Social Media's Effects On Our Minds & Lives

[zazen]

Good to think about all this stuff.

But I do quite appeciate that whatever the funniest thing is that happens in the world each day, a large portion of the world gets to hear about it.

e.g.

 

Which makes me reflect on how amazing it is that the whole world is potentially in touch with each other now. I can remember the pre-internet days when that was not the case, and I could write a lot about how that felt very different (maybe another time).

Which makes me think that for all the problems being created by putting everyone in touch with everyone else, it might be a necessary thing that we have to go through.

But still, there's lot to figure out about avoiding the pitfalls so good thread.

[th555]

On 4/6/2024 at 5:34 AM, ignatius said:

[snip]

Thanks for those Fisher vids

[iococoi]

5 hours ago, Squee said:

Not really a social media thing, but in continuation of amazing things the internet suggests me...

 

[LooseLink]

I only use social media to post creative stuff and occasionally talk to people on FB Messenger when needed. I'm apart of the Messenger generation, not quite the Social Media generation. This is why I mostly prefer messageboards like this one to communicate, against posting everything to social media, whirling my thumbs all day waiting for you all to like the fact I took a selfie or whatever. If I post something, if you liked it, then cool, if you don't then whatever right? It seems the Social Media generation wants us to keep re-assuring them that their life is awesome. I think the Messenger generation was more aligned with storytelling. Get us a reason to "like" your stuff then.

Tho I won't lie, I did post me cooking pizzas and that for abit, but eventually, it didn't fulfill me, I guess if landlords accepted "likes" instead of money to pay rent, then it would make more sense.

 

[th555]

On 4/18/2024 at 2:04 PM, th555 said:

Thanks for those Fisher vids

Found out there's also a part 6, on vimeo only (you can use yt-dlp to grab it if you don't have a vimeo acc)

[o00o]

Yesterday I reactivated my facebook to download some old pictures I had no backup from. I was instantly greeted with some ai generated images that lead to pages opposing in political agenda. Before deactivating facebook some years ago I used a script to unfollow everything so these suggestions are really fuelling the empty internet theory. Especially as boomers and bots can’t see the difference. I don’t plan to do anything with facebook anytime in the future but it was nice to see that it’s almost as fucked up as twitter. It feels like you return to your hometown after some years and the whole town is reenacted by robots as no one is living there anymore. They should do this in malls as well 

[colunga]

On 4/18/2024 at 4:38 AM, Squee said:

Not really a social media thing, but in continuation of amazing things the internet suggests me...

I keep seeing those first two on my YT and there isnt an option to select "not interested" or "dont show me this channel" 

[Squee]

3 minutes ago, colunga said:

I keep seeing those first two on my YT and there isnt an option to select "not interested" or "dont show me this channel" 

We must have the same kinks.
 

Spoiler

 

[chenGOD]

Finally pulled the plug on twitter. What a festering shithole. No matter how hard I tried to train my algorithm to give me music and football, I kept getting vile shit, most recently some Hitler apologetics.

Anyways, done with it.

[Squee]

14 minutes ago, chenGOD said:

Finally pulled the plug on twitter. What a festering shithole. No matter how hard I tried to train my algorithm to give me music and football, I kept getting vile shit, most recently some Hitler apologetics.

Anyways, done with it.

I only check the "Following" tab. That way I only get tweets from people I follow. But to be honest, I've recently stopped checking Twitter excessively as I used to do and now I only check BlueSky.

YouTube on the other hand keeps trying to get me to watch videos of horrible ambient producers. Bleep bloop with tons of reverb.

[o00o]

22 hours ago, chenGOD said:

Finally pulled the plug on twitter. What a festering shithole. No matter how hard I tried to train my algorithm to give me music and football, I kept getting vile shit, most recently some Hitler apologetics.

Anyways, done with it.

It’s really amazing how the Twitter landscape has changed. Check the comments under some commonly left leaning tweets or accounts. Like Greta Thunberg or news about people protesting against war or for the environment. 80% of the comments are extremely hostile and many look like bots. I wonder when this is actively starting to influence elections 

[iococoi]

lord, not mastodon, please...

