I am drowning in mutes: The current Threads experience
internettalk.substack.com
internettalk.substack.com
It's not that the internet is full of bots, it's that the internet is full of self promotion. Finding real people to have real conversations is more difficult because so many want your engagement/attention for their "brand".
Similar to the Black Mirror episode about social credit score.
I don't understand why you are classifying as "sideswipes" posts in a "Show HN" where others chime in to "Show HN".
I mean, "Show HN" is about showing and discussing stuff, not a pulpit to worship a submitter.
I guess it tracks as well, in general on the internet I find you get better advice claiming something is the case and then getting corrected than just asking for advice
It’s vapid beyond anything I’ve ever experienced.
It's specially too early due to the trainwreck which is Elon Musk's Twitter acquisition. If Musk continues to destroy Twitter, we might see the whole world drop it in favour of Threads.
Because if I can trust my very quick internet search, instagram has 500 million DAU. So this means 9 out of 10 are not interested in threads?
Have you met Twitter?
Once you are following some people and the app is able to find enough content from there, your feed's quality should improve.
For a few decades we've been bombarded with the idea that our career depends mostly on our visibility instead of our qualifications and experience, that our next job will certainly be dictated by our social graph, and that getting ourselves known is key to have a good career.
Consequently, we see a whole universe of self-promoting loudmouths generating noise just to get themselves out there.
Perhaps this is a US thing that's leaking.
This is a human thing.
The US culture is less shameless about it.
I'm not sure you got the point.
It really is not about your connections not leading to job opportunities. It's about the belief your job prospects are tied to the number of people you're connected in social network apps, and this belief leading people to try to attract followers by continuously generating noise in social networking services.
Also, some of the most sought after jobs in tech, such as the covetted FANG positions, are not achieved by the depth and width of your social graph. How does knowing people help you with that?
I quit reddit a few times, but kept coming back to ask engineering questions.
Now with chatgpt, I've found myself not using it for engineering, but rather to talk politics that would benefit me.
In my view, a lot of society only want to win, and don't especially care how. Society signals and says, "those people are winners." They attention seek relentlessly. They say anything, as long as it's said confidently. If there's some scandal or controversy, its probably better, cause everybody wants to watch catfights and trainwrecks anyways (see Trump).
Its like that Goodhart quote everybody likes recently, "when we use a measure to reward performance, we provide an incentive to manipulate the measure." I've talked to music artists recently that were also very blunt about music making these days. "What do you make?" "We make what gets more views on streams."
Its not "they don't need each other for creating value", its that what society has determined "valuable" represents is effectively paradoxical.
Another issue is Productivity Punishment. See this article on "loyal work punishing" [1]. Short abstract. If we have John, in Loyal and Disloyal versions, with reputations for those behaviors. And management wants extra work with no pay. We give the scenario to 1000's of managers and then see who they try to exploit for extra work repeatedly. Uniformly try to get extra work with no pay out of guy with Loyal reputation. Nearly everybody says, "you're Loyal, that means we can exploit you. You're valuable in the sense that a mine is valuable." And if they're punishing Loyal John, then who are they rewarding? "Wanna go play some golf?"
See my previous comment on 'what society has determined "valuable" represents is effectively paradoxical.'
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00221...
The main reason why I'm pessimistic about the prospects for Threads to be a success is because it seems to be leaning very strongly towards LinkedIn on the scale of authenticity vs inauthenticity and that is death for a social media platform unless people literally use it to find jobs. I don't think most actual human beings want to use a platform dominated by corporations and people trying to turn themselves into a "brand". They're basically attracting all of the spam accounts from Twitter and amplifying them which might be a good way to attract advertisers but it isn't a good way to attract users.
Humanity breaks into three groups: originators, amplifiers, mimics.
Probably 95-97% of humanity or more are mimics. They will never produce much of anything original, that includes writing long-form blog posts or original media content (eg YouTube). They have little to no interest. This is backed up by stats on pretty much every platform, including Reddit and HN (the extreme majority are voyeurs not contributors). It's one of the reasons TikTok was so successful, it enabled the mimics to easily participate and pretend they were creating something new (while they were actually doing nothing but copying what someone else created, and getting a mental reward for it via likes/watches/followers). It's also why modern cameras in smartphones are so popular for the masses (+ Instagram), anybody can take a photo and feel at least ok about it (you don't have to be an expert photographer, you don't have to really create anything interesting and or new).
