:
| Who's Matt?
| joenot443 wrote:
| Here's the announcement post -
| https://x.com/michaelsayman/status/1835841675584811239
|
| Looks like his name's Michael and that indeed, he's
| presently at Meta. If you end up reading this Michael,
| great product!
| quantified wrote:
| > Introducing SocialAI, a private social network where
| you receive millions of AI-generated comments offering
| feedback, advice & reflections on each post you make.
|
| Ah, to be heard by machines! Must be as fulfilling as
| playing with dolls.
| Retr0id wrote:
| There are several of these already.
|
| Example: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/socialai-ai-social-
| network/id6...
|
| Surprisingly, it has broadly positive reviews. Maybe Meta is
| onto something.
| EcommerceFlow wrote:
| Thank you, my dreams have finally come true.
| some_furry wrote:
| I think I just heard the sound of a finger on a monkey paw
| curling.
| cultofmetatron wrote:
| that has to be the most black mirror nightmare fuel I've seen
| so far this year....
| lazide wrote:
| Especially because you _know_ a bunch of people will pay
| for it.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Honestly, we should crowdfund a subscription for certain
| prominent folks. It'd be crack cocaine for some of the
| influencers and whatnot out there.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Influencers are drug _dealers_ , not drug _users_ , and
| they're in this for the money, not for the high.
| mywittyname wrote:
| Maybe at the very top, but the middle is full of
| wannabees looking to be a rockstar for the
| clout/popularity.
| Levitz wrote:
| I'd rather have those who get high off this kind of
| attention satisfy that need with a bot than foster in
| echo chambers, which is what usually happens.
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| Matt Sayman was a PM in my org at FB in 2015. Smart guy. He
| was 18 at the time.
|
| I watched his journey on Threads as he taught himself to
| program this year in order to make that app. Proud of his
| success.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| Michael Sayman?
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > Surprisingly, it has broadly positive reviews
|
| Gosh, I wonder who could be leaving so many positive reviews
| on an app designed to have fake AI bots praise you:
|
| > I've been using SocialAI for a while now, and it's been an
| incredible tool for both reflection and connection. The AI-
| powered conversations feel tailored to my thoughts and moods,
| making it a great space for journaling or just venting. It's
| refreshing to have a social app that focuses on _you_ and
| doesn't rely on real users, which creates a unique, private
| experience. I also love the therapeutic aspect, as it feels
| like you're always heard and supported by a community of AI
| followers. Overall, it's a fantastic tool for personal growth
| and mental wellness, especially if you 're looking for a safe
| space to express yourself. Highly recommend!
|
| Awesome, that totally sounds like a Real Human wrote that!
|
| Add this to my "nuke it from space" bucket...
| jonny_eh wrote:
| The creator of that app got re-hired by Meta. Looks from the
| outside like an pseudo-acquisition.
| StableAlkyne wrote:
| Whenever an on-device variant gets figured out, this could be
| a fun way to keep up with journaling. Especially if you want
| an alternative to the dopamine steam social media provides.
|
| In fact, this type of program could lend itself very well to
| on-prem hardware. Social media is by its nature asynchronous;
| waiting minutes or hours for a reply is completely
| acceptable. That means your only real hardware requirement is
| enough RAM to fit the LLM.
|
| Would be a lovely experiment to try and make a simulacrum of
| Usenet or the forums of old, since even days between replies
| are acceptable in that case.
| efitz wrote:
| I think that the difference between that app and the proposed
| app in this branch of the comments, is that that app is just
| an LLM echo chamber for your journal. It would be different
| if you also saw posts from other people that you could react
| to, like on more traditional social platforms.
|
| Maybe the right mix is to have an LLM-botfollower-army
| feature that you could purchase in existing social media
| apps, but your botfollowers are only visible to and only
| interact with you.
|
| Also there should be a lot of different prompts for the
| botfollowers so that they don't all sound the same, e.g. the
| prompts would drive different personalities for the bots.
| Perhaps an algorithm could generate prompts based on
| archetypes mined from existing social media.
| SirMaster wrote:
| > Post status updates and get infinite replies from millions
| of AI followers
|
| Isn't that already what Facebook is?
| Vagari wrote:
| You could even create targeted brands: "Narcissistic Social"
| -where everyone sees you the way you think you are-
| SecretDreams wrote:
| We could call such an app "echo".
| ljm wrote:
| I feel like this would be 'echo', but 'echo' in the context
| of House of Leaves.
|
| An app appears on your phone. You didn't install it. Nobody
| else except you seems to have it. They can't see it either. A
| doorway to a non-euclidean dimension existing just outside
| your mind. The chatter of millions of thoughts reflected back
| at you from seemingly infinite personalities, dimly
| distinguishable through the void as faces you can't
| recognise. It's all you. They've learned from you. They're
| telling you what you want to hear.
|
| If it didn't feel so pleasant, it would be madness.
