This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
This is absolutely going to crash and burn for Meta. When companies look at the metrics for their posts on these platforms, they're going to see massive amounts of engagement, none of which converts into sales; and they're going to stop buying ads on those platforms thinking that their market isn't there.
Another example of AI being deployed in a place where AI is not useful; though in this case it's actually harmful to the goal of the company deploying it.
Didn't facebook fake numbers before for video views which caused e.g. collegehumor to fold because they thought they could rely on facebook for views?
Absolutely. And Vice and Gawker, and to some extent even The Onion. Some survived, some did not. Dropout in particular is one of the few semi-success stories of it. It was called the "pivot to video," and it's almost a joke in online content communities now; especially since everyone on these platforms was saying, "we don't want this!" even as Facebook was saying, "everyone wants this!"
Great just like games like Fortnite and Call of Dity Mobile have bots with real usernames and profiles to fill lobbies, now literally everyone online could be a bot with a fake profile.
I’m prepared to just be gaslit for the rest of my life from now on
When I played Fortnite the first time(not for long though), I was winning pretty easily in the first 5 matches or so. They put bots into it to fill the lobby and maybe because it hooks you more or something. But they don't tell you. That was a weird experience figuring that out.
I want my laundry machine to figure out the best way to wash whatever I toss in automatically without an Internet connection. I guess I'm asking for too much :(
Whenever I think it can't get worse
spotify: fake artists
meta: fake users
google: fake results
i see a large trend.
Amazon: fake products AND fake reviews
90% of products in amazon are just marked up temu products lmao
Or aliexpress.
Philip K. Dick wrote a short story ("Autofac") in which autonomous, self-replicating factories continue to operate and produce goods long after a global war has wiped out most of humanity, and they eat up all remaining resources on earth in doing so. I worry that there's a system in which a few extremely rich people can continue thriving without involvement of most of humanity, and that they're (knowingly or unknowingly) moving society in that direction. Who needs the commoners when AI and algorithms can simulate them.
IIUC the calculation of GDP doesn't factor in whether the produced goods serve a human need - the system can in theory continue to optimize for ever-increasing GDP while every human on earth starves to death.
IIUC the calculation of GDP doesn’t factor in whether the produced goods serve a human need - the system can in theory continue to optimize for ever-increasing GDP while every human on earth starves to death.
There's an old joke I remember about economists and the GDP.
Two economists are walking through the jungle and come across a gigantic pile of lion scat. One turns to the other and said I'll pay you 100$ to eat a bite of that shit.
Being an economists and 100$ being worth a lot, the guy eats the shit and gets paid.
A little while later they come across a pile of rhino dung. The now richer economist turns to the first and offers 100$ for him to take a bite out of this pile. 100$ is again a lot of money so he does it and eats the shit.
As they're walking along, both picking their teeth, one turns to the other and asks "did we both just eat shit for nothing?" And the other days "of course not, now the GDP of the jungle has increased by 200$!"
Correct; GDP is a dumb measure, and even its inventor said it cannot be used alone.
Check out The Forever Winter, it incorporates the autofac into its world building.
dead internet
People who use it for business need to start think twice, imagine you saw your stats numbers and think you reach (example) 10000 people and 90% of them are bots but you paid for that 10000, worst is that you may think that your product is bullshit because of the success sales convertion its very low but bots dont buy products so either you have the info of how many bots have seen the add or you need to leave social media because its impossible to read that data to make decisions
The executive team at my company was in shambles because no one was using the company intranet. So, they demanded that the company intranet be launched when a computer turns on. They were ecstatic that the numbers reached almost 100% in a day, even after being fully explained, and understanding, that the new traffic was, of course, not a real figure. All of the new numbers never went past the home page. Still, they patted themselves on the back, and partied.
So I guess what I'm getting to say is more people either wouldn't care, or would even celebrate the fake data than one would think.
The intranet at my work is a near-useless dumpster fire. Everything is disorganized, all the important documents and instructions are hidden behind completely chaotic branches and layers of creatively named folders.
I have used the wretched thing only once. I instantly downloaded everything I thought I would ever need to an encrypted USB stick, so I would never have to use it again. This was 7-8 years ago. Everything important is always delivered by email and apparently stored to the intranet afterwards. The intranet has been hacked at least twice, but the real number is most likely much higher. For "reasons", all the personnel info has also been kept stored on the intranet, despite the successful hacks.
Isn't that essentially how that whole scam called advertising works in general?
While there is scamming happening in ads biz, we have to face the reality that ad spend will drive revenue growth for many brands because pedons have no self control.
For every guy who screaches aDs DonT wOrK on Me Rheee
There is a dozen idiots who ate buying that plastic trash with some idiotic payment plan that they will deff make 4 timely payments on.
The thing about advertising is that pretty much every bit of data that could tell us if it works or not is produced entirely by the same industry that has an overwhelming incentive to tell us that it does work.
