It's so bad I have to wonder if there's a different angle here, maybe they think that releasing something so terribly bad will make it easier when they release something less comically bad? Idk.
It'll be like entirely automated catfishing.
Sure, they faltered at Step 2, but how was this not the plan?
They'll reach out to users and talk to them about whatever they're interested in. They'll then make influencer-style native advertisements. If you're a middle aged man that likes video games when you see their picture posts they'll be "wearing" some vintage game t-shirt (that's for sale). If you're instead a twenty year old woman into yoga the same bit will be "wearing" some new Lululemon yoga pants.
The first pass of these bots failed because they used the follower mechanism. The next version will just follow you to push ads or scrape more data about you.
I have worked with competent product organizations. I know they exist. A few even exist in SV. But for some reason the largest players have just absolutely lost the plot beyond what can get them to favorable quarterly earnings, and that game eventually and fairly consistently doesn’t end well in the long term.
Meta in particular is clearly rudderless, lacking in vision and strategic leadership, and throwing whatever it can find at the wall hoping to find something that sticks. Facebook turned into a cesspool, Instagram isn’t as popular with the newest demographics Meta has traditionally wanted to court (young people), and Threads turned out to be a nothing burger. Their grand quest to unify messaging was a disaster, and mores the putty because they’ve basically delineated their ecosystem by demographic generation in what has to be an unintentional series of missteps. Their “metaverse” projects weren’t even compelling to the teams working on them, their foray into crypto was over almost as soon as it began, and their business products are a nearly unusable mess for those of us who have had the misfortune of using them.
You’d think eventually someone at Meta would hit upon an idea that goes somewhere. It’s like a more pathetic version of Google’s stagnation.
These AI products are not made for users. They're made for Wall Street. Wall Street expects big companies to 1. talk about AI in their earnings calls, and then 2. do something, anything, with AI. All of BigTech seems to be doing this now, and investors are rewarding them by buying their stock. So they're going to continue the cycle of building useless AI products and then canceling them when they have served their purpose (pleasing investors).
For larger orgs I can imagine that number is larger and we definitely get a ton of positive interaction from that. That might be swayed by demographics but I can tell you age isn't one of them because our interaction (on WhatsApp Business which is mostly where I interact with Meta products) is decently in the 20-40 range.
Worst of all, is that Facebook is a terrible platform for hobby stuff. Plain ol' PHP forums are much better for that; they're much easier to navigate, easier to search, easier to host pictures on, etc.
I frequently find myself posting something on one of the Facebook hobby forums, then realizing that:
* the signal to noise ratio isn't great, because there's a ton of people spamming those forums with products and other social media that they're trying to promote, YT in particular.
* Facebook isn't great for long posts.
I think a hangover from the last AI winter, after which everything that would previously have been called ‘AI’ got called ‘ML’, the term ‘AI’ then being shareholder poison. Anything older than the current AI bubble mostly gets called ‘ML’ still, with a possible exception for non-LLMish CV stuff.
Odds are the product team cherry picked conversations for internal demos, their management wanted press and promotions, KPIs were around engagement and not quality, and nobody had perspective and authority to say “this sucks, we can’t release it”.
I mean, just very basic QA, having someone talk to the damn things for a bit, would’ve shown the problem, in this case.
Or with nihilists who learned to say yes to everything, to at least get paid.