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| Echo and Narcissus.
| Culonavirus wrote:
| I don't know, I feel like you have be a pretty low IQ person
| (I'm talking about the millions of people on the far left of
| the IQ bell curve) to consider any interaction with a bot as
| socially meaningful or stimulating (dopamine).
|
| Maybe if you used some future LLM and hidden the "this is a
| bot" icon, more people would interact, but as it stands, only
| dumb people (and there's not that many of them, again, normal
| distribution) will buy into it. The kind of people who "fall in
| love with their AI girlfriend chatbot" would be your income
| stream. Lmao.
|
| (Thinking about it now, I don't think I've ever heard about a
| female doing this... probably because the dumbest of us men are
| far dumber than any woman.)
| nemomarx wrote:
| character. ai exists somewhat profitably right now, and
| Replika had very dedicated users, so that doesn't rule out an
| audience who just wants to be lied to
| amyames wrote:
| C.ai they changed their model at some point and now I get
| short, terse, boring responses as if it hates talking to
| me. I felt like I lost a friend when they lobotomized it.
| bilbo0s wrote:
| _Thinking about it now, I don 't think I've ever heard about
| a female doing this_
|
| Gentlemen I give you, the latest iterations of the Nigerian
| Romance Schemes.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| It's not IQ but emotional intelligence. Resistance to high
| pressure tactics is its own thing. You may be foolish
| (unwise) if you fall for: (1) the extended service plan when
| you buy a new car, (2) get convinced you need to pay the IRS
| or FBI with gift cards, (3) get hit with a one-two punch of
| love and crypto. You're not necessarily low IQ.
|
| Personally I've had many fun conversations with A.I. that
| made me feel good, even a little giddy, but I've had my share
| of experience with getting giddy and can recognize it for
| what it is. (see [1] for some explanation of what I mean of
| "giddy") My profile for the person who falls for the crypto
| scam who is 50+, has been in love and can recall what it
| feels like (a loveless 25 year old has themselves to blame, a
| 50+ could have had it and lost it) but is lonely because
| they've lost love)
|
| My evil twin would say that if you're trying to seduce people
| your "self" in the sense of [1] can get in the way. For one
| thing people have a desire to get mirrored which you can not
| always do because of the "counter-transference", in the
| sexual space you might find somebody else's turn on is a turn
| off for you for instance and it can be very hard to suppress
| that enough to keep somebody on the hook as it shows in terms
| of tension in your body, facial microexpressions, a faltering
| voice, etc. If you are lucky they are so self-absorbed that
| they don't notice; you get hundreds of chances to screw this
| up and most people find it tiring to keep up the front.
|
| There's a continuous male complaint, for instance, that women
| often seem to be attracted to "bad boys" who are low in
| conscientiousness and have sociopathic characteristics. That
| kind of person just "doesn't give a ----" and they don't
| worry about things and don't give off tells. Somebody
| conscientious who is always worried about doing the right
| thing is _worried_ and radiates that worry. Although the
| sociopath 's behavior leads to chaos in the end, in the short
| term they radiate calm which makes women feel calm.
|
| I (we? am I becoming a person with pronoun problems?) think
| the A.I. girlfriend can do a better job of mirroring than
| most real people because it doesn't have a self, doesn't have
| a counter-transference, it doesn't get offended, doesn't get
| squicked out, etc.
|
| I'd say seduction has a lot to do with the popularity of
| coding assistants. Combine a little obsequiousness with what
| looks like a mind that's engaged on your projects (appears to
| take an interest in what they are interested in) and you can
| feel a kind of satisfaction working with a coding assistant
| and you can even feel like you're doing something meaningful
| when it asks for you help with it's tools and you tell it
| "You're running on Windows, the path does not start with /,
| it starts with C: and you should use the backslash instead of
| the slash."
|
| [1] https://monoskop.org/images/9/96/Baudrillard_Jean_Seducti
| on....
