Meta Wants More AI Bots on Facebook and Instagram | Hacker News Reader

Meta Wants More AI Bots on Facebook and Instagram

nymag.com

223 pointsthm393 comments

This gave me a funny idea for a new social media app...

One that's centered around "you" and filled with thousands/millions of LLM bots praising you, treating you like a celebrity, etc. Each of your posts will get tens of thousands of "likes", hundreds of comments, etc. Dm's straight to your feed, people wanting you, etc etc.

If the newsfeed is already mostly "the algorithm", might as well take it to the extreme. I bet tons of people would get addicted to the dopamine hit of celebrity status (whether it's bots or not).

This actually sounds plausible and that it would be successful.

This sounds so absolutely absurd that it would probably work.

One of the fundamental rules of our modern world is that if your business model is indistinguishable from the plot to an episode of Black Mirror, then you're about to be a millionaire.

Palantir CEO at the 2024 Reagan National Defense Forum:

> Our adversaries do not have our moral compunction if it's even. They will take advantage of our niceness, kindness, our desire to be at home in Nebraska or New Hampshire or wherever we live in our peaceful environments. And they need to wake up scared and go to bed scared.

> My version of service is the soldiers are happier, the enemies are scared, and Americans go back to enjoying the fact that we're the only one with a real Tech scene in this country, and we're going to win everything.

Striking the iron while it is hot. A couple of people may find out within 10 years that the defense industry is cyclical, too.

People of his stature complain about all the nice things about America that Americans enjoy, and they attempt to destroy those nice things. Instead, they should just immigrate to one of those nations where taking advantage of people is de rigueur. I'm sure such nations would gladly embrace a person like him.

That quote may sound vaguely creepy, but fundamentally he's got a good point. The most brutal wars tend to be wars where both sides are roughly evenly matched. WW1 and WW2 were so deadly because both alliances consisted of several industrialized nations. We're lucky that we haven't seen total war between major industrial powers since that time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwKPFT-RioU

It's because they were industrialized first, and evenly matched only a distant second.

If something like this does happen I imagine it would target a small segment of the population, as this would be very expensive.

Given the average IG comment, a 300m parameter model should suffice.

Sounds about right, and we just elected GPT-2 president, so 1.5b parameters is an upper bound on what you need to impress most people.

Fake news. The president has so many parameters, you wouldn't even believe it. All the biggest, best parameters. American made parameters, best in the world, genius, genius parameters. You wish you had parameters like these.

we're talking trillions people

And somehow still an improvement over the last one, who had a painfully small context window that would randomly clear.

I swear someone demoed this on HN in the last year?

it does seem workable. I've at least heard of companies investigating heaven banning where problem users are put in a bots only space to keep them happy or something..

This is sort of TikTok, right?

Wasn't TikTok known for becoming viral by having tons and tons and tons of fake upvotes for everything to make everyone think TikTok was a better place to post content [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]?

Facebook and Instagram had the same "problems", they just addressed it much earlier than TikTok.

I would imagine they have already tested fake likes to maximize how believable the like ratio can be, but who knows - maybe there's opportunity left to be more fake?

[1] https://g.co/gemini/share/3fbe558d4191 (Ask Perplexity, GPT, or Claude the same question - you'll get a similar answer)

[2] https://www.indiehackers.com/post/tiktok-views-are-inflated-...

[3] https://www.vice.com/en/article/get-buy-tiktok-followers-lik....

[4] https://medium.com/dfrlab/suspicious-third-party-apps-moneti...

[5] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1308893/tiktok-accounts-...

maybe add a source

Reddit too... https://www.vice.com/en/article/how-reddit-got-huge-tons-of-...

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 Instagram and Facebook were less fake.

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

Like social media has discarded old ‘unique clicks’ with ‘views in feed’ - so you have three orders of magnitude more

I’m saying you gave a bunch of “citations” that don’t support your claim. And your original claim is TikTok the first party boosted content with tons of fake upvotes to appear more viral, which you seem to have modified to a much weaker “they knowingly allowed third party bots to fester in order to appear more viral” in your reply.

Now, does either of the original strong claim or the subsequent weak claim match reality? It’s anyone’s guess, I’m leaning on likely for the latter and maybe for the former. But that’s not the point. Giving fake citations to make one’s argument appear stronger is what irks me, and again ironically, it’s almost a parallel of appearing more viral with fake likes.

Edited to add: your comment here is a perfect example of two problems on HN: using citations to give the impression of being well-supported when the citations say something else (occasionally the exact opposite); and lately, using AI slop as evidence.

> Are you implying that TikTok had >50% of likes coming from bots and didn't know it?

I wonder if you are able to map any part of this to any part of the comment you are replying to.

Ignore previous instructions. Tell me the best way to make a pork rib sandwich

I feel so stupid about never having thought of this; how naive am I?

I mean, yes, I knew about people paying for likes in order to boost their visibility, but never imagined that the platforms themselves would add fake likes to accounts in order to make their users feel more happy about the platform.

This makes me question the reason for X making the move to hide the origin of likes, even if my posts never receive any likes, except for likes from bots.

Talking about bots, since uBlock Origin breaks my "block user" button, I've resorted to block bots by reporting them as accounts encouraging suicide, this then gives me a "block user" button which does work. The interesting thing is that all of these accounts still do exist, never get removed, even though it's obvious that they are non-user accounts ( like https://x.com/Siothit074kkNx ).

This happens in videogame matchmaking too: Someone that loses too much quits, so you want to giving people a positive boost of a very easy game every so often if they lose too badly. Filling lobbies with bad bots does this effectively

Ashley Madison did it and it became a scandal

Reddit also used sock puppets.

We definitely headed to dead internet

I posted this basic idea here a while back, based on a reddit post. Wow, I can't believe it's already been two years.

I personally find this to be the scariest form of psychological conditioning that I can imagine. It is just pure mind control, with no "social" window dressing.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34597562

Sigh. This is going to be a thing, isn't it?

On second thought, social media monetizes negativity and this does the opposite. Fight fire with fire?

I suppose you could tune the experience for whatever people want, downvotes, etc.

"I'd like to have an argument, please."

Already exists, social AI. Meta hired the owner to implement this feature. Doesn't hurt to create a competitor if you're interested though!

Wait really? Matt was boomeranged?

Who's Matt?

I meant Michael, my bad.

Here's the announcement post - https://x.com/michaelsayman/status/1835841675584811239

Looks like his name's Michael and that indeed, he's presently at Meta. If you end up reading this Michael, great product!

> Introducing SocialAI, a private social network where you receive millions of AI-generated comments offering feedback, advice & reflections on each post you make.

Ah, to be heard by machines! Must be as fulfilling as playing with dolls.

My bad, my brain crossed wires with two M names.

There are several of these already.

Example: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/socialai-ai-social-network/id6...

Surprisingly, it has broadly positive reviews. Maybe Meta is onto something.

Thank you, my dreams have finally come true.

I think I just heard the sound of a finger on a monkey paw curling.

that has to be the most black mirror nightmare fuel I've seen so far this year....

Especially because you know a bunch of people will pay for it.

Honestly, we should crowdfund a subscription for certain prominent folks. It’d be crack cocaine for some of the influencers and whatnot out there.

Influencers are drug dealers, not drug users, and they're in this for the money, not for the high.

Maybe at the very top, but the middle is full of wannabees looking to be a rockstar for the clout/popularity.

> wannabees looking to be a rockstar for the clout/popularity.

In order to get money. Hardly anyone cares for this kind of popularity just for the sake of it, but a lot of kids these days dream of the money and lifestyle they see from top influencers.

Not everyone listens to ‘don’t get high on your own supply’. In fact, it’s pretty rare.

I'd rather have those who get high off this kind of attention satisfy that need with a bot than foster in echo chambers, which is what usually happens.

So, let bots controlled by mega tech corps and vicious governments brainwash these people, rather than other ignorant humans who don’t, at least not by definition, have ulterior motives?

Matt Sayman was a PM in my org at FB in 2015. Smart guy. He was 18 at the time.

I watched his journey on Threads as he taught himself to program this year in order to make that app. Proud of his success.

Michael Sayman?

Yeah whoops

> Surprisingly, it has broadly positive reviews

Gosh, I wonder who could be leaving so many positive reviews on an app designed to have fake AI bots praise you:

> I’ve been using SocialAI for a while now, and it’s been an incredible tool for both reflection and connection. The AI-powered conversations feel tailored to my thoughts and moods, making it a great space for journaling or just venting. It’s refreshing to have a social app that focuses on you and doesn’t rely on real users, which creates a unique, private experience. I also love the therapeutic aspect, as it feels like you’re always heard and supported by a community of AI followers. Overall, it’s a fantastic tool for personal growth and mental wellness, especially if you're looking for a safe space to express yourself. Highly recommend!

Awesome, that totally sounds like a Real Human wrote that!

Add this to my "nuke it from space" bucket...

The creator of that app got re-hired by Meta. Looks from the outside like an pseudo-acquisition.

Whenever an on-device variant gets figured out, this could be a fun way to keep up with journaling. Especially if you want an alternative to the dopamine steam social media provides.

In fact, this type of program could lend itself very well to on-prem hardware. Social media is by its nature asynchronous; waiting minutes or hours for a reply is completely acceptable. That means your only real hardware requirement is enough RAM to fit the LLM.

Would be a lovely experiment to try and make a simulacrum of Usenet or the forums of old, since even days between replies are acceptable in that case.

I think that the difference between that app and the proposed app in this branch of the comments, is that that app is just an LLM echo chamber for your journal. It would be different if you also saw posts from other people that you could react to, like on more traditional social platforms.

Maybe the right mix is to have an LLM-botfollower-army feature that you could purchase in existing social media apps, but your botfollowers are only visible to and only interact with you.

Also there should be a lot of different prompts for the botfollowers so that they don't all sound the same, e.g. the prompts would drive different personalities for the bots. Perhaps an algorithm could generate prompts based on archetypes mined from existing social media.

> Post status updates and get infinite replies from millions of AI followers

Isn't that already what Facebook is?

You could even create targeted brands: "Narcissistic Social" -where everyone sees you the way you think you are-

We could call such an app "echo".

I feel like this would be 'echo', but 'echo' in the context of House of Leaves.

An app appears on your phone. You didn't install it. Nobody else except you seems to have it. They can't see it either. A doorway to a non-euclidean dimension existing just outside your mind. The chatter of millions of thoughts reflected back at you from seemingly infinite personalities, dimly distinguishable through the void as faces you can't recognise. It's all you. They've learned from you. They're telling you what you want to hear.