It doesn't matter what you do or what you change, the extreme majority will never meaningfully contribute. Even on services like TikTok and Instagram the masses have little to no interest in meaningful contribution, they produce a couple of videos or photos and then largely stop; the same holds true on Facebook, most people don't contribute very much into the network. They don't want to. They lack the desire to put in the time and effort (people are tired after work, have children/lives to tend to, etc etc), and they lack the creativity to originate persistently (the feedback isn't there because what they're producing won't get much attention).
Everybody isn't the same. Everybody isn't Picasso or Hunter S. Thompson and can't be. So what you're mostly left with are the people desperately seeking attention/self-promotion and the rare slice of originators.
You have to specifically build a platform to cater to the smaller slice of originators and intentionally block/disrupt the aggressive self-promoters that often don't contribute much new value. And if you do that, your platform will never be overly popular (which isn't what most VC backed services aim for obviously).
I agree with you that these people may lack the energy or creativity, but there could be dozens of other valid reasons for not contributing. For one, I think most people who ignore social media are quite wise. A lot of time is lost here on more important matters.
Reminds me of Reddit. Can’t post if your karma is too low - of course you start with zero as a new poster.
Spammers have also countered with karma farming bots that further pollute discussions - decreasing the value of such measures; reduced effectiveness and increased spam pollution.
Redditers in turn countered with bot detection and banning tools … that may no longer work soon - https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/07/reddit-mods-fear-spa...
Bad new user experience and increased spam … things are looking up for Reddit. /s
Slight further (and darker) twist: our economic model is dying, but nothing substantive is being done to make appropriate revisions.
Essentially: we have excessive, but still increasing, numbers of people with skills and in economic classes / roles that are "tertiary" and beyond. As processes have been made more efficient over time, and the surplus wealth has been accrued in an ever more concentrated fashion, we increasingly seem to have a sort of "surplus" (oh boy, can it get more Dickensian?) of people in something of a "middle class limbo".
Of course, the very efficiency that has pushed workers out of roles, is efficiency that means we (can) produce plenty for the people presently around. Further, it's basically always the case that people ultimately pushed out of roles contributed in substantial ways, even if just indirectly, to "our" ability to replace them. But, the "tally sheets" we use to divvy up resources, account for contributions and "deductions", etc., are more and more fundamentally broken.
Throwing the so-called "AI" into the mix only makes this worse.
... I'm a bit too tired and pressed for time right now to try to really tie this off nicely, but, hopefully the outline of this (current iteration of this) hypothesis is clear enough. It's an argument (in the sense of dialectical &/ rhetorical debate) that has come up many times. For example, Vonnegut's "Player Piano" springs to mind. But, I do think we're finally at a point where there will need to be some adjustment in economics, culture, etc. Or, we're heading into "French Revolution" territory.
Also, it's not as though humans haven't been through this before - not only at times like during the "Reign of Terror", but also, when people like John D. Rockefeller were in their heyday. At that time, Rockefeller, for example, became quite community-oriented himself. He made substantial contributions to the well-being of society / humanity, in ways that often went beyond simple provision of money for charitable efforts.
No idea which way things go this time...
Edit: correction - when I wrote "produce plenty", I was in a mindset focused on NA / Europe, in particular. Simply the areas I'm most familiar with. Throwing countries like India, China, etc., into the mix, makes the situation more complicated and difficult. Far too much there to touch on right now.
> the surplus wealth has been accrued in an ever more concentrated fashion, we increasingly seem to have a sort of "surplus" (oh boy, can it get more Dickensian?) of people in something of a "middle class limbo".
I know you are saying that billionaires have a ton of money. But I see this in the lower class. Every teen and every lower class person has an iphone, a Veblen good. Status seeking people have it even easier than ever to present an image of being rich. This means middle class people can pretend to be even more rich (A middle class person could afford a 250k car given the 8 year loans, or rent one for an IG photoshoot). It has people feeling insecure.
The French revolution was driven by bad food harvests. This is an issue of status, not starvation. 100% of people can't be billionaires.
Not sure what that will mean.
