I’ve now realizing that these Tech giants have poisoned their entire well:
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Want to make AR glasses? Cool! Oh… Uh, I guess we run a platform that handsomely pays pervs for engagement, so that’s not going to work.
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Let’s start gaming services. Oh… why does no one want to make an account with us, or trust we will keep it running?
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Generative models for creative media. Oh, uh… back to the AR glasses issue. And some others.
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Ah, so our LLMs need to reference the web to be at their best which…. We… Kind of killed for a quick buck? Oops.
There are hundreds of examples of this.
And now? The whole reason people use these platforms is being consumed by cancer. Rapidly, from the feel of things.
I’m a cynic. I believe companies like Meta can carry on destroying people and getting away with it, no matter what, and users will be indifferent.
But now I’m starting to suspect they they have nowhere to pivot to, because they’ve burned the forest down.
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As soon as posts were no longer ordered by post date and time it was over for me.
Dude they filled my timeline with a bunch of ads and AI generated nonsense. We stopped posting because no one ever saw it thanks to all of the filler.
Most of my microblogging stuff has been just shouting in the void about stuff I’ve been doing. And random brainfarts. I follow cool people on social media so I can see them shout in the void about what they’re doing. And their random brainfarts.
I’m happy Mastodon still lets me do just that. Perfect platform for that sort of stuff.
The Algo Lords decided people don’t actually want to see that, they want “popular” things and engagement bait. Yeah no, not what I want.
To be fair, engagement bait works.
Look how much Twitter ragebait gets upvoted here on Lemmy.
Whenever I go to check the source for the posts, they aren’t even real; it’s a bot account posting 24/7, or at the very least a dedicated engagement farmer. But people don’t care, they just want that feeling.
I just signed up for my local Nextdoor; holy crap, it’s 75% commercial ads, about 10% personal ads, about 10% dogs/cats/kittens, and 5% misc. Utterly useless.
You’re lucky then. For me there was at least a double digit percentage of just plain racism.
Photo of black man walking: “ANYBODY KNOW WHO THIS IS?!”
Car broken into: “I BET IT WAS THAT MEXICAN”.
Absolutely vile place. Boomers talking to other boomers with no filter, an HOA board given a social platform.
Yeah I’m originally from a very notorious southern state for racism and the nextdoor app was like that there too.
Hated it. I’ve not been in it ever since. Also, a lot of people being very nosy about weird stuff.
I thought it was going to be like a community app, a good way to meet people. How naive I was.
Too many people tell me they prefer small towns because people are “nice”. In my experience, absolutely not. They may say hello to you, but that does not mean they are nice people. My experience aligns with yours. Selfish, ignorant, nosy. After you leave they’ll immediately start talking about you, your family, and anything else gossipy. Not much else to do in a small town.
Say what you will about big cities but no one gives a damn about you and its great. Someone rude to you? You can literally never see them again. It’s wonderful.
I grew up in the city because my parents couldn’t stand the gossip, conformism and backbiting of small-town life. I’ve been to where they came from (there are still relatives there), and getting the hell out of there was one of the best things they ever did for me.
I’m in a small city now. The neighbors are friendly but not over-curious and the crime rate is minimal. I live near the center so everything I need is within a 20-minute walking radius. And the last time there was a racist demonstration here, the counter-demo was five times larger and the fascists got back on their bus and fucked off: they weren’t even locals, they were a rent-a-mob. That matters greatly to me since we’re an ethnically diverse family. If those assholes get the upper hand, they’ll be coming for us.
It sounds like you found a very nice place to live! Congrats to you!
No one gives a shit what I ate for lunch.
I mean, I still post to social media every day, but it’s pixelfed. It’s not toxic, it’s just me throwing in my art on the pile with everyone else’s art that I also get to flip through and enjoy, in chronological posting order, with no advertisements or other subject matter present.
No ads and no “algorithm”. That’s all I ask for
Mine is at https://pixelfed.social/tanisnikana, if you want to get an idea of what gets posted. There’s much better artists than me on that site too!
It’s a really interesting thing that happens, Pixelfed put me in touch with some amazing industry photographers like NatGeo dudes and such, and it’s actually got my photography career properly started.
For me it’s the idea that by interacting with social media I’m working to generate profit for a billionaire-led company.
Not just America. It’s a trend worldwide thanks to the abundance of AI slop taking over any ‘social network’.
See also the privacy-invading aggressiveness of most platforms, and the political ads and propaganda inundating people’s feeds. If social media had just remained a way to keep in touch with friends and post pictures, it would probably have remained popular.
But unprofitable
No, just not as profitable.
They could have had guaranteed medium long term return, if they played nice. But now there’s backlash against both the brands and even the very concept of that form of social media.