I am not even saying that it never works, more that advertising's primary purpose is to sell advertising to companies and if that advertising works or not is a distant secondary goal at best as long as those companies have no way to prove it doesn't.
It very likely works on some types of products while being completely useless on others. And even where it works it very likely has a distribution from extremely bad ads for a given product or service to very effective ones for the same product.
I'm going out on a limb here and assume these bots don't count as an impression, but they will market it as an opportunity to show your ad to the followers of the bot account.
The advertising companies would riot if they did count as impressions, so Facebook would either not count them as such, or hold off on them for that reason.
Dead internet theory was inevitable, but who thought Facebook themselves would bring it about?
I mean, who else was gonna do it?
if anybody can make a profit from enbottification, facebook wants to be the one to make that profit.
They see Reddit pulling off having bots steer discourse and they're green with envy. I can't imagine it not being something like this
Friends don’t let friends use Facebook.
Facebook was a wonderful tool for me for quite a while. It let me build a digital list of my irl "friends" and then I got watch over the years as they posted their most vile and ill-conceived innermost thoughts.
An excellent tool for seeing what people really think and feel when they're not "performing" in social settings. Curiously people don't understand that public posts to a public SM site aren't anonymous but there's enough separation from the "real world" that lots of people forget that.
Just sitting back and watching gave me a lot of insight as to how awful people really are when they "feel like" they aren't being watched.
Facebook is near unusable now, the feed is 99% fake politically charged shit. I report it all as spam, promoting hate/violence/terrorism, and block the users, but a bunch more just show up the next day.
This is me too. I'm still on Facebook for some family contacts and a couple of useful groups. Years ago I could spend hours a day there. Now I spend maybe 15-30 minutes each morning scrolling for friend/family updates and group content - and hitting "Hide all from ..." on every single bit of unsolicited content. I was reporting and blocking them, but I've decided it probably doesn't achieve anything and it was too many taps/clicks.
Instagram is similar - I used to spend hours there too but now I only go to check if there's progress on one car build I'm following and scroll for maybe 5-10 minutes and I'm out for the day.
The amount of irrelevant content that FB sticks in the default feed is just ridiculous. I'll get a couple posts from friends near the top, but as i scroll the ratio changes until nearly nothing is from friends or FoF. And it's all this garbage content that FB thinks I want to see, like I watch one cake decorating video and then more of them show up and keep showing up, and im not sure how to get rid of them.
What you have to do is create feeds of your friends (and GD FB limits the number of friends you can put in a feed) and browse that instead.
And holy shit does their algorithm latch onto any minor interest in their content.
Accidentally tapped on a floor tiling video the other day, three days of tiling and handyman videos jammed into my feed and me pressing the "not interested" button on every single one.
Facebook, I am there for the rare post from my 150 or so friends and family. That's it. Nothing else.
The reason we don't use it anymore is because actual posts from real humans we know are buried under a torrent of shit. Sometimes their posts take days to surface leading to all sorts of chain-mail posts on how to "get your feed back". None of which work because the whole business model is about jamming sponsored shit down your throat.
I use clean my feeds grease monkey script to hide it and only show my friends and groups I subscribed to and it makes it so easy to see how much of things that it shows is just their stuff and how dead the Facebook really is.
People are still think social media is social. They think that when they post something, all their friends will see it.
In reality what each person sees is determined by the feed algorithm. They can use all the things they know about you and present you content that will press your buttons and change your opinion about topics.
The biggest issue though is to have a proper content. This is where generative AI comes in and this is why owners of social media are so much invested in it.
They basically have platform like the old MSM, except all content is specifically tuned to every person.
The "likes by dead people" story broke in 2012. Ever since, I've been assuming that most likes for the stuff I've been posting, especially from friends I've not talked to in many years, are inorganic and inauthentic. Still I post sometimes because I know a few people actually do care about what I'm up to and we don't meet very often at all. Of course, I strip all EXIF data from my photos first.
"Spotify managers defended PFC to staff by claiming that the tracks were being used only for background music, so listeners wouldn’t know the difference [...]"
https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machine-liz-pelly-spotify-musicians/
(PFC = "Perfect Fit Content", i. e. Fake Artists)
I have a feeling this quote exemplifies the attitude the management of these platforms have towards their end users, though it's seldom this explicitly formulated.
Ugh. So glad I don't use FB. It's already so enshittified and only getting worse.
Well they don't need us anymore, I'm going back to reading books.
Oh soo looking forward to content out of control! Already dislike the robofarming on YouTube with clips with voiceovers. Imagine nonsense content on Instagram…
I don't care how hard to look at the (real) person is, I don't care if they sound like Janice Joplin, I will take that over the soulless AI read script any day. I did watch a few of these AI chans, as they had stuff I was interested in, but I just can't anymore, tone matters. I want to giggle at the real person mispronouncing words, stumbling (very briefly) over words (editing is a thing). I hope it doesn't get to the point I can no longer tell the difference, at that point I think I just quit the tubes