Whoops, what I meant to say was:
Hi! As a developer at ACME inc (http://example.com/ACME) I have been following the trend of self-promotion here too, while sitting at my utra-comfortable ACME Comfy(TM) chair, and I have noticed that some people, even the ones not using our ACME Inc. TNT-as-a-service(TM), have a tendency to self promote. I have written more about it on my block on our ACME site, http://example.com/ACME/blog.
But there are probably at least as many instances where someone refers to their experience with a topic and pointedly leaves out the name of their company, and then other commenters ask for more details and the company name.
They stifle innovation. They lock up funding. They buy anything that looks remotely competitive then stick it inside their walled garden. They demand 30% of your revenue for simply being middlemen.
Of course, in this environment, all that's left for people is to constantly self aggrandize in the hopes that one of these monopolies will hire them and give them a decent salary.
This isn’t a mark of degradation at all. “Back in the day” of non-monetization isn’t sustainable for any decent length of time because eventually the people donating (VCs) will want a return or will run out of money.
Of course they could, just make it part of the service agreement.
I would feel much inclined to pay for youtube if they filtered out all ad-funded content.
Even better, they could have a model where content creators for the paid service got their piece of the revenue based in quality metrics rather than quantity metrics.
If they are raising prices (amount of ads shown) and people continue to pay then I can’t fault them for it.
As I type this I realize that both you and the person I was originally responding to are just expressing that you don’t like the price increases. Which is totally fair.
And reddit has just turned into the same hundred jokes repeated over and over again with the same desperate-to-look-clever pun thread at the top.
I went there. After the first day, i was so incredibly disappointed. Everyone, even the „anti capatialist“ speakers, were so eager to hand out their business card. It‘s not like the were scharlatans, they were experts in deed, much more knowledgeable than me in their fields of course, but it seemed all they truly cared about, is being expert in something that way easy to them. It was just one of those marketing events, that exists for companies to feel good & important to find people to transfer big loads of money to, to get a pet on their back by the boss. I mean business tickets were about 1000 euros.
OT: All i wanted was to find people like here, who love to jump from discussing coding, AI and climate change, to explorations silly ideas, like how beauty is a weird thing, as it’s just the product of natures waste… the green nature we love, is just their of excess energies and a fun evolutionary luck for our eyes, that we see color & reality like that. Because if we perceived the basic reality much differently, who knows what sense of beauty was the filter for source of true inspiration: the urge to live, which is, the need for control (at least whatever makes our mind feel we are in control, which is much easier & keeps humanity going), because of what color actually is the frequencies of the excess energy, „thrown away“, for stupid humans to come along, and adore the nature for it… oh, when did people start planting plants for beautys sake? Or was the beauty in the protectice plants / good plants, there, before we learned and adapted our human reality? Was this a hint from the nature? Does it reward us for something? Lure us in? Is natures poop, what we perceive as powers, but are just by design uncapable to see it? Are humans like GPT to GOD(s)? Now, what if this was a simulation? It must be like a room with no windows or doors, you just woke up in this room, and don’t even know words, have no memory, nothing to hunt, no need to fulfill, no one to learn from, because of lack of other beings like you and even if, no needs means no need to learn anything, or teach, or remember, there is nothing and you don‘t even think about what difference could exist… there is no light in this room, no features or any similarities of the real laws of physics, no light, nothing happens, no time, no need, no pain, „consciousness“ (whatever that is), but nothing else… how could humans, possibly breakout? Or just grasp, what that is? How would you view the outside of the room, from the inside, if no windows, no doors, no experience(s)? Either through technology which works in a dimension we either haven‘t fully figured out yet, or, don‘t even know about… maybe, yet. If not, it must be Phantasia. If we develop such a technology, then it must serve a purpose within that room, right? And even if no purpose or even if this just a stupid question, but wouldn‘t that mean, that either looking for the „real“ technology, might lead us into a trap? If the room is constructed like that, it must be, because no one wants you to look outside. And if there was, why is it there? Which makes me think: even if Phantasia is not the actual key to making us look at the outside, how would we find the real way? Probably not, without imagining what it could be like, which shouldn‘t be too close to the reality of the outside… which means two things: either way, phantasia is the only thing we could rely on, in that case… and: if true, it means, that the further away from reality, the realer it gets. But not as a figure of speech, and not just