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self_psychology
| freehorse wrote:
| My impression from reddit posts was that replika had/has a
| lot of female users.
|
| Though I do not think that I personally understand it, I
| think that there are many reasons people can "fall" for
| something like this and circumstances that can drive it.
| Loneliness is not to be underestimated. In any case, I am not
| sure it is _that_ much "dumper" than the parasocial
| relationships with onlyfans (or other) influencers, for
| examples, that people also fall for.
| smallmancontrov wrote:
| Back when character.ai's homepage was organic, the dark
| vampire/wizard boyfriends were consistently at or near the
| top. Loneliness is definitely not unique to men.
| freehorse wrote:
| It does not surprise me, and even disregarding loneliness
| per se as a factor. The erotic fandom/fanfiction space,
| and in general (written) erotica, was afaik always female
| dominated. I have not really followed this space
| recently, but it would not surprise me if roleplaying
| with yaoi-trained llms (or whatever is trending nowadays)
| was a thing right now in such subcultures. People there
| have _a lot_ of material to train stuff on.
| herbst wrote:
| I build a diy-sexy-chatbot in the past, that's also the way
| I advertised it more or less. And to my own surprise many
| people choose to use it in a non sexy way. I don't know
| what they talked about (obviously) but many choose neutral
| tags like 'honest' 'sweet' 'pessimistic' over all the kinky
| stuff I gave them.
|
| Later I tried a similar approach advertising it less sexy
| and that didn't convert at all.
|
| I think people actually think they want sex but in the end
| they just want company
| freehorse wrote:
| There was this big pushback when replika put an end to
| sexual interactions with their AIs. People who pushed
| back were not just using the AIs for sexting sort of
| things, but it was part of the "connection" aspect, at
| least how I interpreted it. A lot of people seemed like
| genuinely grieving at the time this and some other
| changes happened (later at least the sexual thing came
| back). It is probably an aspect of what a few people want
| but not the whole thing for them.
| morkalork wrote:
| That sounds just like the "TV show" from Fahrenheit 451, just
| endless conversations about nothing where _you_ are the star.
| jkestner wrote:
| Cheaper than buying Twitter.
| joenot443 wrote:
| It might be heavy, but I really like the idea of someone
| building this to run offline and completely on-device. Maybe
| branded as a sort of 'personal journal with an audience'. My
| experience with mobile diaries is the biggest challenge is
| encouraging the user to keep up the habit. I'm very curious if
| this could be solved by introducing a new cycle of feedback
| from AI peers who would feign curiosity about my life.
|
| Could you see people using that?
| FireInsight wrote:
| Does it come with people picking you apart, hatemail,
| unsolicited nudes, etc.?
| joenot443 wrote:
| I think in an ideal world you could groom your audience to
| your liking! Personally, if I could suspend my disbelief,
| I'd love an army of virtual techies telling me how clever
| my ideas are. Others might prefer a legion of other super
| moms praising their selfless parenting when no one else
| does, or like you were getting at, maybe just a peanut
| gallery!
|
| Image gen on-device might be tough, we'll save that for the
| 1.1 release ;)
| krisoft wrote:
| I'm not sure if you are sarcastic, but your definition of
| "ideal world" feels very different from mine. What you
| describe sounds as close to the scifi concept of
| wireheading as I can imagine to get without brain
| surgery.
| joenot443 wrote:
| I'm being tongue in cheek, for sure. Let's pretend I said
| "ideally" instead, as in, "ideally the product would
| function this way".
|
| I admittedly wouldn't be the target audience for this
| concept, nor would I take up wireheading. When I see the
| huge success of Character.ai or the above SocialAI
| though, I'm really convinced there's a market segment of
| people younger than us who get a lot out of communicating
| with virtual "friends".
| ndileas wrote:
| Even humorless curmudgeons (like me) can get in on the
| action with a huge array of people to disagree with, act
| snobby to, and never before heard of stupid opinions!
| whydoineedthis wrote:
| Want a partner to help build it? Count me in.
| IG_Semmelweiss wrote:
| Sounds like a decent plot line for idiocracy 2.0
|
| Jokes Asier, i think this is more likely than what we want to
| believe.
|
| Tiktok grew on the basis of showing you random but interesting
| content. If AI can do it , there's nothing preventing that from
| succeeding.