[auxien]

13 minutes ago, iococoi said:

lord, not mastodon, please...

saw that this morning, but just because he was a 'founder' of Twitter back when it started doesn't necessarily mean he's going to muddy up the Mastodon pool, who knows his personal approach these days, 15+ years on...it's sure possible tho, no doubt (and one thing's for sure, he's not funny: https://www.instagram.com/bizstone/). they've also started a 'non-profit' which is either a really good thing or a really worrying thing. the conjunction of these two has my antenna up about things.

Edited Saturday at 07:48 PM by auxien

[Rubin Farr]

On 4/24/2024 at 9:58 AM, chenGOD said:

Finally pulled the plug on twitter. What a festering shithole. No matter how hard I tried to train my algorithm to give me music and football, I kept getting vile shit, most recently some Hitler apologetics.

Anyways, done with it.

this is the way 

[decibal cooper]

On 4/24/2024 at 9:58 AM, chenGOD said:

Finally pulled the plug on twitter. What a festering shithole. No matter how hard I tried to train my algorithm to give me music and football, I kept getting vile shit, most recently some Hitler apologetics.

Anyways, done with it.

It really has gotten pretty bad. I used to like and bookmark every 9/11 meme I found on there, and the algorithm just was feeding them to me at one point, twas glorious. About two months ago this slowed down and then halted completely. Not even a fake 'reminder that this was on Bin Laden's hard drive' meme. In my most private moments of reflection I wonder if things will ever improve, but on the real my hopes are dashed.

[o00o]

Google deliberately made their search engine worse to increase profits. Article about who is responsible and why: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

[usagi]

10 hours ago, Rubin Farr said:

that looks like a lot of time and effort that could instead be spent on... literally anything else.

[ignatius]

28 minutes ago, o00o said:

Google deliberately made their search engine worse to increase profits. Article about who is responsible and why: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

Same shit different company. Replace the people who know how to do things with toadies who manage profits but don’t give a shit about anything else. Fucking fucks. Like Boeing or GE or whatever. 

[o00o]

3 hours ago, ignatius said:

Same shit different company. Replace the people who know how to do things with toadies who manage profits but don’t give a shit about anything else. Fucking fucks. Like Boeing or GE or whatever. 

Yeah they dumped the guy who built most of the architecture for someone who was already responsible of killing most of yahoos business model leaving the company without business model in muddy waters looking for fresh meat he can ram his teeth in

[chenGOD]

12 hours ago, Rubin Farr said:

this is the way 

Way too much work to listen to people bloviate. Bluesky is pretty good so far. Nothing in my feed except people I follow, no bots, no *p*u*s*s*y*i*n*b*i*o* etc. 
 Very chill.

[ignatius]

On 4/28/2024 at 12:39 AM, o00o said:

Google deliberately made their search engine worse to increase profits. Article about who is responsible and why: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

haha! more google news

https://www.hindustantimes.com/business/google-layoffs-sundar-pichai-led-company-fires-entire-python-team-for-cheaper-labour-101714379453603.html

Google layoffs: Google has laid off several employees in the past few weeks. The company witnessed recent cuts in its Python section as the entire team was laid off owing to Google's plan to reduce costs by hiring less expensive labor outside the United States,

[Satans Little Helper]

1 hour ago, ignatius said:

haha! more google news

https://www.hindustantimes.com/business/google-layoffs-sundar-pichai-led-company-fires-entire-python-team-for-cheaper-labour-101714379453603.html

Google layoffs: Google has laid off several employees in the past few weeks. The company witnessed recent cuts in its Python section as the entire team was laid off owing to Google's plan to reduce costs by hiring less expensive labor outside the United States,

enjoyable reads (link oO00o posted as well) 

 

[o00o]

15 hours ago, Satans Little Helper said:

enjoyable reads (link oO00o posted as well) 

 

The hackernews discussion has some interesting insights from google engineers:

Quote

Ex-Google search engineer here (2019-2023). I know a lot of the veteran engineers were upset when Ben Gomes got shunted off. Probably the bigger change, from what I've heard, was losing Amit Singhal who led Search until 2016. Amit fought against creeping complexity. There is a semi-famous internal document he wrote where he argued against the other search leads that Google should use less machine-learning, or at least contain it as much as possible, so that ranking stays debuggable and understandable by human search engineers. My impression is that since he left complexity exploded, with every team launching as many deep learning projects as they can (just like every other large tech company has).

 

https://hn.premii.com/#/comments/40133976