based on the assumption that in that room, the „perceived“ (whatever that is) laws of physics couldn‘t resemble the ones outside of the room. Even within this very weird explorative silly idea, this assumption seems a stretch. But that doesnt matter still. Because the idea Phantasia must be the furthest away from reality, is the way our minds work either way. Most ideas are based on reality. Even the thoughts i find unique, they aren‘t for most of you. But i haven‘t read many of them yet anywhere. But they are just combinations of my experiences of the way i perceive the world. So even as unique as they seem to myself, the experiences creating these ideas, only exist because of the reality, so the ideas are real… and if reality is the room, then these ideas are based on what‘s in the room. But if there was any „beam of light“ (or any other physical ground for the real reality) coming from the outside of the room „shining“ (not real light, just examplatory– if it wasn‘t light but sound, that we imagine as coming into the room from the outside, i‘d write „being audible“) into the room, in a way, so that we can perceive it, can either come from, yet again, technology or phantasia. But even if the former: the route to this technology leads to an end, without phantasia itself… this seems like actually phantasia is the basis for reality either way… Or imagine, as weird as a lot of the „aliens“ and „ufo“ stuff sounds, what if… i mean a species that would come here to this planet, must have interesting technology (or whatever that ability would be to them, maybe no technology, maybe something natural, if they even have „nature“ as a concept as the basis of reality), if they had abilities to come here and thus „travel“ faster than light, faster than time, couldn‘t a million human years be nothing to them, so maybe once every 50k-10m years they come here? Or maybe they haven‘t… maybe they have put one of their own into some kind of advanced jail, just like the room i described above, and maybe this jail is not constructed as a physical space confinement, but a state of nil… and because it has nothing to do, since 10m human hears, it end up briefly thinking „thinking“ about a world like ours, as if it was a thought, a phantasie of that prisoner, who somehow by doing that „creates“ us, which we can‘t understand because of these multiple nested realities, and maybe we only exist for an equivalent of a split second in the respective mother-reality. And maybe less in the real reality?… and then talk about how all the fear mongering should be under punishment, because if all our minds have the same fantasies, we end up changing „reality“ (whatever that is)… i mean the opposite effect seems to be easily visible, but is garnered with facts & logic… i mean, i am typing this on my phone via mobile internet access, just because a long, long, long time ago someone started the idea of „more advanced“, or even a „future“ at all which is only possible because of the way humans perceive reality and how this artificial concept of reality based on time, is a lie but it works much better than not having one, and no other seems reasonable from this biased point of view, this one human looked at a stone, and found inspiration in „natures“ (whatever that is) poop (which seems like it is all there is), which led everything after that… all the way up to me with a smartphone… doing nothing, but typing symbols into the void, being lonely, thinking how interesting these thoughts are to me, and nothing else excited me, but how pointless, because even if they weren‘t as silly, i ain‘t even smart enough to be a good software developer… and even if, it would still just be pointless… will i be a good father? Will my mind still be occupied when my child is here? Must i stay in this room forever? Why not make the best out of the room? Can’t see shit in here anyway… might as well be naked… so that’s why i just post this random chain of thoughts. I wish they wouldn’t captivate my mind, i can’t focus on the things that matter… i always wanted to create, now that i did, i didn’t… aaaand then back to the next thought that i had much earlier when gyping this but totally lost the way… the thought was about how the octopus mind might have unimaginable potential, but is limited by their short life span & anti-social behaviour, excluding them from having culture & knowledge transfer… which made me think about how i behave anti-social with my weird arrogance… and rather writing crazy words that i know people will perceive as crazy and that i didn‘t even proof-read because i know it wouldn‘t be worth the effort any way… which might limit my potential as well… just like the octopus… hmm… maybe i must… hm… well… maybe… revelation… why don‘t you just follow me on twitter to find out more about this journey? There is also a book, podcast, vlog, social-media, influencing stuff & propaganda (that i myself am unaware of) & of course: advertisement deals!
…
Back to reality: sorry, usually i would delete all of this again, after writing (if i don‘t write this into my notes or on pen & paper). I just wish i‘d know what to do with this… i wish i could somehow spend all day thinking about things like that… but i am mute and blind… at least in real life… i think…
Then I realized, maybe all this is good in a way. Discord allows you to chat with real people, but if you want to promote yourself or do some stealth advertising, it sucks. In the end it seems to be full of honest to goodness normal people who share an interest.