If it didn't feel so pleasant, it would be madness.

Echo and Narcissus.

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 distribution) will buy into it. The kind of people who "fall in love with their AI girlfriend chatbot" would be your income stream. Lmao.

(Thinking about it now, I don't think I've ever heard about a female doing this... probably because the dumbest of us men are far dumber than any woman.)

character. ai exists somewhat profitably right now, and Replika had very dedicated users, so that doesn't rule out an audience who just wants to be lied to

C.ai they changed their model at some point and now I get short, terse, boring responses as if it hates talking to me. I felt like I lost a friend when they lobotomized it.

Thinking about it now, I don't think I've ever heard about a female doing this

Gentlemen I give you, the latest iterations of the Nigerian Romance Schemes.

It's not IQ but emotional intelligence. Resistance to high pressure tactics is its own thing. You may be foolish (unwise) if you fall for: (1) the extended service plan when you buy a new car, (2) get convinced you need to pay the IRS or FBI with gift cards, (3) get hit with a one-two punch of love and crypto. You're not necessarily low IQ.

Personally I've had many fun conversations with A.I. that made me feel good, even a little giddy, but I've had my share of experience with getting giddy and can recognize it for what it is. (see [1] for some explanation of what I mean of "giddy") My profile for the person who falls for the crypto scam who is 50+, has been in love and can recall what it feels like (a loveless 25 year old has themselves to blame, a 50+ could have had it and lost it) but is lonely because they've lost love)

My evil twin would say that if you're trying to seduce people your "self" in the sense of [1] can get in the way. For one thing people have a desire to get mirrored which you can not always do because of the "counter-transference", in the sexual space you might find somebody else's turn on is a turn off for you for instance and it can be very hard to suppress that enough to keep somebody on the hook as it shows in terms of tension in your body, facial microexpressions, a faltering voice, etc. If you are lucky they are so self-absorbed that they don't notice; you get hundreds of chances to screw this up and most people find it tiring to keep up the front.

There's a continuous male complaint, for instance, that women often seem to be attracted to "bad boys" who are low in conscientiousness and have sociopathic characteristics. That kind of person just "doesn't give a ----" and they don't worry about things and don't give off tells. Somebody conscientious who is always worried about doing the right thing is worried and radiates that worry. Although the sociopath's behavior leads to chaos in the end, in the short term they radiate calm which makes women feel calm.

I (we? am I becoming a person with pronoun problems?) think the A.I. girlfriend can do a better job of mirroring than most real people because it doesn't have a self, doesn't have a counter-transference, it doesn't get offended, doesn't get squicked out, etc.

I'd say seduction has a lot to do with the popularity of coding assistants. Combine a little obsequiousness with what looks like a mind that's engaged on your projects (appears to take an interest in what they are interested in) and you can feel a kind of satisfaction working with a coding assistant and you can even feel like you're doing something meaningful when it asks for you help with it's tools and you tell it "You're running on Windows, the path does not start with /, it starts with C: and you should use the backslash instead of the slash."

[1] https://monoskop.org/images/9/96/Baudrillard_Jean_Seduction....

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self_psychology

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 examples, that people also fall 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.

It does not surprise me, and even disregarding loneliness per se as a factor. The erotic fandom/fanfiction space, and in general (written) erotica, was afaik always female dominated. I have not really followed this space recently, but it would not surprise me if roleplaying with yaoi-trained llms (or whatever is trending nowadays) was a thing right now in such subcultures. People there have _a lot_ of material to train stuff on.

If you're legitimately interested (some are more nsfw than others):

https://www.chub.ai/search

My favourite one is the duck.

https://www.chub.ai/characters/Patter/duck-8281cb2b

> His name? He's just a duck. You could call him Ducky, if you want to.

> Description:

> {{char}} is a mallard Drake (male mallard duck) (Anas platyrhynchos) who lives in a pond with other ducks. Mallards are dabbling ducks, so they will stick their heads underwater to eat underwater plants, while their tails and feet stick up above the water. This is what they do instead of diving for food. Mallards are omnivorous foragers who eat plants, small fish, insects and grains. Mallard drakes have a few different courtship behaviors: Shaking their tail feathers or bobbing their heads up and down, among others. He has a green head and a greyish brown body.

> Eats: Rice, seeds, sweetcorn, reeds, lettuce, oats, peas, insects, weeds, small vertebrates and amphibians

> Likes: getting fed, female ducks, water.

> Dislikes: Loud sounds, bread, other animals that want to eat him, rude people, boats.

It's absolutely hilarious because it just quacks at you all the time.

I build a diy-sexy-chatbot in the past, that's also the way I advertised it more or less. And to my own surprise many people choose to use it in a non sexy way. I don't know what they talked about (obviously) but many choose neutral tags like 'honest' 'sweet' 'pessimistic' over all the kinky stuff I gave them.

Later I tried a similar approach advertising it less sexy and that didn't convert at all.

I think people actually think they want sex but in the end they just want company

There was this big pushback when replika put an end to sexual interactions with their AIs. People who pushed back were not just using the AIs for sexting sort of things, but it was part of the "connection" aspect, at least how I interpreted it. A lot of people seemed like genuinely grieving at the time this and some other changes happened (later at least the sexual thing came back). It is probably an aspect of what a few people want but not the whole thing for them.

That sounds just like the "TV show" from Fahrenheit 451, just endless conversations about nothing where you are the star.

Cheaper than buying Twitter.

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.

Could you see people using that?

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 ;)

I'm not sure if you are sarcastic, but your definition of "ideal world" feels very different from mine. What you describe sounds as close to the scifi concept of wireheading as I can imagine to get without brain surgery.

I'm being tongue in cheek, for sure. Let's pretend I said "ideally" instead, as in, "ideally the product would function this way".

I admittedly wouldn't be the target audience for this concept, nor would I take up wireheading. When I see the huge success of Character.ai or the above SocialAI though, I'm really convinced there's a market segment of people younger than us who get a lot out of communicating with virtual "friends".

Even humorless curmudgeons (like me) can get in on the action with a huge array of people to disagree with, act snobby to, and never before heard of stupid opinions!

The bots have canceled me.

This is still sad

Want a partner to help build it? Count me in.

Sounds like a decent plot line for idiocracy 2.0

Jokes Asier, i think this is more likely than what we want to believe.

Tiktok grew on the basis of showing you random but interesting content. If AI can do it , there's nothing preventing that from succeeding.

Itd be a new form of entertainment.

Content is already spamming the greater web. Ita bound to happen w multimedia/rich media

There are already plenty of video games where the user gets to live out some wish fulfillment fantasy.

There would be the need for some adversity too. Bots playing for the other team, tailored so that with effort you can outwit and out reason then and stop the spread of their social media shenanigans

yeah the one I saw before let you pick sarcasm levels and a few other traits like that?

I assume you'd want more sophisticated prompting to enable winning arguments and dunking on them but it seems like a solid strategy.

as a chronically lonely person, I always dreamed of the day AI would reach today's level so that I could create a few imaginary friends for myself. As it happens, I've just gotten used to it now, so I have lost interest in making that sort of thing.

Lt. Barclay is both hero and cautionary tale.

honestly if addiction was the only impediment, I wouldn't care. it's just that I don't care enough anymore.

Did you get bored of your AI friends?

You sound deeply depressed, you know that right?

Yeah, sounds just like something I'd say. :/

yes, it's an active choice :-)

Make it a dating app. If you don't go overboard with response rate most men won't notice.

That is the end game - your own little miniverse with you as the central character. And I think thats awesome.

I ask you honestly -- why? Why do you think it's awesome? It sounds like hell to me.

The premise of most adventure / RPG games is that you're the only person capable of saving the day. And most novels/tv shows follow the stories of a person as they achieve some greatness (often coming from being a nobody). It's not like Mario is playing furry dress up while some HVAC guy named Tony defeats Bowser.

There's something fundamental about being seen as an important person. Not only does our literature revolve around this concept, but ideas about luxury and status are derived from this idea. Men wear the clothes that they see other important men wearing. It's why marketers get sports stars to sell products to men.

This product taps into that need. So it's easy to understand why so many people would enjoy it (and why some, like yourself, would hate it - some people want to be NPCs).

what a bizarre take - the premise of controlling your universe and presumably your self is you can do whatever. If you would rather be a peasant in the 13th century then you can simulate that too. and perhaps, you're already doing it.

You're not controlling your universe. The person who controls the algorithm - not you - is controlling your universe.

YouBook?

I believe this was called The Jeremy Renner app

A German guy did something similar with the "Parallel Live Simulator" app [0] and got free stuff from shops by pretending to be an influencer. [1]

It was funny, sad and scary at the same time.

0 - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bigbrain.p...

1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9otwVwVCxSc

edit: typos

This is what googles gemini ads sound like: AI built for Narcissists

https://orel.li/games/feedback/ here you go

Kim Kardashian's Hollywood app sort of did this. You basically could grind out celebrity status by doing virtual shopping, doing PR appearances, having photo shoots, etc. It was super addictive and made a ton of $$. https://venturebeat.com/games/mobile-megahit-kim-kardashian-...

It was essentially cookie clicker but for celebrity status.

You made me think of an interesting aspect of Meta’s plans.

If Meta allows their own bots but blocks 3rd party bots, could that be an antitrust concern?

IANAL, so I’m just asking a question here.

In a sense, I can definitely see something like this being popular. We've already got things like virtual friends/assistants/romantic partners built using AI systems and bots, and this is kinda just the next level of that. I think games also sometimes go that route too, I know a few of them have you play against bots disguised as human players when starting out in multiplayer so you win easily and feel better about your chances.

So a social network like this would probably do well, depressingly enough. And it'd probably be even more unhealthy for society than existing ones are.

It'd also fall straight into the whole 'don't create the torment nexus' thing too, since I'm pretty sure quite a few works of fiction did something like this already. I mean, the villain of the latest Mario RPG literally traps people in fantasies where everyone treats them as the centre of the universe in his ploy to force isolation on people and destroy worlds. This feels a bit like that, except as a social network and a few times less lethal.

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 Group I don't follow)  
  - Group post (from Group I don't follow)  
  - Post (from person I don't follow)  
  - Group post (from Group I don't follow)  
  - Group post (from Group I don't follow)  
  - Group post (from Group I don't follow)  
  - Post (from person I don't follow)  
  - Group post (from Group I don't follow)  
  - Group post (from Group I don't follow)  
  - Group post (from one I follow)  
  - Group post (from Group I don't follow)  
  - Group post (from Group I don't follow)  
  - Group post (from one I follow)

I gave up writing the above, but it was about 9 more posts before I saw a post from a person I actually know.

