Meta Wants More AI Bots on Facebook and Instagram • Hacker News Board

Re: Meta Wants More AI Bots on Facebook and Instagram

#211

Post by freehorse » Thu, Jan 02, 2025, 4:21 PM UTC

iib wrote: post #83

k1kingy wrote: post #41

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 Gro…

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 sam…

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

Re: Meta Wants More AI Bots on Facebook and Instagram

#212

Post by joenot443 » Thu, Jan 02, 2025, 4:22 PM UTC

FireInsight wrote: post #197

joenot443 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Coul…

Does it come with people picking you apart, hatemail, unsolicited nudes, etc.?

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 ;)

Re: Meta Wants More AI Bots on Facebook and Instagram

#213

Post by jameshart » Thu, Jan 02, 2025, 4:23 PM UTC

lumb63 wrote: post #170

nradov wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

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.

Re: Meta Wants More AI Bots on Facebook and Instagram

#214

Post by tokioyoyo » Thu, Jan 02, 2025, 4:25 PM UTC

seydor wrote: post #162

tokioyoyo wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not sure. Which Cgi videos make it to the top? Not even movies

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.

Re: Meta Wants More AI Bots on Facebook and Instagram

#215

Post by yitianjian » Thu, Jan 02, 2025, 4:26 PM UTC

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #177

oefrha wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 Instagra…

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

Re: Meta Wants More AI Bots on Facebook and Instagram

#216

Post by smallmancontrov » Thu, Jan 02, 2025, 4:26 PM UTC

freehorse wrote: post #192

Culonavirus wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 distri…

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…

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.

Re: Meta Wants More AI Bots on Facebook and Instagram

#217

Post by wnmurphy » Thu, Jan 02, 2025, 4:26 PM UTC

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.

Re: Meta Wants More AI Bots on Facebook and Instagram

#218

Post by fullshark » Thu, Jan 02, 2025, 4:26 PM UTC

alex1138 wrote: post #11

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)

Sounds like a good way to lose 50% of your revenue

Re: Meta Wants More AI Bots on Facebook and Instagram

#219

Post by kingkongjaffa » Thu, Jan 02, 2025, 4:27 PM UTC

FredPret wrote: post #130

paganel wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

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.

Re: Meta Wants More AI Bots on Facebook and Instagram

#220

Post by afavour » Thu, Jan 02, 2025, 4:27 PM UTC

a2128 wrote: post #171

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…

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.