There you’ll still find people willing to have thoughtful conversations.
At least, that’s my experience.
People act like self promotion is almost braggadocious and it bewilders me... The problem is spammers and promo shills that spam for commercial entities and brands under the cover of acting as if they are honest human beings. The enemy is not the individual tring to promote their mixtape, legal advice, or knitted hats.
Social media and sites like Reddit have shut out honest individual self promoters based on moderator arrogance that is very self destructive, anti-competitive, and also very hostile to everyone's ability to be an independent entrepreneur. They shut out small promoters because it leaves room for larger companies to shill all day while using celebrities, manufactured celebrities, and even well known personalities that are already very wealthy. I think it's disgusting how marketing works now, charging the smallest creators the same price as wealthy {fully staffed} big companies for online ads even before small entities are properly profitable is deeply unethical. It creates a business economy in which only the wealthy thrive. As the cost of living rises. None of us normals are safe from this unfair financial manipulation. And the threat to devaluation of our ability to create and run a successful business of our own/
If that attitude of banning self promotion prevails, no one will be upwardly mobile, because as social media is already throttling everyone for money. Eventually if this attitude prevails, there will be no way to let anyone know about your business or skills, and we'll all be at the mercy of only working for large corporations because business promotional costs will be prohibitive to success.
I have noticed data working across even competing social sites, which worries me greatly. I think there is already a social score at plat for most of us even when we aren't signed up for web apps... Our phones are the likely underhanded snitch//
You immediately saw the energy and positivity drop as these groups arrived to threads. Perhaps it was a mix of egotism, phoniness, and shallow attempts at engagement, but you also saw engagement and follows rise with that group.
The head of Instagram has said that news is going to be less of a priority for them, which coincides with Canadian legislation demanding pay for links and upcoming US legislation that is expected to be similar.
I would love to see them deprioritize these financially motivated accounts and try to focus more on local and more genuine interactions, otherwise they will just fall into the same trap Twitter has been stuck in for years.
Ultimately, these accounts drive engagement but perhaps there is a cost to the long-term health or viability of the platform when taking this approach. Given Meta has seemingly no need to monetize Threads, I hope they try new approaches that are healthier for the platform and better for their users rather than cheap engagement.
It feels like there is a certain amount of worthwhile stuff, despite vast numbers of people seeking ways to create it. You'd think with billions of people trying we'd get more things worth actually looking at.
Is is because a lot of people just really have nothing to contribute to the world?
Perhaps they simply have a different definition of “contribute”?
Seems there are plenty of things for other people to look at given the download and signup data.
And on the other hand there are "influencers" and "content producers" and "digital marketers" who want to slip into that gap, but know full well that their contribution is not of any value. They're trying to be middle men in a world that's overconnected already. They plagiarize and copy and SEO and use generated content in the hopes of snagging a fraction of a cent simply by being in the way.
I don't mean that as personally derogatory as it sounds. I don't know them or their story. But I've seen many thousands of human lives spent in quiet desperation and wish that there was a better way to use the mind they were born with.
We all have something to contribute but, like a single ant in a column of ants moving from one hole to another, that thing may be minor and not newsworthy.
Have thought that this was a problem so have been working on a solution. At some point intend to announce on HN. I'm supposed to do a "Show HN"?
Meantime I am distressed by that grasping, which I understand to be necessary, or at least desperate. I wonder if they could do better creating something, anything, more useful than vast quantities of the lowest possible effort.
Meta goes farther than Twitter ever did, as they actually deprioritize the more news-like content.
After all, why pay for less engaging content when you have users tripping over themselves to game engagement for free? Ignoring long term health (and the health of the society they inhabit) seems to have worked out for Meta so far.
I think an interesting experiment would be to also prioritize some "news-ish" "good news" of the type that wouldn't quite make major TV news broadcasts. The type of stuff that John Krasinski was doing with Some Good News during the pandemic.
It's amazing to me that people expect one of the largest companies on the planet to be capable of doing this with any measure of success.