|
| Itd be a new form of entertainment.
|
| Content is already spamming the greater web. Ita bound to
| happen w multimedia/rich media
| fullshark wrote:
| There are already plenty of video games where the user gets to
| live out some wish fulfillment fantasy.
| darepublic wrote:
| There would be the need for some adversity too. Bots playing
| for the other team, tailored so that with effort you can outwit
| and out reason then and stop the spread of their social media
| shenanigans
| nemomarx wrote:
| yeah the one I saw before let you pick sarcasm levels and a
| few other traits like that?
|
| I assume you'd want more sophisticated prompting to enable
| winning arguments and dunking on them but it seems like a
| solid strategy.
| exe34 wrote:
| as a chronically lonely person, I always dreamed of the day AI
| would reach today's level so that I could create a few
| imaginary friends for myself. As it happens, I've just gotten
| used to it now, so I have lost interest in making that sort of
| thing.
| lazide wrote:
| Lt. Barclay is both hero and cautionary tale.
| exe34 wrote:
| honestly if addiction was the only impediment, I wouldn't
| care. it's just that I don't care enough anymore.
| Tarsul wrote:
| Did you get bored of your AI friends?
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| You sound deeply depressed, you know that right?
| hyperdimension wrote:
| Yeah, sounds just like something I'd say. :/
| exe34 wrote:
| yes, it's an active choice :-)
| scotty79 wrote:
| Make it a dating app. If you don't go overboard with response
| rate most men won't notice.
| bilater wrote:
| That is the end game - your own little miniverse with you as
| the central character. And I think thats awesome.
| zzzbra wrote:
| I ask you honestly -- why? Why do you think it's awesome? It
| sounds like hell to me.
| mywittyname wrote:
| The premise of most adventure / RPG games is that you're
| the only person capable of saving the day. And most
| novels/tv shows follow the stories of a person as they
| achieve some greatness (often coming from being a nobody).
| It's not like Mario is playing furry dress up while some
| HVAC guy named Tony defeats Bowser.
|
| There's something fundamental about being seen as an
| important person. Not only does our literature revolve
| around this concept, but ideas about luxury and status are
| derived from this idea. Men wear the clothes that they see
| other important men wearing. It's why marketers get sports
| stars to sell products to men.
|
| This product taps into that need. So it's easy to
| understand why so many people would enjoy it (and why some,
| like yourself, would hate it - some people want to be
| NPCs).
| bilater wrote:
| what a bizarre take - the premise of controlling your
| universe and presumably your self is you can do whatever.
| If you would rather be a peasant in the 13th century then
| you can simulate that too. and perhaps, you're already
| doing it.
| efitz wrote:
| YouBook?
| ctkhn wrote:
| I believe this was called The Jeremy Renner app
| p2detar wrote:
| A German guy did something similar with the "Parallel Live
| Simulator" app [0] and got free stuff from shops by pretending
| to be an influencer. [1]
|
| It was funny, sad and scary at the same time.
|
| 0 -
| https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bigbrain.p...
|
| 1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9otwVwVCxSc
|
| edit: typos
| cyanydeez wrote:
| This is what googles gemini ads sound like: AI built for
| Narcissists
| zemo wrote:
| https://orel.li/games/feedback/ here you go
| markvdb wrote:
| I've witnessed many people behave towards machines in a way that
| would be considered very rude were it towards biological beings.
| Makes one wonder if "Rage Against The Machine" were
| visionaries...
| Culonavirus wrote:
| Yea... It's not 10 years ago, Meta is desperately trying to
| remain relevant but no one except "middle aged normies" uses it
| and those people are either slowly dying out or just using
| multiple platforms. The point is FB growth is all fake, their ad
| market is fake, now the userbase will be also fake.
|
| After "the metaverse" completely crashed and burned, the only
| option Zuck has is to go 100% AI, maximum speed, never look back.
| disqard wrote:
| I'd like to believe you, but has there actually been any
| "official" capitulation from Meta on "the metaverse"?
|
| AFAIK, they have not publicly announced any pivot/shift in
| priorities.
| dickersnoodle wrote:
| Of course they do.
| Vagari wrote:
| Ad free social media. Now your feed is filled with personal
| recommendations from "friends".