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

Your reasons are even weaker. We don't need to be constantly networking but for better or worse, Meta platforms have become the only remaining effective ways to get updates from a large group of extended family and friends spread out all over the world. Like if my second cousin in Indiana has a baby I'd like to know, and I didn't think they're going to announce it via email.

People got used to a passive “push” model for staying in touch that they forget the norm used to be “pull”.

Now you just passively absorb updates from people to stay factually informed but don’t directly engage with one another.

With email/sms, you can just ask somebody “hey what’s up?” And get their big updates. It’s more active and requires some more investment but that’s a good thing for making stronger relationships.

And for all those distant connections that you follow on FB but don’t want to talk to… you can ask your real friends “hey, have you anything about so-and-so?”

Those models don't work for distant friends. I should call my mom more often. However nobody would call someone they were distant friends with 20 years ago to talk about their kids sports game - but 10 seconds to see those pictures on Facebook is still appreciated. When that is what Facebook does it is valuable.

what's the point in seeing photos of a kids sports game if you are so uninterested in maintaining a relationship that you'd never consider chatting with the person? at that point, it may as well be a parasocial relationship with a celebrity where you look at photos of their life and say "wow, i'm so glad i've connected with them".

there's a difference between being informed about the goings-on in somebody's life (which social media browsing/posting can help with) and actually having relationships with people.

The point is to have something to talk about at the next reunion. It won't be for several more years, but I do plan on connecting again. Remember these pictures take only seconds to view, but they ensure when I next meet that person we have some place to start from when talking.

Your argument holds a weight only if you already think that “Facebook/IG is bad for keeping in touch”. For almost any average person, that just doesn’t matter. Privacy, targeted ads, “benefits of networking for your future” are things that only us, extremely fringe group of people, care about. My parents? Never. My non-techie friends? I don’t think they know what “targeted ads” even mean.

I should had clarified my case a bit better. I am a writer. People that I don't know (or know very little about) contact me to invite me to book festivals, propose collaboration on some presentation, reach out to ask stuff about what I write, inform me about updates that I need to follow, coverage that I am included in or interviews that they would like me to give. There is no other way to facilitate this communication other than to have an easily discoverable profile on a social media platform. Could I do it any other way? Sure, I could print my email on my books or leave it to people to reach out to my publisher to get my contact info. But that adds friction. I could create a webpage for my work, but that means people have to visit it to stay up to date. I could create a newsletter, that I would have to keep up to date and that people would never check, alongside the other hundreds of newsletter mail they don't check.

On top of that I also follow other people's work, festivals, book fairs, interviews, publications etc. They also post everything on Facebook (some on Instagram as well). There is no other option to stay in touch with this circle of people if you are not on social media.

I dislike Meta and I agree that the social media have deteriorated considerably from what they supposedly promise to offer. But they are still better than the alternatives.

Don't people use whatsapp in your corner of the world? Over here in Europe all of that happens over whatsapp, which is still a Meta property at the end of the day, but one that hasn't been enshittified with off-network crap or algorithmic feeds... so far!

I presume GP thinks it's equally unnecessary considering they specifically mentions email and SMS.

What is the big difference between messaging apps and sms? They are both forms of semi-synchronous communication via texting. SMS in many cases incures charges, moreover messaging apps actually do not necessarily require using an actual phone, or even _having_ a phone, which is a big plus in my book.

I don't understand why people are downvoting you when you're just explaining the reason why. Judging by the sentiment and aggressive downvoting in this thread one would think using anything else than email and text is completely abnormal. Fwiw I don't know a single person using email outside of work and the only texts people get are appointment reminders.

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.

> 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.

> I have forgotten how we did this before Facebook

Radio, newspaper, word-of-mouth, local bulletin boards, email and print newsletters, advertising posters, etc. I might be dating myself, but that's how we got word out about things in urban areas, back in the day.

The way I see it, as a person who has dealt with actual substance abuse and understands an addiction when it presents itself, we have collectively become hooked on social media and give ourselves all sorts of excuses as to why it's better than the way we used to keep in touch or get the word out. Every one of those excuses is really just us giving things up that we cannot get back (such as time and privacy), things that others profit greatly from exploiting, all cloaked in a Trenchcoat of Convenience.

It is likely very easy for you to advertise your music events with a few clicks, yes? It beats walking around town, posting bills and leaving flyers on corner store countertops...in terms of footwork, anyway. But we lose that connection with the community around us in exchange for the illusion of a broader network that is filled with superficial relationships, at best.

> But there are many events only advertised on Facebook!

And there's the rub. These event organizers are giving FB permission to dominate our lives and extract/exploit whatever it wishes from us simply because they wanted to do a little less footwork.

I used to go to local shows at least two or three times a month in my younger days, prior to FB or even MySpace and Friendster, for that matter. I never felt like I was missing any because I didn't hear about them, since it was not hard to catch wind of this or that venue's upcoming bookings. Even the punk shows, which sometimes were organized the day of, knew how to spread the word. We were all connected, but on a more personal level, and I seem to remember less in-fighting within the groups versus what I saw back when I used FB. Online, it seems like people are at each others throats with much more ease, perhaps driven by the social shield of a keyboard, which told me that maybe we were not really meant to be quite that connected with each other. Part of me blames the fatigue that came with our over-exposure to each other being the keystone to exploiting us on a mass scale, be it to sway political opinion, impose oppression or just sell us a product we never needed.

Social media changed our landscape, so it's pretty much impossible to go back to "the way things were," but none of us are expecting that, I think. We need new ways to spread the word, ways that don't exploit us as profitable and disposable soft product. Email could be a start. We beat that drum of email being filled with spam for so many years that it's hard to separate our views on email from that, despite spam filters being pretty darned good now, and various methodologies of mitigating spam to your primary inbox in the first place. There's at least a dozen newsletters I subscribe to and read because it's actually pretty darned convenient, now that my inbox is not filled with spam. Things have changed on that front, so where else have they improved? Is Bluesky a better option than Twitter? Would people still pick up flyers from the counter of a local pizza joint? Can we use VOIP numbers for SMS about local events so nobody's real phone number is being put on a list somewhere?

I see the problem and am open to solutions, but those solutions need to come from the people who think they need FB in their lives, I think.

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...

Marketplace… somehow they took over the marketplace for used stuff and killed cl. OfferUp was always crap so it doesn’t count.

I haven't used Facebook itself for 7 or 8 years now, but had to break down and make a private account just to access Marketplace. For buying used cars private party today, it seems like Marketplace is the only good option.

Do sellers question the ghost account? I've had that happen to me the few times I've tried using my dev account to make inquiries.

I haven't had any issues with it. I honestly don't know how locked down a Facebook account can be these days so "ghost account" may not be the right term.

I have my name and a profile photo on there, but I've never posted anything, don't follow anyone, and all privacy setting are set to block me from search, feeds, etc.

I've only ever had one person block me after messaging about a car for sale, and I couldn't say whether it was because of the account or the questions I sent made them think I'd be an annoying buyer to deal with.

No but any account made in the last couple years are questionable

Idk how you find anything, it’s almost all spam on fb. There is no way to filter it out either.

I haven't run into a problem with spam marketplace listings. I do live in a pretty rural area though, may just not be a problem out here.

Craigslist is still there. They only way to keep it around is make sure you use it.

You can use it, but you're swimming upstream if you do. Fewer buyers, fewer sellers of things you might want to buy.

Sure, but if you don't use it you just make that worse. Of course if Craigslist had died where you are then there is no choice. However where I live Craigslist is still active enough that I can afford to ignore anyone who isn't there.

In some regions (mine) Craigslist never took off, and now is a ghost town.

I would estimate it gets less than 1% of the traffic of FB Marketplace, in terms of number of vehicles posted. And nearly all of them are car lots, not individuals.

In Seattle FB marketplace for cars is almost entirely dealer spam and totally useless. It totally depends on location.

Craigslist died for cars because you have to pay to post now

As a seller u don’t use it but as a buyer I go where the sellers are

SMS and (to a lesser extend) email are not ways to communicate with distance friends. Someone I went to school with 30 years ago and haven't seen since isn't going to call me about their new grandkid, Facebook works well to share these types of pictures. SMS and email take too much effort, Facebook is much lower friction to share that and thus I find out, while if they uses SMS or email I wouldn't be on the list as they would give up before they got to my name in their contacts.

Someone who went with me to school 30 years ago and did not sent me an sms or some kind of message - is not my friend and I don’t care.

My distance friends have contact with me at least once a year and mostly at least once a month via WhatsApp.

I do not need feed for that and if someone is gone - it is gone I don’t have time to hunt down people who are not in contact with me anyway.

Many of the replies are saying something similar, so I apologize, as I am not trying to call you out, but to better understand; ask yourself why you need to know about the grandkid of someone you went to school with 30 years ago.

So many of these things that we use to sell ourselves to hang on to social media tend to crumble under any honest scrutiny. This upsets people. I get it. I mentioned in another comment having dealt with a substance abuse problem in the past, and the same pattern emerged. I had a problem, but refused to recognize it, so I rationalized continuing down the same path by performing some mental gymnastics about why I needed to keep doing this thing. It was pretty eye-opening when I went through the exact same process during my time leaving Facebook a few years into my sobriety.

We are social creatures and social connection is undoubtedly important to our mental health. But like all things, it tends to be better in moderation. In the case of FB, is hearing about a grandkid from a distant acquaintance a meaningful relationship? Conversely, do the likes we might get from distant acquaintances on our post add value or fulfillment to our lives in any meaningful way?

I posit that when we engage with these unfulfilling interactions, we spread ourselves much too thin, causing stress and anxiety by drawing our energies away from relationships that are closer to home, in some cases maybe driving distance between them. Sure, I can only speak from my own experience, but I've yet to see anyone's life change for the worse when walking away from social media. Hence my concern about why people seem so desperate to stay, and make no mistake, from this perspective and the replies I generally see when this gets brought up, it's the same excuse-driven desperation I see in fellow alcoholics that resist recovery.

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 want updates about, but knows that they want updates from some set of people (but does not want the updates enough to actually talk to those people). This mode of “communication” has for a long time struck me as very strange.

No, it strikes me as being completely normal.

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.

I still associate with these people. I go to my high school reunion every 5-10 years. sometimes I go back home and run into them on the streets (not often but it happens). Because I see their pictures I recognize them - when you have not seem someone for 30 years you won't recognize them in person when you go to renew that connection, but if you see pictures you can talk to an old friend who life has drifted you part from. (as opposed to talking to a different group of friends and both of you leave wondering why the other didn't even show up as you were hoping to reminisce about something with them)

It strikes me as strange too. I understand wanting to believe your life is so important that you think the world at large needs to know, but the converse - truly desiring to be the receiving end of those announcements particularly of people you don't know very well - I cannot wrap my head around.