So they’ve had high short term gain that could all come collapsing down relatively soon.
I thought all of the social medias were bleeding money until they had the customer base locked down enough to exploit with all of the aforementioned shit?
Bleeding money expanding as fast as they could so nobody else got there first.
Huge capital investment to capture the market, and as you rightly put it, exploit with all of the aforementioned shit.
But that doesn’t mean they had to go down that route. Income via vaguely targeted advertising has been a standard practice for decades by newspapers, radio stations, and TV channels. They could have improved upon that old model without turning to the evil manipulators and spyware companies they are now.
Take, for example, DuckDuckGo, this is their model:
It is a myth that search engines need to track you to make money. The majority of our revenue is from private ads on our search engine. On most other search engines, ads are based on profiles compiled from your personal information, such as search, browsing, and purchase history. Since we don’t have that information per our Privacy Policy, search ads on DuckDuckGo are based on the search results page you’re viewing instead of being based on who other companies and their tracking algorithms assume you are as a person. For example, if you search for cars, we’ll show you ads about cars. We’ve even created a way to show localized ads while still keeping you completely anonymous.
https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/company/how-duckduckgo-makes-money
AFAIK, these companies are making record revenue.
From scams
I think this is what makes me the most angry.
My daughter wanted some toy, so I Google it, and go to one of the top results for it, thinking it’s a legitimate website. I go through the checkout process, but it’s weird and hanging. And then they text me some “verification code” I’m supposed to enter which is actually my CC code for my account. A total scam. I do some more searches and this is a common scam for this toy. So I cancel our credit card immediately.
But what pisses me off is that this totally fraudulent website was a top results from Google. They could have verified that shit! But instead they chose to serve me up to wolves.
They could have verified that shit!
There’s no “They”. There’s nobody home. Nobody’s looking at this shit, it’s all just algorithms and machine learning, there’s nobody customer-facing at Google who’s job it is to vet this crap. That scammy website passed some set of automated metrics Google uses to determine scamminess, so it’s off to the front page of search results it goes.
From what? Is my mom clicking on that many ads and buying their shit?
Spoiler: >!Yes she is.!<
My mom: I don’t want ad blocker I want to see what the ads are selling!
Also my mom: Malware ridden phone I have to clean every two months
She has a constant stream of useless, scammy shit from temu ripoffs being sent to her house constantly and I just had to get some AI face filter subscription she swears she didn’t sign up for off her bank account.
But she’ll constantly tell you how much she hates technology.
Do we have the same parents?
Hello brother
Because no one fing cares about your hourly updates and you’re just advertising your insecurities.
Social media is 75% ads, 15% shared content (more ads), and 10% people you know creating actual posts. You’re a gluten for punishment if you hang out there.
“gluten for punishment”, thanks autocorrect for another genius coinage
Darn it! I’m not changing it. I shall live with my shame of not proof reading
For some, gluten could indeed be punishment.
And I still use social media the way many people originally imagined it: as a way to stay connected. My feeds have always been a mix of far-flung relatives, old friends, and high school band chums (because, let’s be honest, band buddies are the best buddies). Most days, I carve out a little time after work to catch up with the people who matter.
The last thing I’d want is for doing so to be…just more work. And yet, more than half of respondents agreed with the statement “Maintaining an online presence feels like work,” with about a third of those checking the “strongly agree” box. Only 16% disagreed, with the rest remaining neutral.
A full 60% of Gen Z respondents feel the pain of maintaining a social presence. Perhaps they have a niggling hope that they might still be discovered as an influencer?
I don’t really care about the following-people form of social media, the Twitter family. I’m more interested in the forum sort, the Reddit family. There, I don’t need to singlehandedly maintain a flow of content, because people aren’t coming to see @[email protected], but because they’re coming to see what’s going on in some community that I only incidentally participate in.
I miss webforums terribly. phpBB boards were everything back in the day. Reddit/Lemmy isn’t remotely the same.
I keep hoping some of the new old web stuff will manage to strike a spark again.
I personally prefer Markdown to BBCode and not having to have a ton of different different accounts, but if you want phpBB forums, they are out there. Search a Web search engine for a string that exists on the website that the forum software displays by default. “Powered by vBulletin”, “Powered by phpBB”, etc.
searches
It’s annoying to have different accounts but at the same time I feel like it’s a necessary component if you wanted to retain the same feel. Plus password managers making keeping it all organized dead simple.
This exactly. I like the thread style formatting, because then I’m following a topic, and not an individual person, because I really don’t give a shit what you had for breakfast, and don’t need your food pics lol. I’m not into that, but if you post something interesting in a technology forum, then I’m quite interested.
I haven’t had breakfast yet. I’m still working on my Americano. #espresso
