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I am drowning in mutes: The current Threads experience

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Re: I am drowning in mutes: The current Threads experience

#42

If you have to put that kind of work into a platform to make it usable, I would suggest putting it into a platform that aligns with your values. I just can't understand why anyone, even "normals", would be so eager to jump into bed with Facebook again after the last decade.

I agree with you and I have no plans to sign up for threads, but I have to admit that there's some part of my monkey brain that has softened on meta throughout all this. I am not saying that feeling is justified; only admitting it's there. I think the last decade has given us events and people who went out of their way to make "normal" levels of malevolence seem quaint or even charming.

I have a hard time giving up FB because so much family and old friends are on it, but intellectually I know it's awful. Probably worse than Musk's Twitter, TBH. Zuckerberg has personally done a better job of not being public-crazy than Musk (just cringey), but his platform has arguably net-effects worse on society.

They crossed the line last fall when they put me in FB jail for posting a picture of my son at the beach in his bathing suit as "violating community standards", and then extended my jail-time further when I appealed and complained. The implication being that I was posting .. CSAM... because their image detection algorithm & moderation sucks... that's awful.

Meanwhile they continually try to show me far right or climate change denial material presumably to try to get me to "engage"; yesterday was a meme encouraging people to run over cyclists, complete with a picture of a cyclist being hit by a car, and when I reported it as encouraging violence they rejected my report.

Meta depends on outrage-engagement to make $$. Zuck talks a big talk about creating online community, but he's actually kind of created the opposite. Even the active FB groups I've been in around niche topics have become kind of awful in tone recently, like they're doing the same outrage engagement algos in them, too. Or people are just bigger assholes after COVID, I dunno.

They really are the worst, in actuality, and getting worse. I think I will delete my account ... but it means losing contact with a lot of friends and family.

Re: I am drowning in mutes: The current Threads experience

#43

If you have to put that kind of work into a platform to make it usable, I would suggest putting it into a platform that aligns with your values. I just can't understand why anyone, even "normals", would be so eager to jump into bed with Facebook again after the last decade.

I don't think it's fair to call it getting into bed. More like trying out the new ice cream place that everyone is trying.

I think in this case we —-the customers—- are the ice-cream and Facebook’s tongue licking all over us, as if they haven’t had enough taste of our metadata yet!

Re: I am drowning in mutes: The current Threads experience

#44

If you have to put that kind of work into a platform to make it usable, I would suggest putting it into a platform that aligns with your values. I just can't understand why anyone, even "normals", would be so eager to jump into bed with Facebook again after the last decade.

I don't think it's fair to call it getting into bed. More like trying out the new ice cream place that everyone is trying.

(Continuing this analogy)

Except that the icecream place is run by a group known for extremely poor hygiene, manipulating customers and lacing their other food products with nicotine to ensure chemical dependency issues.

Re: I am drowning in mutes: The current Threads experience

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's fair to call it getting into bed. More like trying out the new ice cream place that everyone is trying.

(Continuing this analogy) Except that the icecream place is run by a group known for extremely poor hygiene, manipulating customers and lacing their other food products with nicotine to ensure chemical dependency issues.

“This Carolina Chocolate is amazing! I just keep coming back!”

Re: I am drowning in mutes: The current Threads experience

#46

If you have to put that kind of work into a platform to make it usable, I would suggest putting it into a platform that aligns with your values. I just can't understand why anyone, even "normals", would be so eager to jump into bed with Facebook again after the last decade.

I can only imagine 2 use cases right now:

1. You are a celebrity or influencer and you are trying to “colonize” the place

2. You have a business that sells products or services to this people: celebs and influencers are your primary target

Re: I am drowning in mutes: The current Threads experience

#47
post #6

Muting like this is in my opinion dumb. Just move on, you don’t need to ‘purge’ their ability to reach your eyes. Threads is brand new, and the home feed is not meant to be only people you follow as of now.

I don't know about Threads, but in Mastodon mutes, filters and the occasional block make the experience vastly better.

Because Mastodon only has a linear feed, I don't even see the point, you're only going to see what you explicitly followed. It actually takes a lot of time just to build up interesting content to follow. One of the more frustrating things is when someone I find interesting goes crazy posting and the lack of algorithm just means I see way too many posts from them in a row. Maybe the mobile apps improve on this, I dunno.

Re: I am drowning in mutes: The current Threads experience

#48
post #30

If you have to put that kind of work into a platform to make it usable, I would suggest putting it into a platform that aligns with your values. I just can't understand why anyone, even "normals", would be so eager to jump into bed with Facebook again after the last decade.

If I already use Instagram, Meta isn’t getting much new information from my use of threads that they didn’t already get from IG.

Well they're capturing additional text-based interactions associated with your identity and demographic.

Re: I am drowning in mutes: The current Threads experience

#50

If you have to put that kind of work into a platform to make it usable, I would suggest putting it into a platform that aligns with your values. I just can't understand why anyone, even "normals", would be so eager to jump into bed with Facebook again after the last decade.

I agree with you and I have no plans to sign up for threads, but I have to admit that there's some part of my monkey brain that has softened on meta throughout all this. I am not saying that feeling is justified; only admitting it's there. I think the last decade has given us events and people who went out of their way to make "normal" levels of malevolence seem quaint or even charming.

Perhaps the softening is related to the open sourcing of LLaMa? I softened a bit on Microsoft after it started embracing the open source approach in the 2010s... even if the motivate was being late to the party.
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