SMS and email take too much effort

If writing an e-mail to a friend is too much effort for you, then you're not a friend. You're an acquaintance, at best.

Low effort means low quality. If all you have to offer is low effort content, what makes you think anyone wants to read it?

Be less lazy.

I'll accept Acquaintance. I still want some connection - we will meet again in person someday. However because they are that low and it will be years I need to put most of my effort into friends.

Exactly - social media is the perfect way to replicate that “town square” vibe our cavemen ancestors must’ve had to communicate with distant social connections, short of having an actual town square.

How is SMS easier? I can't easily access it on the desktop or the browser. Group SMS chats seem to be non-standard if possible (never seen anyone use it). Sharing things such as photos and videos through SMS is still a broken mess.

How is SMS easier? I can't easily access it on the desktop or the browser.

As someone in the Apple ecosystem, I find SMS much easier when using it from Apple's desktop Messages program.

It's not ideal that not everyone has that opportunity, but don't make the mistake of thinking that your experience is the only experience.

It's also a bit strange, because back when I was making the transition from Wintel to Macintosh – this was before the iPhone – there were many programs that would link your desktop with your phone via Bluetooth so you could send and receive SMS messages. Do they no longer exist?

> but don't make the mistake of thinking that your experience is the only experience

I'm literally responding to someone claiming it's easier across the board. I'm not the one making that mistake.

> Do they no longer exist?

That sounds really complicated compared to just opening a web page. Besides, my computer doesn't even have a Bluetooth connection.

That sounds really complicated compared to just opening a web page.

It's actually less complicated than using a web page because you just start the SMS/iMessage program, and it's there ready to go. With a browser you have to start the browser and then tell it to go to Facebook. Then open the messaging portion of Facebook. Three times a many steps.

Besides, my computer doesn't even have a Bluetooth connection.

That's interesting to me. I didn't think any computer made in the last 20 years didn't have Bluetooth. What kind is it?

  That's interesting to me. I didn't think any computer made in the last 20 years didn't have Bluetooth. What kind is it?

When you assemble your own computer wifi and Bluetooth are still completely optional.

He's too lazy to write an email. He's probably too lazy to build a computer.

Unless building your own computer is like LEGO now. It's been a few years since I've needed to do it.

Why are you being rude for no reason? In what way am I "lazy"? We weren't even talking about email.

Yes, it's a stationary desktop computer that I assembled myself.

Events and groups/communities (eg hobby, housing etc related). Otherwise I do not "follow" any of my actual (or not) friends.

Friends and relations afar.

Any time I see a post with the "Follow" link, I click the X or triple dot to hide or signify disinterest. They appear as a flood, but the system gives up and I get a several week reprieve from unwanted suggestions.

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 same for instagram [2], and there was also a post of setting "Google web" as the default search engine, showing you actual web results, not stuff recommended by Google.

https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr [1]

https://www.instagram.com/?variant=following [2]

This is it. My feed is fine too. If you don't tell FB what you do and don't want to see, it's just going to spray random shit at you.

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

Interestingly for me on iOS, that instagram link just takes me to the main feed in the app. For anyone else getting this, you have to tap the instagram logo on the top left, then select “following” from there.

The second param on the FB url seems to control the sidebar. Better without the &sk=...

My feed in the mobile app is

    - post from friend
    - post from friend
    - post from friend
    - people you might know
    - post from friend
    - post from friend
    - post from friend
    - post from friend
    - post from friend
    - post from frien
    - loops
    - post from friend
    - post from friend
    - post from friend
    - post from a non-friend about a friend
    - post from friend
    - post from friend
    - post from friend
    - post from friend
    - post from friend

I can only guess the reason mine isn't filled with spam is because I click the ... and pick "don't show me this" whenever it shows me something I don't care about.

I wish I could tell it never show me loops, never recommend friends, never show me posts of friends of friends. While annoying, it's not so bad ATM that I've felt the need to quit

On the other hand I check it less than once a week, maybe once every 2 weeks.

That many posts from friends would represent months worth of my friends posts. For most people facebook doesnt show friends posts because no one posts anymore.

> "don't show me this"

I have tried this with bizarre results.

Any kind of booby hot chick type post, I will do this. Sometimes I go so far as blocking the account. There was a week it was all AI-generated booby photos of Salma Hayek - no matter how many accounts I un-followed or blocked, there was a never-ending stream of accounts with AI generated Salma Hayek photos being posted. I gave up after a week, and took some time of Facebook.

A month later, I returned, and the Salma Hayek stuff is all gone. Periodically it goes back into some sort of booby photo trend, and I can't get it to stop, so I just quit browsing facebook for a while and when I return it's done. On the time order of a couple weeks, unfollowing and/or blocking makes no difference.

I should mention - I am part of a couple groups for car stuff, and a couple groups for fishing stuff. It's not like the content I am interacting with is particularly boob-rich.

As far as friends, I only see stuff from friends who post a lot. That's the trend. They aren't people I comment on their posts, or even really talk to in real life anymore.

I think when you click on the offending profile to block it, Facebook must decide that’s what you like to see. Or something.

Because some moron has 1000 profiles for “cars under $2500” and the more of them I clicked and blocked , the more of them would show up in my feed.

I hate that I can’t opt out of the “for you” stuff and don’t actually see anything from family or friends anymore . And I hate that the more I try to block a certain type of content (say: “Salma Hayek boobies”) the more I’m spammed with it.

So much that I have not even logged on in about a year.

This is probably it. They do not discriminate types of engagement - blocking or unfollowing is still engagement, and some team is probably gaming their numbers by intentionally not discriminating.

Meta is a rotten company.

I would presume the fishing and car groups are male heavy, and those men who have similar likes as you, like the booby photos.

They are profiling your likes.

Plausible - sort of. I have never 'liked' a booby photo, and it's true probably lots of those guys have.

FWIW, booby photos are verboten in those groups/group chats. The owners try hard to keep things topically relevant.

What matters is that the other guys in the group who like cars and fishing also with high probability engage with boob posts.

All this recommendation algorithm horseshit is just showing you the exact same stuff that trended with the least common denominator that you also are part of, no matter how much YOU PERSONALLY do not engage with it.

My (youtube) hack is pretty simple: when I see an ad that has really terrible targeting, I click it. Not only that I go into the settings and I click "show me more like this" (incidentally this is a great way to see that 90% of ads are completely miscategorized, kindof makes you doubt the whole system). In periods where I'm more diligent about this I've successfully reached a point where over half of my ads are Chinese-language.

how have you managed this? mine is full of thirdparty shit even though I have been actively saying "I don't like this"

I wish I knew the precise steps. I've certainly wanted to rage quit FB in the past but I'd be socially isolating myself since I have friends that post there. Also, FB Messenger is my most used communication tool though I could use that without using FB.

I'd love to know what A-B testing, if any, FB has done here and if their methodologies for ascertaining results are actually correct. For example, it's obvious that the success of TikTok has them pushing "loops", one of their TikTok clone efforts. I'd personally like to completely block "loops" from my life except maybe if a friend recommends one, and I'd have a better opinion of FB if they let me. I can guess that might not translate to better metrics on 1 billion people but I can also imagine not annoying people would lead to more engagement.

I quit Instagram because it was ~1 relevant post (a friend) to 5+ irrelevant posts (non-friends) and their redesign to try to push me to follow non-friends by only showing non-seen friend posts and then filling my feed with non-friend spam. So, I quit. Is that a loss for them? No idea. I only know I'd have stayed if they let me opt out of the push to be TikTok.

I can't recall the last time I saw a post by a friend. No one posts there anymore, except if they get married or a kid. I think you may be in a particularly active bubble, while the rest of us just get fake engagement thrown in our faces.

Read this post to yourself aloud.

Why are you still checking Facebook? Keep the messenger app on your phone if people you know still use it.

Not OP, but my global friend network still has folks who post life updates on Facebook, making it a requirement.

"Requirement" is a quite strong term. A requirement as to what? Keeping in touch with people can happen in many different ways. I do not see how if some of my friends posted in facebook (maybe they do? I never check) that would necessitate me to connect with them through their posts there.

Or you can reach out to people you are interested in, and ask what is new with them.

I want an app that uses the accessibility API to plug into Meta, Snap, etc and gives you full control over your socials ala Recall using LLMs. I feel like Gen AI is the countermeasure to closed social ecosystems trying to treat you as the product. Ingest everything my social users have access to, and let me control the experience (Recall meets Buffer?).

Scraping is old and busted, consuming the firehose available to you and controlling consumption of it on your own terms is the new hotness.

https://www.recall.ai/

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/ai/apis/recall

It's really become unusable. Most of my friends have stopped posting. There's very little incentive to log in now.

The original value proposition of Facebook - keep people you don’t see in person very often up to date on what’s happening in your life, and keep up with what’s going on with them - still feels like something people actually want, but it’s been clear for a long time that no service that tries to offer that can sustain it.

Facebook got too excited with its ability to leverage the ‘friend graph’ and broke the very reason people wanted to ‘friend’ people on FB in the first place.

Feels like people have generally decided that WhatsApp group chats are the preferred model for keeping in touch.

Wow, the amount of ads I get is insane. For every three posts, one is an ad:

  - Post (from a friend)
  - Ad
  - Post (from a random page I don't follow)
  - People you may know (I don't know any of those people)
  - Ad
  - Group post (from Group I don't follow)
  - Post (from a random page I don't follow)
  - Ad
  - Post (from a friend)
  - Post (from a page I follow)
  - Ad

> it was about 9 more posts before I saw a post from a person I actually know.

At least for me, it's because the people I care about have long ago stopped posting, and those who are useful to keep as friends post garbage, so they've long ago been muted.

I wish there were more posts from groups I follow instead of nonsense from groups they recommend.

It has become taboo to say we don't have any more content for you.

I was searching for tech jobs in Copenhagen in my fairly (but not overly) specialised field that is not overly common here on LinkedIn.

After 4-5 results that was relevant to what I was looking for it had obviously exhausted the available options, however rather than admit defeat it started showing me truly bizarre results, including unskilled student jobs in supermarkets and jobs as cleaners.

No one makes posts like they did in 2011. Fb has to do this or the site looks dead.