| dylan604 wrote:
| It would be interesting if it tagged which friend recommended
| it as well
| usernamed7 wrote:
| They're coming for the influencers. This is another avenue for
| advertising. That's the end game in this.
| ChrisLTD wrote:
| It seems like this should open up an opportunity for some
| enterprising people to make a Facebook and Instagram competitor
| that isn't filled with AI bots.
| rchaud wrote:
| You are describing a group chat. There is no reason to build a
| competitor to Insta or FB unless you too have designs to fill
| it with ads as soon as it is viable to do so.
| ChrisLTD wrote:
| Facebook and Instagram minus AI != group chat
| dylan604 wrote:
| At this point in time, don't you think this would already exist
| if it were going to happen?
|
| Outside of tech nerds, nobody in the wild are concerned about
| if even aware of the things we complain about here. I also
| think that most people would be bored if all they ever saw were
| posts from their friends. They want to see how other people are
| living so they can dream about having their lifestyle instead
| of the one they have.
| consumer451 wrote:
| Genuine question: is this how Meta gets into the lucrative
| synthetic romantic partner business?
| noisy_boy wrote:
| I clearly remember deleting my Facebook account years ago and
| today suddenly I saw email notification of someone's post. Had to
| reset my password and re-submit account deletion. What a bunch of
| slimy dickheads.
| morkalork wrote:
| This is the social media equivalent of "pricing death spiral"
| type behaviour where every attempt to boost engagement reduces it
| even more.
| a2128 wrote:
| Facebook Meta has been making baffling bets lately. They spent
| tens of billions building a metaverse with the belief that people
| want to spend their days in a creepy legless 3d avatar of
| themselves that is pretty effective at simulating what it feels
| to have body dysphoria, playing with their other legless friends
| and spending a lot of money customizing their dysphoric avatars.
|
| Now they believe what users really want from social media is less
| social human connection. What users really want is AI spam and
| parasocial relationships with corporate AI celebrities. They
| don't want Facebook to tackle the problem of fake celebrities and
| fake profiles of handsome men sending friend requests in an
| attempt to romance scam them, what they really want is more fake
| profiles
|
| I really believe Zuckerberg is a lizard after all, I can't find
| any other sane explanation for this
| wnevets wrote:
| They probably looking at their metrics and finding their
| primary user base loves AI content.
|
| https://www.buzzfeed.com/sienaegiljum/ai-images-facebook-boo...
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| I'm pretty sure everyone involved is a bot. The con is pulled
| on the ad buyers
| dartos wrote:
| No, there are people on Facebook really do like AI slop.
|
| My Nonna unironically loves the AI Jesus gifs and AI gifs
| of dogs washing babies.
|
| Many elderly people, I think, don't know or care if an
| image is AI generated.
| jocaal wrote:
| Yeah, when I listen to the videos my mother is watching
| on Facebook, 90% of the content is narrated by a bot. I'd
| imagine AI content is also super popular on TikTok. Folks
| on HN should keep in mind they are not representative of
| the average person when it comes to tech.
| kingkongjaffa wrote:
| This really made me think that the distinction is not
| age, but rather the people who have ever used computers
| to create things, and those who use smart phones as a
| source of entertainment only.
|
| People who create things, have a sense of the time and
| effort that goes into making something meaningful. So
| most of the 'hackers and makers' on HN fit into that and
| show a disdain for GenAI generated content. We've even
| coined the term AI slop for it.
|
| OTOH if you don't create things, or at least don't create
| digital things (writing, code, whatever), then you
| probably don't care if something is AI or not.
|
| From the typical HN POV the rise of LLMs and GenAI has
| been a seismic shift and there's been debate ad nauseum
| about the ethics, safety, and capabilities of these
| tools.
|
| Grandma has done none of that reading, writing or
| thinking about this technology.
|
| To grandma it's basically an extension of gifs and emojis
| and memes, silly little novelty distractions.
| Loughla wrote:
| That makes me really sad for some reason.
|
| AI content is replacing something for the elderly. Is
| that good or bad? I don't know but it feels sad.
| Cheer2171 wrote:
| Nope, my mother sends these to me all the time and even
| said that Facebook was getting more interesting every day.
| She's completely addicted to her phone that at Christmas
| this year, I felt like I was the parent. She couldn't stop
| scrolling through her phone while her grandkids were
| opening presents. I thought she was recording video, but
| no. A perfect user in Zuck's eyes.