Meanwhile, there's tons of groups of people who meet under the banner of shared interest, probably right now, right in the town you live in. You can just go do that if that's what you _actually_ want.
I keep hearing this. "Oh! The Algorithm gets me so well! It's so freaky!" about TikTok, IG, everything really... But let me tell you how my IG feed goes:
I get 3 posts at the top, posted by my friends. I like all of them – even if I didn't like it. I'm just pleading to the algorithm to show me more from the people I care about. I then scroll for another 30 seconds through endless muck of golden retrievers, frat boys, etc. I'm hoping to see another post from my friends, but it just doesn't come. I leave the app for another week, until my friend shows me a post she made 2 weeks ago that was never shown to me.
The algorithm makes social media a painful experience I avoid. I've enjoyed Mastodon, Snapchat, and BeReal MAGNITUDES more... Platforms without one, platforms where I'm actually "social".
for example, a while ago a friend sent me 3 or 4 relationship memes. I didn't like the posts, I may, at most, have reacted to one or two in chat, but since then my suggested posts have been 20-30% relationship memes. no matter how many times I say "I am not interested in content like this" or after blocking about 30 of the most common relationship meme hashtags, I still get the same 20-30% of posts, just now they have no or unusual tags. and then more recently, seemingly appropros of nothing this time - bodybuilding/fitness memes! it's the opposite of freakily good
* natgeo : Then you'll start seeing that account replying to its photgraphers and you can build your own list.
* michaelgeorge
* reuben
* cosmic_background (I don't think he's natgeo but still neat)
* benashtonart (Also not natgeo but fun)
It’s Instagram in words, and Instagram by and large is an awful, fake and vapid place.
Threads might be decent software, but the content is horrible.
I love it, it’s great for workout and vacation pics and seeing what people you know are up to. I get the feeling Twitter powerusers hate it
It’s not a fake and vapid place. All social media are just vehicles to communicate with other people. If you feel it’s fake and vapid you’re just following the wrong crowd.
LOL at the clown trying to mute accounts, that's like trying to attack waves in the sea.
I'm sure for the dev team this is a busy time, and the work they need to do to accommodate so many new users creates a feeling of forward progress. But none of that work (from what I'm seeing in discussions) seems to involve adding basic functionality, while in the interim people are forming a durable first impression of the service.
It feels like it is neverending AB testing or neverending beta.
Now day's it's broadened what you see, but also keeps giving random (and sometimes, offensive) nonsense that I have to mute.
It also doesn't seem to learn from mutes very well: shouldn't mute not only mean "I don't want to see tweets from this account", but also "I'm not interested in Tweets on this subject"?
Similar issue with Spotify. I feel like it used to be better at finding me NEW tracks based on what I'd liked in the past. But now it just mostly wants to play the same things I've listened to before, over and over?
Algo-feed only Threads means trusting the same sort of algo behind Reels and I am not convinced that it will work. Twitter allows for much easier bootstrapping.
Already, I am pretty turned off by how inundated Threads is with celebrity content that I really could not care less about.
this is clearly not a platform that caters to that use case, so if that's what you want then you shouldn't use it. if you're infuriated because the entire world isn't designed to specifically cater to your expectations, you're going to spend a lot of time being infuriated
Personally, I’ve really come around to the idea. I follow a few baseball accounts - if an amazing highlight gets popular over on the LA Dodgers account, I want to see it without needing to trust the Mets might repost it or it’ll make the MLB’s accounts or whatever else. I don’t make a habit of following public entities like teams or brands or sports meme accounts, but sometimes they post things that really resonate with people who follow the accounts I do follow
A big part of “social” is the buzz in your corner of the world, and recommendations help me be far more clued in
On Twitter you can simply select "following" instead of "for you" and all the tweets you see come exclusively from the people you follow, in chronological order. If I was forced to sift through the endless mounds of garbage recommended by Twitter (or any a social media company) there is a 0% chance I'd use it.
>A big part of “social” is the buzz in your corner of the world, and recommendations help me be far more clued in
I think the big question is, what does "social" mean to you? Personally I only want to see posts and messages from friends, people and organizations I proactively choose to follow. As long as I'm able to personally curate my own experience the toxic brew of e-celebs, SEO nonsense, advertisements and government/corporate propaganda of all kinds if almost entirely absent from my timeline. It may appeal to some people but it is absolutely repulsive to me (and others).
