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Meta Wants More AI Bots on Facebook and Instagram

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Re: Meta Wants More AI Bots on Facebook and Instagram

#51

Post by prinny_ »

0xEF wrote: post #45
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…

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?

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.

Re: Meta Wants More AI Bots on Facebook and Instagram

#52

Post by axegon_ »

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

Re: Meta Wants More AI Bots on Facebook and Instagram

#53

Post by rnd0 »

alex1138 wrote: post #44
_Algernon_ wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It applies to much more than facebook though. For example, Tiktok, Youtube, Reddit, Instagram. Not sure why you want to single out Facebook.

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)

>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.

Re: Meta Wants More AI Bots on Facebook and Instagram

#54

Post by Symbiote »

0xEF wrote: post #45
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…

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?

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.

Re: Meta Wants More AI Bots on Facebook and Instagram

#55

Post by Symbiote »

wincy wrote: post #28
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)

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 milli…

Do you get fewer junk posts in the feed, or are they just different?

Re: Meta Wants More AI Bots on Facebook and Instagram

#56

Post by spacechild1 »

0xEF wrote: post #45
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…

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?

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...

Re: Meta Wants More AI Bots on Facebook and Instagram

#57

Post by 0xEF »

prinny_ wrote: post #51
0xEF wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

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

Re: Meta Wants More AI Bots on Facebook and Instagram

#58

Post by Symbiote »

hapticmonkey wrote: post #30
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)

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…

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.

Re: Meta Wants More AI Bots on Facebook and Instagram

#59

Post by ahartmetz »

rnd0 wrote: post #53
alex1138 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

>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…

Musk isn't weasely in the background, he's unhinged in public. Big difference.

Re: Meta Wants More AI Bots on Facebook and Instagram

#60

Post by nicklaf »

Symbiote wrote: post #54
0xEF wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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 aggre…

> 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.

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