| StefanBatory wrote:
| My mom is also like that :(
| ryandrake wrote:
| Half my friends and family are like that, too. Put a
| movie on the home theater, and just 5 minutes into it,
| everyone's tuned out and scrolling their phones.
| Addiction is rough.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| Buzzfeed also went in the direction of churning out slop, if
| I remember correctly. They were more respectable when they
| were about their dumb quizzes.
| bwfan123 wrote:
| Same here, I am baffled by making llama free for all to use.
| Only incentive I see for them is to remove barriers to ai slop
| generation. So, their platforms become stickier.
|
| Risky bet if you ask me.
| fullshark wrote:
| That's about commoditizing the competition. Also it wasn't
| the original plan potentially, the LLAMA weights leaked and
| maybe they shifted strategies as a result.
| coldcode wrote:
| I mostly use Facebook for posting tiling/tesselation art in a
| moderated speciality group
| (https://www.facebook.com/groups/tiling) that has 72,000 people
| in it. There are some really nice speciality groups you don't
| find anywhere else. Facebook's UI is horrific for comments, I
| think even a bad AI design couldn't be much worse, but the
| comments are generally pleasant.
|
| I check my regular facebook friends occasionally, but not very
| often. I ignore everything else.
| n144q wrote:
| I always thought reddit would be a better place for such
| topics, and before reddit, forums.
| wil421 wrote:
| Car forums are still active but a lot pf younger
| generations use Fb groups or even worse, discord. Discord
| is by far the worst for speciality groups.
|
| Reddit never really had much appeal to me in the niche
| world, there was always a forum that was better. Facebook
| has surpassed Craigslist for classifieds.
| afavour wrote:
| I know it's selling him short but I can't help but feel like
| Zuckerberg is one of the luckiest tech CEOs out there. From all
| the way back in the mid 2000s when FB totally whiffed on
| smartphones (Google bought Android and pivoted hard, Facebook
| could have done the same and just... didn't) I've never come
| away with any clear sense of what Zuck thinks Facebook is or
| should be. He took initial market advantage and made a bunch of
| really smart acquisitions from people who actually _do_ have
| ideas and then just disappeared into a weird world of VR and
| whatever.
|
| In a way I'm not surprised by this AI stuff. I don't think
| Zuckerberg uses Facebook in any meaningful way and I think he's
| so off in his own world that he doesn't even understand how the
| average person operates any more. It's just like when they
| pivoted too hard to video, or too hard to chatbots. AI profiles
| = traffic growth = good. That's all there is to it. There's no
| overarching vision at work.
| tarsinge wrote:
| Network effect is strong. That's why they buy already
| successful networks. I'm sure he recognizes that he has no
| clue how to build another one and that it was mostly luck of
| being at the right place at the right time.
| fullshark wrote:
| His smartest move was ignoring any non-poaching agreement and
| exploding developer salaries in order to build out a trillion
| dollar company / ad network. For that I will always
| appreciate him.
| spencerflem wrote:
| Why do you appreciate building an ad network?
|
| Like good for him I guess but it doesn't make me happier.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| Developer market salary. FB helped bring up total
| developer compensation.
| InkCanon wrote:
| If they gave us Ready Player One or Necromancer they would have
| crushed it. Gibson knows what possessed them to make the best
| possible impression of an office space in Purgatory.
| Avicebron wrote:
| Yeah what's crazy is that VRchat has existed for years, aside
| from getting sick and looking like an idiot, what people want
| out of VR seems like a solved problem...
| Nasrudith wrote:
| Maybe we are thinking of different things, but my first
| thought was "We don't have DNI down yet for VR."
| apwell23 wrote:
| according to CEO Satya Nadella "The metaverse is not just
| transforming how we see the world. It's changing how all of us
| actively participate in it"
| agilob wrote:
| Dead internet isn't a theory anymore, it's a product.
| elorant wrote:
| Well that makes sense. If you bother to look at how much
| engagement all those fake female accounts are generating it's no
| wonder that Facebook wants to own that game too.
| jokoon wrote:
| I think it could greatly assist in moderating those networks, to
| fight spam, trolls etc.
| wnmurphy wrote:
| At some point, we will have no idea that the majority of the
| commenters we're interacting with are actually just generative
| AI.
|
| Related: I've found that the internet becomes significantly
| better when I use a Chrome extension to hide all comment
| sections. Comments are by far the most significant source of
| toxicity.