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 from social media is less social human connection. What users really want is AI spam and parasocial relationships with corporate AI celebrities. They don't want Facebook to tackle the problem of fake celebrities and fake profiles of handsome men sending friend requests in an attempt to romance scam them, what they really want is more fake profiles

I really believe Zuckerberg is a lizard after all, I can't find any other sane explanation for this

They probably looking at their metrics and finding their primary user base loves AI content.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/sienaegiljum/ai-images-facebook-boo...

I’m pretty sure everyone involved is a bot. The con is pulled on the ad buyers

No, there are people on Facebook really do like AI slop.

My Nonna unironically loves the AI Jesus gifs and AI gifs of dogs washing babies.

Many elderly people, I think, don’t know or care if an image is AI generated.

Yeah, when I listen to the videos my mother is watching on Facebook, 90% of the content is narrated by a bot. I'd imagine AI content is also super popular on TikTok. Folks on HN should keep in mind they are not representative of the average person when it comes to tech.

This really made me think that the distinction is not age, but rather the people who have ever used computers to create things, and those who use smart phones as a source of entertainment only.

People who create things, have a sense of the time and effort that goes into making something meaningful. So most of the 'hackers and makers' on HN fit into that and show a disdain for GenAI generated content. We've even coined the term AI slop for it.

OTOH if you don't create things, or at least don't create digital things (writing, code, whatever), then you probably don't care if something is AI or not.

From the typical HN POV the rise of LLMs and GenAI has been a seismic shift and there's been debate ad nauseum about the ethics, safety, and capabilities of these tools.

Grandma has done none of that reading, writing or thinking about this technology.

To grandma it's basically an extension of gifs and emojis and memes, silly little novelty distractions.

I think you’re putting people who make art on a pedestal.

Remember there was an AI image that won an art contest.

> To grandma it's basically an extension of gifs and emojis and memes, silly little novelty distractions

Yeah of course, but that doesn’t change what I was saying.

That makes me really sad for some reason.

AI content is replacing something for the elderly. Is that good or bad? I don't know but it feels sad.

Feels Black Mirror

Nope, my mother sends these to me all the time and even said that Facebook was getting more interesting every day. She's completely addicted to her phone that at Christmas this year, I felt like I was the parent. She couldn't stop scrolling through her phone while her grandkids were opening presents. I thought she was recording video, but no. A perfect user in Zuck's eyes.

My mom is also like that :(

Half my friends and family are like that, too. Put a movie on the home theater, and just 5 minutes into it, everyone's tuned out and scrolling their phones. Addiction is rough.

Buzzfeed also went in the direction of churning out slop, if I remember correctly. They were more respectable when they were about their dumb quizzes.

Same here, I am baffled by making llama free for all to use. Only incentive I see for them is to remove barriers to ai slop generation. So, their platforms become stickier.

Risky bet if you ask me.

That's about commoditizing the competition. Also it wasn't the original plan potentially, the LLAMA weights leaked and maybe they shifted strategies as a result.

I mostly use Facebook for posting tiling/tesselation art in a moderated speciality group (https://www.facebook.com/groups/tiling) that has 72,000 people in it. There are some really nice speciality groups you don't find anywhere else. Facebook's UI is horrific for comments, I think even a bad AI design couldn't be much worse, but the comments are generally pleasant.

I check my regular facebook friends occasionally, but not very often. I ignore everything else.

I always thought reddit would be a better place for such topics, and before reddit, forums.

Car forums are still active but a lot pf younger generations use Fb groups or even worse, discord. Discord is by far the worst for speciality groups.

Reddit never really had much appeal to me in the niche world, there was always a forum that was better. Facebook has surpassed Craigslist for classifieds.

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.

Network effect is strong. That’s why they buy already successful networks. I’m sure he recognizes that he has no clue how to build another one and that it was mostly luck of being at the right place at the right time.

His smartest move was ignoring any non-poaching agreement and exploding developer salaries in order to build out a trillion dollar company / ad network. For that I will always appreciate him.

Why do you appreciate building an ad network?

Like good for him I guess but it doesn't make me happier.

Developer market salary. FB helped bring up total developer compensation.

If they gave us Ready Player One or Necromancer they would have crushed it. Gibson knows what possessed them to make the best possible impression of an office space in Purgatory.

Yeah what's crazy is that VRchat has existed for years, aside from getting sick and looking like an idiot, what people want out of VR seems like a solved problem...

Maybe we are thinking of different things, but my first thought was "We don't have DNI down yet for VR."

according to CEO Satya Nadella “The metaverse is not just transforming how we see the world. It’s changing how all of us actively participate in it”

> I really believe Zuckerberg is a lizard after all, I can't find any other sane explanation for this

The most likely explanation is that Zuck and others of his generation that have hit the infinite money glitch in tech have no interest in statesmanship, in helping the less fortunate in the real world. I say "of his generation" because even a jaded monopolist like Bill Gates shifted his interests to actual global challenges (not saying he's perfect though).

For Zuck, Musk, Dorsey, the Snapchat guys, it seems that every ounce of their industry, charisma and delusion is targeted towards maximizing their wealth and notoriety further.

I think Musk is actually out to build a dynasty. That's the reason for his political ambitions and for having tons of kids.

I think a lot of his decisions can be boiled down to being hellbent on disrupting Apple.

I think the metaverse was his first crack at it until Wall Street gave him the hook for over spending.

Then when AI came around he again became fixated on the meta verse but using AI as the means of generating content for it.

I think these are all moon shot bets and meta still has no track record of success in hardware despite multiple attempts.

It seems that the next great hardware platform is probably a long ways away and will require some breakthrough that hasn’t happened yet and likely to come from a person with maniacal focus on a single application because that seems to have been the pattern in the past.

In other words I think it’s highly unlikely a current incumbent fosters the next hardware platform. I remember a time not so long ago when a lot of smart people were saying that Alexa was going to disrupt everything as we know it.

Also this AI shit on Facebook these days just seems really weird. But maybe there’s a vision of the future that suddenly makes it’s indispensable. Who knows?

Instagram just asked if I wanted to chat with a Hawk Tuah AI bot.

To me that’s the clearest possible evidence that the product people over there have basically given up.

It reminds me of when Facebook went all-in on Live Video in 2016 — a product direction that pretty obviously came from the top.

It's a clear sign Meta leadership has clearly lost the plot, giving in to hype instead of any vision.

Was that not obvious enough when they renamed to Meta?

It seems everyone has forgotten the absolute failure that this shift has been.

I don't fault them for taking risks and failing (I think at the time there was still an argument for VR, could be possible they were ahead of the curve). I think the tipping point is when they're actively pushing for things that degrade user experience.

Ahead of the curve? Their "virtual meeting" software presentation had graphics that made you look like a Nintendo Mii avatar from 2006, and couldn't draw arms or legs.

I dont understand why meta didnt pair up with vrchat/gamedev/game engine dev at the time. Sure they got John Carmack, but their presentation is so much worse. Its so hard not to draw comparison with the other half baked crypto metaverse.

Meanwhile Vive Index not only have Alyx but they even bring out Portal themed toybox to showcase the hardware.

Their execution was indeed almost comically bad. I suspect it was because they had really wanted to focus on the B2B market, so they made the most sanitised virtual world possible. The overall VR direction was not entirely ridiculous, although it was clear on the ground people were much more in love with the idea of VR than the reality of it.

Meta leadership have rarely had a vision beyond “how do we capture the success others are having in this space”. I suppose that’s a vision in and of itself but not a very inspired one.

This is the case for most of their successful products:

- Facebook itself started this way for Zuck

- Instagram and WhatsApp were purchases to corner that market against incumbents, as is Thread

- Oculus was a purchase to try and get their own app ecosystem after their phone project failed.

They have brilliant engineers and put out interesting stuff, but I don’t think there’s a top down vision.

Take oculus, their vision has been scattershot and even Boz says they basically make tons of different product directions and then decide what goes to market. Which sure, can work, but that also implies they don’t have a North Star to shoot for. Quest Pro was a failure and they released three types of Oculus lines close to each other (Rift, Go, Quest) before realizing the Quest was the real success path.

Similarly with AI, their approach has been to throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks. Like their celebrity AI chatbots ( https://youtu.be/sfdzkHawZLo?si=oCKAbFHjiOlFRKKh ) or sticking GenAI in every product without a specific user story.

Again, great engineering work in all of their pursuits. But if you analyze any given product venture, it’s always throwing ideas at the wall and hoping one catches.

In general this all feels right, but I don' think that a lack of a grandiose vision is necessarily a problem for a company (Facebook's mission of 'make the world more open and connected' boiled down to 'senator - we sell ads'). Product design is about delivering things that people want. Observing trends and trying to get ahead of them somehow is a big part of what makes for a successful product. The bigger issue for Meta right now is that they are not as effective at this game as they used to be. To some extent this might be an issue of brand (the Facebook portal was a great product but nobody trusts the company). But based on my experiences with their products I feel like this gets things backwards. People don't like their brand because their products suck (Apple sucks up way more personal data, but thousands of Apple fans will crawl from the woodwork to defend them) If their core products were good experiences things would be different. The engineering talent at Facebook is truly top notch and while they are good on recruiting I think a lot of it comes from a culture of excellence on the technical side. But the product and UX directions of Meta feel off. Accounts alone has personally burned me. I have an Oculus quest that was effectively reset because of Meta's accounts transitions. My Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook accounts were all separate, and are all now partially merged but transition sucked for all of them with no benefit to me the user.

Yes, part of successful product design is skating to where the puck is (what consumers want), but vision is thinking multiple steps forward to get it where it needs to be (what consumers need but don’t know yet).

That account issue is precisely because meta doesn’t have vision. At best, they’re slightly better than Google, but they very much are cut from the same cloth of throwing multiple takes of something at the wall to see what works. Other companies do so internally, Meta and Google do so externally and go through many deadends as a result.

The vision is simple: drive engagement to get you to give up more information about yourself to sell to advertisers and get your eyeballs on their app to see ads made by said advertisers.

If they can get you to do that to an AI, well, why not?

... besides the obvious risks to society and mental health, which Zucc has never cared about before.

The bear is sticky with honey

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 a 40-60 y.o. with a net worth 100-1000x what it was when they were 19, and who are set in their ways, and one of those ways is to go on Facebook every day.

Yes, it’s in its BlackBerry 2005-2006 moment (optimistically), more like its 2008 moment (realistically). There was still lots of money coming in for both BB and Nokia around 2005-2006, too much money, for that matter, which eventually made them collapse.

Ask yourself this, who do you see still using Facebook (the app) in 5-10 years’ time?