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.
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.
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
I really tried to make Mastodon work for me, but the lack of discoverability killed it.
As somebody with trans people in my family, getting away from Musk's Twitter is a priority. But Twitter is where I get a lot of news and entertainment.
I would rather have seen Mastodon win, but their product just isn't good enough.
Ahhh! That is the key to the design.
A network of users consuming and producing in real time. Weird feedback amplification effects.
A vast beast with a million heads, muttering to itself.
(Having your notifications turned on might be important for this to work. Remember that Black Mirror episode where having your notifications turned on was legally mandated.)
I want a tree of threads. Posts and replies. Like reddit and hn. It's the only way that makes sense.
Boggling that they do it this way.
Easily one of the most forced product launches I've seen in years.
A Reddit replacement with the reach of meta is a very fertile opportunity.
Really think they dropped the ball not offering followers only feed when shipping with the algorithm in this state.
According to screen time I’ve spent 45 minutes in it but have no desire to look at it again.
Twitter, for all it’s controversy, doesn’t feel that way.
The only thing I ever found useful on Twitter was notifications from government agencies. Mostly recently, changes in ferry schedules in NC.
I feel like I need a “Twitter for governments and public services”. Verified accounts and none of the influencer garbage.
They've probably underestimated how quickly people will rebuild their social graph.
Tongue-in-cheek response aside, when YouTube managed to trick me into wasting a couple hours with YouTube shorts, my reaction after reflecting on what I just did wasn't to try and make it even better by curating it - instead I blocked YouTube shorts recommendations with my adblocker.
I personally don't mind ads, somebody needs to pay for the service and I prefer ada over forced paid for content wasting my time.
I don't mind ads either if they are obvious and targeted (no more penis ads like the early days of the internet). I suspect Meta won't turn on ads for awhile, but when they do, they have one of the biggest ad markets to tap into. I suspect soon enough advertisers will see an additional button in their preferences. Run ads on Instagram and Threads.
Isn't Musk hinting that twitter implemented rate limits because Meta/Threads were scraping them agreaaively?
== Slack Bugs ==
Constantly I will get pings despite having had my settings to be "Direct messages, mentions & keywords". Including pings for threads that I never even participated in or were tagged in. Slack will also notify me for channels that are muted and grayed out! So my only real choice is to just kill notifications all together and it fixes most of these problems. But then I don't see any messages unless I see the icon in my dock.
== False Positives/User Abuse ==
Lots of users abuse the @channel (almost never using the @here). My advisor sends tons of irrelevant papers in the main group channel, so I have to ignore or be spammed, but then miss "important" messages. There's something I don't get, it is that people don't seem to understand that you can't send spam and junk from the same location as you send critical information. Spam and junk is more common and you're just teaching users to ignore everything. My Uni does this too and it is infuriating. I know they might think that this gets people to see more of the spam, but it just makes people not see important things.
Slack people: can you fix notifications. Admin/manager people: can you please for the love of god stop spamming channels and chastise anyone who abuses tags everyone unnecessarily? I just want to do my work without getting distracted every 5 minutes. It's akin to someone knocking on my door: I don't know if they just want to chat or need something. This kills productivity.
I get too distracted and end-up wasting too much time doom-scrolling. I've deleted all my accounts.
That way I'm only reading people I am actually interested in. Might reduce discoverability but eventually the people I "follow" in this way will mention/reply/retweet someone else worth following as well.
Immediately saw a sanctimonious GaryVee thread and was instantly turned off.
It’s all so cringe, as the kids say.
https://www.threads.net/t/CuYdZ_oBX8v/?igshid=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ...
Seems bearable now.
My wife owns a company. I told her to get on Threads early so she can get ahead of the algorithm.
I had 0 interest.
That is the demographic. Influencers and marketers.
Why not? Why shouldn't I? I don't get it
Of course, you run the risk of enclosing yourself into an echo chamber, but that's up to each individual user to consider.
You know the Gell-Mann Amnesia meme? You realize somebody is full of shit after reading/watching their content, but then you move on and forget what you learned, falling for them again in the future. Well if you block their content, this problem goes away. The block system remember what you might otherwise forget.