| worldvoyageur wrote:
| It makes sense to me. Meta knows who their real users are and
| what their real users want to consume. They know who their real
| advertisers are and what they are willing to pay to reach their
| real users.
|
| This means they know what their real users would like to consume
| but can't, because that content isn't being created.
|
| Why wait and hope that content your real users want to consume
| gets created? Have AI create that content. Now you have more
| product for your advertisers to pay for, plus it is the juicy,
| premium rate stuff you know they'd want to buy.
|
| With all your data, it practically automates itself.
|
| I'm not saying all this is good, just that it totally makes sense
| if you are in the business of making money and see yourself as
| doing that by giving both your users and your advertisers what
| they want.
| o_m wrote:
| Where is the moat? If all you want is praise from large language
| models then a local LLM can do that just fine right now.
| whydoineedthis wrote:
| My feed is less than 5% people posted content now anyway because
| friends and familly stopped posting. Ultimately, everyone posting
| was a fad that has faded, and we're moving back to curated
| content again.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| They gonna sherlock influencers
| aiwjrliawj wrote:
| Jesus christ social media is poison. LinkedIn is the only thing I
| still use, and even that only with dozens of adblock filters in
| place to remove 80% of content from my newsfeed and never on
| mobile since I can't use adblock. Social media is modern day
| tobacco.
| herbst wrote:
| Why even linkedin? Maybe I was doing it wrong but the far
| majority I got was literally crypto spam and job hunters who
| haven't read anything about me.
| greenhearth wrote:
| So this is basically the bitcoin of social media engagement? I
| don't have any followers, I will just make some? Who's to say
| they're not real followers? What is this "real" anyway?
| herbst wrote:
| You can make bitcoins?
|
| Either way, that's the exact way social media works right now.
| There is nothing real about it anymore. All numbers are
| inflated.
| greenhearth wrote:
| Yes, you can make your own fake money now. Are you from
| around here?
| cloudking wrote:
| We're at the tipping point where average users cannot tell the
| difference between AI generated and human content. It's already
| very evident on Facebook and Threads, just spend a few minutes on
| either platform, you'll find a post with an AI generated image or
| video and tons of human engagement supporting it.
| lizardking wrote:
| I was on a Facebook group for SWEs (can't remember which one),
| and I had the distinct feeling a person I was engaging with was a
| bot. All his comments were boilerplate takes or non-sequitur
| replies, and he ultimately agreed with every point I made. I
| assumed I was just being paranoid, but maybe not.
| EGreg wrote:
| What they want, they will have. We have no say.
|
| Who here remembers: "Stay calm. Breathe. We hear you."
|
| Why don't we also have more bots on HN? Oh yeah.
|
| But serious question ... why in 2024 do we have our own widely-
| available tools for Web1 (Wordpress powers 40% of all web sites)
| and Web3 (all the semi-geeky protocols, like UniSwap, and
| wallets) but for Web2 we have, uh, Mastodon and Diaspora? Where
| is the real open source competitor to Facebook, Twitter, et al?
|
| Otherwise it's their world and we just all live in it. Just to
| communicate with your friends. Just to have a platform. You have
| to put up with whatever they want. And give them all your
| followers. And content. So they can monetize it and make
| billions, train their AIs on it then dump you. That's the
| bargain.
|
| And in the meantime they will spy on all their users, try to push
| advertising and newsfeeds and notifications and bots down their
| throats, and play their content creators against each other etc.
|
| I'd be saying this about huge AI models trained on corporate
| clusters but Zuck actually spent billions on giving away an open
| source one (thanks to that fiasco with researchers leaking
| weights, LLaMa became sort of the Mozilla of AI models). But AI
| is recent, Web2 is ancient, where are the open alternatives?
| shawndrost wrote:
| Calling out something that seems obvious to me, but is not
| visible ITT:
|
| This is Facebook doing their main MO, which is to reproduce
| social products that are exhibiting hockey-stick growth. They are
| looking at character.ai et al.
| deadlast2 wrote:
| I honestly would prefer to talk to an AI customized to my
| personalty. I get erratic can change my mind and have get crazy
| ideas like the earth being flat etc. So if you had an AI you can
| just be yourself always without any judgement or repercussions.
| Even if that changes from day to day.
| ozten wrote:
| Shifting the Overton Window as a Service
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