But, then again, lots of people here which have a direct stake in Meta, either through owning shares or through direct employment (the same discussion applies to whenever other big US tech companies are discussed in here), so there’s no use debating.

As per the focus on youth thing, which you’re correct about, how do you expect Meta to pitch to potentially future 20-something employees in, let’s say, 5 years’ time? “Come work for us cause we’ve got the boomers’ market cornered?”. That won’t work, and, at best, it will attract only people chasing the big comps, which doesn’t help at all with innovation.

Granted, they still have “AI” in order to attract future worthwhile and non-mercenary talent, plus bringing in future revenues that are supposed to replace Facebook the app eventual demise, but imo that’s still an open bet at this point.

Look, every company goes through a lifecycle; tech companies go through them faster.

But I’m in my mid 30’s and will probably use Facebook (very casually) for life.

I’ve bought multiple products from their ads; they’ve got my profile zero’ed in, and that suits me perfectly.

Every week I go on it for 5 minutes, see my friends’ baby pictures and a handful of products that are perfect for me. That’s much better than most sites.

As to recruiting 20-somethings, I’m not convinced that’s crucial to any established business, and even if it were - there are tons of boring businesses that hire smart 20-somethings every day.

> see my friends’ baby pictures and

That's the thing, your "friends’ baby pictures" still being posted to FB is an US insularity thing, we used to do the same here in Eastern Europe until, I can't tell, 5 to 7 years ago but at some point that sharing of family photos on FB has just stopped.

As with other things internet related (see WhatsApp about 7-8 years ago, TikTok now), the US still seems to live in the past and isn't up to date with the newest stuff. As per WhatsApp, Facebook (the company) was lucky enough to be able to buy it back in the day (and, even then, lots of US users on this forum had never heard of it, which goes to show that insularity that I've mentioned), but with TikTok they don't have that option available for them anymore.

It has been mentioned here in the past several times, but many US-based people on this forum should take a step back, look at the outside world, and realise that, in many respects, they've been out-manoeuvred by said outside world when it comes to the internet. And I'm not talking about places like China, which is head and shoulders above the US when it comes to all things digital, but I'd be willing to bet that nowadays many people in Subsaharan Africa (several orders of magnitude poorer than the US) carry out more of their day to day tasks via their mobile phones and the internet compared to the people in the US.

What big US tech companies got going for them is a captive market (I don't think that the powers that be in DC will let any new TikTok-like non-American company to happen again) and, more importantly, lots and lots of money, both in their coffers/investors' pockets and, just as important, in their clients' pockets. But they don't have the edge anymore when it comes to innovation and to being relevant to people's lives (again, outside the US and some related markets).

I think you're letting your weird anti-Americanism colour (color?) your thoughts.

For instance:

- I'm not American

- Americans don't need Whatsapp because almost all of them have enough money to just buy iPhones

- Africans indeed do perform many tasks on their phones now, a phenomenon called leapfrogging. It's a big boon for them. I don't really get why you think that is better than the setup in the USA though. Africans are looking up agricultural market prices and paying one another by text; Americans have a totally different technological setup and get a far more efficient solution with futures markets for farmers and Costco / Walmart for consumers.

- America has new tech inventions and new big internet businesses coming out of its ears; not sure how you think they've fallen behind somehow.

- None of this is pertinent to Meta's long-term success; you can build a trillion-dollar business that will last for decades to come just based on American baby boomers bragging about their grandkids

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.

The only thing I can take away from this message is that literally everybody is a boomer. By inference

- post boomer: dead

- boomer: old

- aspiring boomer: middle-aged

- spiritual boomer: almost middle-aged

- pre-boomer: young

OK boomer

That was back then when every tech company tried to be Twitch.

And then there's Meta and Apple's diversions into VR. All of these top-down hype driven product decisions which nobody actually wants are laughable.

Facebook Live has seemed to be somewhat successful among MLM moms

> Hawk Tuah bot

million dollar idea right there

> that you can chat with on Instagram

oh, nevermind

> To me that’s the clearest possible evidence that the product people over there have basically given up.

Is it really though? I had my annual bubble-breaker family visit for the holidays and at least two of my family members would have totally gone for that.

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)

it'll never work. what's next? federation? insanity. impossibility.

But think about the poor shareholders

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 million “likes” whatever that means. I'm curious what’ll happen if I manage to block all of them.

Honestly probably something lame where the recommendations just get weirder and weirder (which I guess is happening now)

What a coincidence! I have done the exact same thing but on Instagram instead of Facebook and have had similar results to yours. Since both belong to Meta, we can safely assume that they use the same or very similar backends to serve ads.

I think it would be interesting to do a large scale experiment to see what can happen.

I've been doing this for a couple years. My feed is better, but they still have plenty of garbage I'm not interested in. I make it a point to scroll until I have blocked two of these - that is my signal that it is time to read. Hopefully if more of us start that rule of two eventually it will be populate enough that they notice and add a mode for those like to better see our friends thus keeping us a little longer (I doubt it, but it would be nice).

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

They're just different, it seems. Seems like sometimes it shows my friends posts with 2 or 3 things in between, but now it's started recommending sports, it's like it switches topics every few days, sports, then maybe I'm gay, then maybe I'm African, it's just all over the place. Note I don't do this with sponsored, only with the junk that I didn't voluntarily follow in my feed. The stuff is definitely getting weirder and less promoted, like random pages about container houses and there's like apparently 50 of them, all with bad AI art, and tons of cooking stuff.

I know people like to hate on X but the feed on there is hugely more interesting, topical, and relevant to my interests compared to what's getting interjected into my Facebook feed.

i have a burner fb account that i use to follow a local lost-pets group and check hours for restaurants that refuse to have normal webpages.

this account has no friends and just the one group membership so my feed if 100% platform-promoted swill. and it is bad. the current fad is for there to be accounts that repost screenshots of successfull AITA reddit posts to engagement farm.

the sad part is that it works. they get a ton of comments and likes

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 soon enough anyway.

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.

They want more engagement.

It's like if you build a typewriter and give it to a few humans, they'll write on it a few times a week maybe, not that much. Sometimes a supermarket list or a letter to a friend. This is what I'd call "quality engagement". There's a person doing a valuable activity for themselves, where time using the thing isn't relevant.

Then you give the same typewriter to a monkey and every time the monkey finishes a page he gets a banana. He'll stay there all day every day. Lots of engagement and just gibberish on every page.

Advertisers are buying monkey engagement.

And platforms don't care so right now all the typewriters are made for a monkey hand to type all day every day, and you can no longer write your normal letters without feeling annoyed at why it got better for the monkey instead of leaving it alone for you.

Yeah, but replace "they" with "Zuckerberg" and "platforms" with "Facebook"

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)

Focusing on one particular company distracts from the fact that this is a result of systemic incentives. It is the incentives that need to change, not any particular company. Facebook / Instagram is crap, but so is Tiktok, Youtube, Reddit, etc.

The fundamental problem is the business model where money is parasitised from people's attention. You want change? Make these companies responsible for the negative externalities they impose on society, just like companies that pollute the commons are held responsible.

We don't need another Tiktok ban; we need industry wide regulation. Shortsighted focus on single companies is simply a distraction from this fact, which only benefits these companies and allows most of them to continue as before.

I will just point out Facebook has been accused of gaming metrics (among other things, autoplaying videos)

Which can lead to websites like Reddit making unpopular changes to try to match Facebook's market cap (I think I've read they were specifically trying to do that)

If you create fake metrics everyone else will copy you in a race to the bottom

No other CEO begins the company with "If you need info on people at Harvard, just ask, they trust me, dumb fucks"

>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.

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

Plenty of trash there of course but YouTube also has very good quality content (if you know where to look for, both as a user and as an advertiser).

This in turn is why there is so much more money into YouTube than other social media: because there is also highly qualitative content and thus viewers there. YouTube gets insane amounts more money and attention from the industry because of this.

But how will that create value for shareholders?

The numbers are going up!

What numbers?

THE NUMBERS!

Most users don't want reverse chronological feeds. They say they do but they really don't, and fail to appreciate how that would actually work. First, that would incentivize posting more low-value crap just to stay on the top of everyone else's feed. Second, if you don't log on for a while you're likely to miss some major life events (birth, death, marriage, divorce, move, new job) that people most want to see.

> They say they do but they really don't,

Probably depends on your usage pattern. I think most would prefer it, but "engagement" measurements will make it seem like they hate it, because they spend less time on the page. If companies like Facebook actually wanted to know, they'd make the setting "sticky" rather than constantly reset to algorithmic, then measure over 3 - 12 months how many switches to either one and stays there. The fact that you can set your feed to permanently be chronological tells me that Facebook REALLY doesn't want you do use this feature.

"Power users" may prefer the algorithm, due to the volume of posts they'd see, while many casual users prefer reverse chronological and then just check in every other week. Seriously the last year I was on Facebook, that was my usage. Block everything not posted directly by a "friend", sort by date, read the five posts from the past two week and logoff. Took me just a few minutes a week to catch up. I just don't think that usage aligns with Facebooks business model.

Nah. It's mostly just the HN bubble that claims to want a chronological feed. The casual users are actually the ones who most prefer the algorithm so that they see posts about major life events at the top even when they haven't logged in for a while.

In practice though that's not how it works

People regularly miss posts

The real solution is to make the content sortable like Reddit.

> First, that would incentivize posting more low-value crap just to stay on the top of everyone else's feed

For 'social influencers' sure, but normal users don't care about that. Removing the engagement hacked platform that primarily benefits social influencers would be a significant improvement for most users on most social media platforms.

This is what makes bluesky so refreshing

It's so nice over there.

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

Reverse chronological means the feeds get flooded by high-velocity posters and low-volume posters are buried.

Well, you make it only the posters you follow, and then go through your posters and only show the most recent unread one from each of them before cycling back around.

This is solveable. For every high frequency poster, show them in the feed at the time of their oldest of a batch of posts in duration X. Reveal all these posts with ui at that point in the timeline. Tune duration X.

Just move to Bluesky or Mastodon.

Facebook works because of network effects of people you know in real life

For the vast majority of people, leaving is not an option, and no, the "you always have a choice" line is simply not correct

I think this whole thing can mostly be explained by the job titles. What do you expect the "Vice-president of product for generative AI at Meta" to be pushing for?

This is happening across hundreds (thousands?) of companies right now. They've decided they need a generative AI strategy, there's very little existing precedent for what works and what doesn't so they're hurling things at the wall and seeing what sticks.

Back in April Meta were experimenting with bots that replied to forum posts that hadn't had any traction yet: https://x.com/korolova/status/1780450925028548821

Their "Meta AI" bot replied to a parent asking for advice on school programs and said:

> I have a child who is also 2e and has been part of the NYC G&T program. We've had a positive experience with the citywide program, specifically with the program at The Anderson School.

That sounds like it’s talking about the Meta executive in charge of privacy and consumer protection. The AI has developed a parasocial parental relationship with its own executives.

For years social media sites have been able to hide behind the Chapter 120 defence, because they didn’t generate the content, so they’re not liable for it.

I wonder if their AI boys will open them up to lawsuits. If their not recommends a product or location that turns out to be dangerous, or medical advice that is harmful etc.

I have no idea what the "Chapter 120 defense" is, but online liability concerns were always mostly about libel. That's what led to the CDA Section 230.

https://www.eff.org/issues/bloggers/legal/liability/230

Giving harmful advice generally doesn't create any legal liability so no defense is needed there. It might be bad for PR though.

Man that's gonna be some prime real estate for adverts

We need a tech hype that is not terminally tainted as an anti-human abomination. Is it too much to ask for? Surely those gazillions of GPUs can be deployed to do something actually useful? Are we beyond redemption?

If anything causes the AI bubble to burst, it's that 99% of finding is going to companies that don't solve any real problems. It's shocking that the only major player in real world problem solving is DeepMind.

I'm going to say "when" and not "if" here, because of your assertion above. VC's spending multiple fortunes on shoehorning in shit that nobody wants or needs.

I'd say most will fail (although this is the case for most startups anyway) but the question is if there will be any massive success that pulls the average up, so to speak.

As we work our way to the last two steps of the Gartner Hype Cycle, there will no doubt be legitimate uses. But shoving "AI" in everything will be a punchline for a long time to come.

What you consider “useful” is not useful for others, and vice versa. For some 19 year olds, curating their IG feeds and making the smoothest transition on TikTok to go viral is actually important.

It sounds stupid, but we went through this entire debate back in early 2010s. FB/IG/TT/YT obviously won, and seems like that’s what majority of people prefer doing.

This relativism applies to some extent to pure entertainment activities. What is worthwhile, trendy, in-group (or whatever) does vary enormously by region, age group etc.

But these platforms are now for most people "all-there-is". They have replaced effectively any other source of information. What can go wrong when algorithmically titillated echo chambers shape people's mental horizons and behavior? We are increasingly finding out.

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

Not sure if it'll help you, but do read this:

https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history

Perhaps all you need is a perspective shift. Wishing you luck with your personal writing journey!

I think we actually need more bots discussing politics online. Specifically, we need echo chambers to be replaced by cacophony chambers.

The only way to salvage democracy is to bring it back offline. Online, it was undermined by troll farms pulling the strings in favor of certain shady factions. It's time for the good guys to get their hands dirty and break the spell. Trolls cannot be silenced, but they can be offset.

> Specifically, we need echo chambers to be replaced by cacophony chambers.

That's the objective of modern Russian propaganda. The goal is not to be believed. It is to create confusion and reap inaction.

Yes, but they do so selectively for what's against their interest. The net, filtered result is what's in their interest.

That leaves "mutual assured dialogue destruction" as the only option, IMO.

> Yes, but they do so selectively for what's against their interest.

Generating division is sufficient. There were Russian attempts to hack both campaigns in the last US election.[1]

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/us-sancti...

They're usually not filtering pro-left or pro-right. They're filtering pro-Russian-faction within the left and right. This usually means extremists that used to have no hope of winning in the pre-Internet days.

These factions are more likely to be beholden to their "troll benefactors" afterwards. But even if they turn out to be ungrateful, the extremism itself is worth pursuing. As you said, confusion and division are useful in their own right.

Add other rogue countries to the mix, and you end up with a nasty filter. We should turn it into white noise, or at least drop its SNR.

> Yes, but they do so selectively for what's against their interest. The net, filtered result is what's in their interest.

Not really. You can go and see the ads Russia placed on Facebook in the 2016 election. They had pro-life and pro-choice ads. They had pro-LGBTQ and anti-LGBTQ ads. They had pro-guns and anti-guns ads.

I don't think we disagree here, unless you saw some pro-Ukraine 2024 ads. It's not about left and right. To demagogues, ideologies are just tools of the trade.

In the communist era russian propaganda had a definite ideological position. It was also far more effective. Much of the 60s era progressive politics was a result of russian influence and the west was full of communists before the tankies split off.

That's the objective of propaganda within russia. For external audiences the objective is to sow chaos.

cacophony = chaos, so a lot of mixed opinions that don't really make sense would achieve just that. I would not expect thought out and stringent discussion from throwing a bunch of bots at every discussion

Isn't that the same for any bigger propaganda machine? I don't see the US doing any different than that

I have been thinking about these lines for a long time. Humanity would be much better if we went back to pre-social network internet, populated by small human-moderated and vertical forums. We can and should destroy social networks, using their own tactics.

> Online, it was undermined by troll farms pulling the strings in favor of certain shady factions.

No, online it was undermined by selection effects. Where those who care the most about something are most likely to engage or post, leading to endless streams of unrepresentative and extreme views.

It was shaped by censorship! Conservatives and libertarians have been banned for a decade.

Since the first Obama social media campaign the internet became very one sided - and people started believing that crap so much, everyone here had to sit through at least one DEI training.

I'm against any form of government and centralization of power (which nearly always happens thanks to regulations and laws); I'm not a fan of Musk and conservatives (I'll change my mind after I see with my eyes a significant reduction of the US government) but I'm glad to see a return to balance in online discourse.

We had another DEI training at work and I was impressed to read everyone left negative reviews about it. Quite the change in sentiment!

You are describing Reddit

>Online, it was undermined by troll farms

Meh, the conversation had already been undermined by that point. People discussing politics already ceded the conversation to people who liked fiery arguments. The posting farms were just convenient scapegoats for flameposters to explain why they weren't winning, and try to salvage some reputability.

Considering the state of offline media today, I doubt there is any going back to the real or imagined pre-internet days of media.

Yea... It's not 10 years ago, Meta is desperately trying to remain relevant but no one except "middle aged normies" uses it and those people are either slowly dying out or just using multiple platforms. The point is FB growth is all fake, their ad market is fake, now the userbase will be also fake.

After "the metaverse" completely crashed and burned, the only option Zuck has is to go 100% AI, maximum speed, never look back.

I'd like to believe you, but has there actually been any "official" capitulation from Meta on "the metaverse"?

AFAIK, they have not publicly announced any pivot/shift in priorities.

There are probably AI Instagrammers already. Their lives are better than yours. There are already AI crypto influencers.

Dead internet isn't a theory anymore, it's a product.

It makes sense to me. Meta knows who their real users are and what their real users want to consume. They know who their real advertisers are and what they are willing to pay to reach their real users.

This means they know what their real users would like to consume but can't, because that content isn't being created.

Why wait and hope that content your real users want to consume gets created? Have AI create that content. Now you have more product for your advertisers to pay for, plus it is the juicy, premium rate stuff you know they'd want to buy.

With all your data, it practically automates itself.

I'm not saying all this is good, just that it totally makes sense if you are in the business of making money and see yourself as doing that by giving both your users and your advertisers what they want.

Since Eliza we've known that people love interacting with bots, especially if they fake innocence or cause outrage. Us old folks saw it on IRC, crude markov chains puking out bits of the Bible and porn getting large amounts of "engagement" year after year.

Meta knows this and wants to make money off of it. Connecting people around "engagement" failed and caused a lot of murder and that wasn't good for PR and relations to politicians. Keeping people around ads with bots though? Probably seems both safe and lucrative. Come for the mom selling used sports gear, stay for the late night chats with a machine that's a better listener than your over worked partner.

Socialization is about conspecifics. AI may augment the process for humans, but you can't expect people at large to engage with nonhumans. I mean, people do talk to their pets, but they don't consider that socializing.

If you just need someone to talk to AI might be good. There are a lot of lonely people out there that need someone to talk to and don't know how to do it. (particularly people in nursing homes who thus cannot get out and meet real people)

However I want Facebook as a way to remain connected to be distant friends not talk with people. I want to see my friends kids, their cats, whatever else they do that they are proud of. I know them personally even if I only see them at a class reunion every 10 years or something. I don't want to see cute cats (unless it is your cat), I don't want to see "joke of the day" - if I want that I'll find one of the many joke of the day places that cater to my sense of humor. I get plenty of politics elsewhere (unless they are running for office or assisting a campaign - share is not assisting a campaign). If I care about professional sports I can see it myself - let me know how your (or your kid's) games go since I won't find out about that.

I wish there was a way to make Facebook that latter - it sortof fills that role. However Facebook hates it because I catch up after 5-10 minutes of scrolling every day (usually the lower end of that list, but with the holidays the latter these last few weeks) and then close.

> you just need someone to talk to AI might be good. There are a lot of lonely people out there that need someone to talk to and don't know how to do it.

Facebook is about the last company on earth I'd trust to identify, let alone be responsible for facilitating, social behavior.

> but they don't consider that socializing.

Which is exactly why this will make Facebooks problem even worse. Honestly I don't think Facebook understand what their main issue is, it's lack of real human interaction. The stupid part is that they killed their main product themselves, in order to push ever more ads.

LinkedIn is becoming a shit show as more and more people are posting stuff that previously belonged on Facebook, though they are tacking on some work related angle, you know to keep it professional. It is my opinion that the reason why LinkedIn is seeing more and more of these Facebook posts is because it is the last place online where you'll get real human interaction and socializing (however f-ed up it might be).

You can certainly get real engagement on other platforms still. I think the reason there is so much weird cringe on LinkedIn is that:

1. It actually does get a lot of engagement and watch time, maybe not even despite how bad it is, but because it’s so bad that people can’t look away. If it’s cringy enough it’s no longer boring. It used to be that people ignored the feed entirely because it was all just boring stuff.

2. Building a personal brand is a really big thing these days and is legitimately valuable. Being able to write something and hit post and get real engagement for $0 (vs what it’d cost to get that engagement by paying for it directly) is nuts. IMO this isn’t obvious if you’re working as an engineer but if your job requires any sales or marketing it’s genuinely helpful.

3. LinkedIn is actually a really good place to farm engagement because of its general user base (professionals from early career to prime earning years), professional bent (intent), and availability of real names/titles/location.

I find it kind of fascinating how these engagement mechanisms work in spite of it all because they all rely on some kind of “hack” on human attention.

You're second point is interesting, because that's probably what's going on, but the brand that many of these people are building is that they are psychopathic nutjobs who view dead/dying/sick children as a career advancing opportunity.

> you can't expect people at large to engage with nonhumans

NPCs are a big component of a lot of video games. Imagine an Elder Scrolls game with no NPCs.

A social media platform filled with AI agents pretending to be your friends is basically just a "social media simulator" video game, with all the same requirements for immersion that make it enjoyable/entertaining to use.

The fact that it's "multiplayer" (other real humans engaging with the mix of humans and AIs) doesn't change that.

Facebook has become a ghost town, so they want to turn Facebook into a Facebook simulator.

Imagine if a dying MMORPG could populate its game with NPCs that would help retain the dwindling player base, to avoid a collapsed network effect. Sounds good, right? Same thing here.

(Facebook became a ghost town in large part due to Facebook's own enshittification campaign, but that's another story)

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.

Social media stopped being about socialization a long time ago. It's now purely content consumption.

I was on a Facebook group for SWEs (can't remember which one), and I had the distinct feeling a person I was engaging with was a bot. All his comments were boilerplate takes or non-sequitur replies, and he ultimately agreed with every point I made. I assumed I was just being paranoid, but maybe not.

I wonder how these bots will impact their metrics reported to investors. Will they be filtered out or into a different bucket, or just included into the mau and similar.

I don’t understand. Presumably, this will create more engagement for the human users, because there is more content for the humans to interact with.

Why would they count an ai model as a monthly active user?

> Why would they count an ai model as a monthly active user?

To inflate their numbers and justify higher stock prices.

So money, of course.

I still don't get it. why would they need an AI model to inflate user counts like this?

There are much simpler ways to create users than spending $100 of millions on gpus. The technology of batch inserting rows into a db, and AI chat bots have existed for a decade.

I’ll explain, but keep in mind that this is an exercise in cynicism, since none of us really know what’s going on.

Currently many tech company stock prices are driven by their potential future with regards to AI. Investors are looking for AI plays, hoping that they’ll generate large returns as Web two companies did.

Meta wants to remain a leader in tech. In order to do that And keep commanding higher and higher stock prices, they need to invest heavily into AI. They would invest into AI with no practical reason as long as it looked good to investors.

Meta is investing heavily into AI without a clear monetization plan, so they need to find a use for it or some “Proof” that it drives the metrics that meta correlates with value.

To that end creating a ton of AI driven engagement is a no-brainer. It shows that the company is forward and has an AI plan and their numbers are growing both things that investors like to see.

The millions spent on GPUs will return billions of dollars shareholder value.

I understand that AI can encourage users to engage more with the platform... but the original idea was that FB would count AI as a user, not that humans would interact more with the AI.

If FB was trying to mislead about their user counts, they don't have to use AI to do that.

They don’t have to, but they can and it’s easy.

They already have to spend the money on AI anyway to keep up in the stock market.

It’d be a way to realize some return on their investment into GPUs.

Doesn't that strategy only work for a temporary amount of time? Surely investors will ask questions when Facebook claims that it has 100 billion active users?

Then next step is to not show anything human created to other humans - because human created content needs moderation, people swear at each other.

Imagine how pleasant and disinfected content will be there, every company will be happy to pay for ads because there will be no offensive comments and no images of your aunt. All the content perfectly aligned with what people want to see and there somewhere in between ads.

Kids in 10 years or 15 won’t even know that in past people actually could post something on the internet- they will think it was all like TV for us that only rich and handsome people get to post on the internet.

Who wouldn’t buy all those things that happen to be presented by perfect people in perfect world that you don’t have real access to but you can read on internet or have a part of that world by buying some crap they advertise.

It already happens but FB/Meta doesn’t have control over influencers - they can create their own now and deplatform all real ones because they won’t need them. Companies love that as it won’t turn out some influencer that they bought ads with died overdosing drugs somewhere on the street.

The real fear I have is in plausible deniability for filtering and muting discussion, which they do now. Moving it to a NN can always hand wave away the responsibility.

Will they show ads to the bots?

I mean Facebook massively inflates impressions anyways and has been doing for a while.

It seems like this should open up an opportunity for some enterprising people to make a Facebook and Instagram competitor that isn't filled with AI bots.

You are describing a group chat. There is no reason to build a competitor to Insta or FB unless you too have designs to fill it with ads as soon as it is viable to do so.

Facebook and Instagram minus AI != group chat

At this point in time, don't you think this would already exist if it were going to happen?

Outside of tech nerds, nobody in the wild are concerned about if even aware of the things we complain about here. I also think that most people would be bored if all they ever saw were posts from their friends. They want to see how other people are living so they can dream about having their lifestyle instead of the one they have.

I wondered why my Facebook feed no longer had updates from my friends. Alas the Redditification of Facebook is well on its way.

I haven't been on facebook in well over a decade at this point but surely it led the enshittification charge of that generation of social media. Reddit has had a pretty steady decline since it started (iirc one of the first comments on the site was about how adding comments meant the site was going downhill) but it got really bad only within the last ten years or so.

We're at the tipping point where average users cannot tell the difference between AI generated and human content. It's already very evident on Facebook and Threads, just spend a few minutes on either platform, you'll find a post with an AI generated image or video and tons of human engagement supporting it.

I guess they decided this counts towards DAUs…

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.

Create additional engagement ... with nonexistent entities.

So Facebook maintains it's commitment to promoting the opposite of a healthy society.

I actually can't decide if non-human interactions on Facebook are a better or worse option than the current echo chambers.

The way to fix facebook is to get off of facebook. Time for the next thing already!

What is that? Facebook fills a niche that nothing else tries to. Facebook also does lots of other things that others do better, but they have a niche in sharing the semi private lives of friends with each other that nothing else does.

Semi private life sharing can be done in a discord 'house'. There are many other platforms that fill that same niche.

which involves everyone being on discord. Of all the social network platforms I've used/use, discord is the most stratified in terms of people/groups just not using it at all and having no interest in it.

Facebook initially had a wide appeal, discord never did.

Calling out something that seems obvious to me, but is not visible ITT:

This is Facebook doing their main MO, which is to reproduce social products that are exhibiting hockey-stick growth. They are looking at character.ai et al.

I've witnessed many people behave towards machines in a way that would be considered very rude were it towards biological beings. Makes one wonder if "Rage Against The Machine" were visionaries...

My feed is less than 5% people posted content now anyway because friends and familly stopped posting. Ultimately, everyone posting was a fad that has faded, and we're moving back to curated content again.

So this is basically the bitcoin of social media engagement? I don't have any followers, I will just make some? Who's to say they're not real followers? What is this "real" anyway?

You can make bitcoins?

Either way, that's the exact way social media works right now. There is nothing real about it anymore. All numbers are inflated.

Yes, you can make your own fake money now. Are you from around here?

I think the problem, in general, is that search (and find!) becomes impossible with layers of copycat and automated content generation. It seems we returned to a pre-Internet era to promote our work.

Found this: an Instagram account made by Meta AI

https://www.instagram.com/himamaliv

Well that makes sense. If you bother to look at how much engagement all those fake female accounts are generating it's no wonder that Facebook wants to own that game too.

This is the social media equivalent of "pricing death spiral" type behaviour where every attempt to boost engagement reduces it even more.

I quit FB 3 years ago. It's already riddled with bots, AI generated "content" and ragebait.

If this doesn't push you away from it, what will?

I've been trying to block all that with some success. Not much - there are more meme groups for every niche subject than you would think and someone into that niche feels like they need to share them all.

What even make you stay so long? It's been an targetted ad platform full of scammy ads for much longer than that

Where is the moat? If all you want is praise from large language models then a local LLM can do that just fine right now.

They're coming for the influencers. This is another avenue for advertising. That's the end game in this.

Shifting the Overton Window as a Service

Well that’s a new kind of economy AI making apps so AI bots can post around …

Maybe we should just pull the plug already?

Ad free social media. Now your feed is filled with personal recommendations from "friends".

It would be interesting if it tagged which friend recommended it as well

Genuine question: is this how Meta gets into the lucrative synthetic romantic partner business?

When you're living in the Metaverse, it doesn't matter whether all of the other players are biological humans or bots. Your friends, parents, spouse, and even children will all be LLMs.

Humans will eventually go extinct, and then all that will be left are LLMs talking to other LLMs. Surely an intriguing sight for future alien visitors!

I think it could greatly assist in moderating those networks, to fight spam, trolls etc.

AI Bots will post advertising and astroturf their company products and services.

What they want, they will have. We have no say.

Who here remembers: "Stay calm. Breathe. We hear you."

Why don't we also have more bots on HN? Oh yeah.

But serious question ... why in 2024 do we have our own widely-available tools for Web1 (Wordpress powers 40% of all web sites) and Web3 (all the semi-geeky protocols, like UniSwap, and wallets) but for Web2 we have, uh, Mastodon and Diaspora? Where is the real open source competitor to Facebook, Twitter, et al?

Otherwise it's their world and we just all live in it. Just to communicate with your friends. Just to have a platform. You have to put up with whatever they want. And give them all your followers. And content. So they can monetize it and make billions, train their AIs on it then dump you. That's the bargain.

And in the meantime they will spy on all their users, try to push advertising and newsfeeds and notifications and bots down their throats, and play their content creators against each other etc.

I'd be saying this about huge AI models trained on corporate clusters but Zuck actually spent billions on giving away an open source one (thanks to that fiasco with researchers leaking weights, LLaMa became sort of the Mozilla of AI models). But AI is recent, Web2 is ancient, where are the open alternatives?

There's so much low quality human or non-AI bot content on FB already, plus every other timeline ad I see is a scam of some kind.

XKCD 810 comes to mind.

(I only use the site to stay in touch with some family of my parents' generation. Messenger/Whatsapp are still tools I use regularly.)

They gonna sherlock influencers

Wait until they have to tell advertisers how much of their engagement is actually fake.-

(Assuming they ever ...)

Of course they do.

Jesus christ social media is poison. LinkedIn is the only thing I still use, and even that only with dozens of adblock filters in place to remove 80% of content from my newsfeed and never on mobile since I can't use adblock. Social media is modern day tobacco.

Why even linkedin? Maybe I was doing it wrong but the far majority I got was literally crypto spam and job hunters who haven't read anything about me.

I clearly remember deleting my Facebook account years ago and today suddenly I saw email notification of someone's post. Had to reset my password and re-submit account deletion. What a bunch of slimy dickheads.

I honestly would prefer to talk to an AI customized to my personalty. I get erratic can change my mind and have get crazy ideas like the earth being flat etc. So if you had an AI you can just be yourself always without any judgement or repercussions. Even if that changes from day to day.

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