AJ0072 days ago
Very helpful for ad targeting. As Apple kills tracking and ramps up its own ad business, Meta will need to collect as many signals as possible.
i give it a year or less.
Yesterday.[1]
In other news, FB has been using whatsapp metadata to coordinate genocide campaigns in Gaza. What’d all those dead civilians (including infants) do, again?
Presumably they signed a TOS, so it’s OK.
The tweets just saying “drug use” and then you hear it’s weed is ridiculous. Why wouldn’t they just state that they lied on their immigration form about drug use?
[1] https://www.cbp.gov/sites/default/files/2024-07/cbp_form_6059b_english_0.pdf
It’s seductive because it justifies complacency. On a theoretical level, it seems irrelevant whether someone has your data if anyone does. That abstraction collapses all distinctions and makes further choices seem moot.
But in practice, this logic breaks down. Anyone who has worked with data or communication forensics knows that a single missing email thread can be the difference between understanding what happened and hitting a dead end.
They will get to decide what to do with their likenesses when they're older. It seemed cruel to let Facebook train a model on them from the time they were babies until they first start using social media in earnest.
Also in many places WhatsApp is practically a requirement for daily life which is frustrating. What I need is some kind of restricted app sandbox in which to place untrustworthy apps, they see a fake filesystem, fake system calls, etc.
GrapheneOS comes pretty close to that I think? You can put such apps in a separate profile and cut off a lot of permissions. You can also scope contacts, storage, etc.
I’m grateful though. We would have called meta malware back when.
Limited Access to Your Library
"App" can only access the items that you select. The app can add to your library even if no items are selected.
I.e. messenger.com is possible to use if you request desktop version, change font size and deal with all sort of zoom issues. Of course fb doesn’t support actual calls or notifications just because, so I don’t use it.
Instagram is even sneakier - you can’t post stories via mobile to “close friends”, post videos or view them from instant messages.
This UX would get developers and product managers fired at any of the mid-tier tech companies at which I’ve worked, but apparently not at Meta.
And on Android they're not even the worst privacy player which is Google of course
Description of the latter from the uad list:
Facebook Services is a tool that lets you manage different Facebook services automatically using your Android device. In particular, the tool focuses on searching for nearby shops and establishments based on your interests.
Samsung has nothing against creepy, their own TVs are full of spyware too. At least here it can be removed.
And they do care about money which is the reason they do it.
Basically every kindergarten, primary school and high school will want to post pictures.
LinkedIn was used in a similar manor, to coordinate meetups for our local Cloud Native meetups, but the LinkedIn algorithms are much much worse than Facebooks, so people would get "You might be interested in this meetup" two weeks after the event.
Facebook basically took over communication, no more mailing lists, no more updates on the website, if there even is a website. You just have to accept Facebook if you want to be notified about changes in scheduling, upcoming events or general information about your kids soccer practise.
Here (NL) we get a form at the beginning of each school year to mark which uses of photos we find acceptable. E.g. we allow photos in the school portal (which is private and not owned by big tech), but not on Facebook, etc. It's the way it should be done, because there is not much burden on the parents. If the school also wants to put photos on social media, the burden should be on them to make sure that kids for which they don' have an ack are not put there.
A bit harder was initially convincing my parents not to put pictures of their granddaughter on Facebook. They are understandably proud and want to show their friends. But they respect it.
I think in all her life there has only been two violations of our policy. In both cases we contacted the person who published the photo/video and they took it offline.
You just need enough 'weirdos' to make it normal. I know that there are other parents that agree, but not everyone has the gut to stand up to the social media tyranny, but will join if some people set an example.
I do wonder also if the blur effect they use is one of those that can easily be reversed. I need to check that one of these days.
Honestly what's the point at this point? Are parents not going to send their children to that school because they didn't see pictures of blurry-faced children having fun on the Internet, or is this just teachers wanting to post about their students?
It took the rest of us much longer to realize they were right.
wasn't the camera doing the stealing, but the holder of the photo (facebook in this case)! And it wasn't the soul being stolen, but money!
In Holland we have a saying, what do you bring it your house is burning down? And most people said my photos. This was before the digital age and cloud obviously. We take photos because we care. Stuffing them into everyone else's face has also been a thing at birthday parties but outside that not so much.
First, for most of us in daily life, once you know you are being photographed you exit any context you were in and enter the new “I am being photographed” context. In some important way, you are stolen from the world around you for a period of time. Your body is still present, but you might be thinking about how this all would look at any later time. This does not apply when photography is specifically arranged by you (common in analog era), or if you are unaware of being a subject photographed (but there may be other concerns about that[0]).
Second, a photo/likeness of you is a proxy allowing other people to relate to you. Keeping in mind that we only ever relate to images/models that we build of each other in our minds (we have no “direct access” to other people), in this case a photo is a shallow (there is little other information than appearance) but weirdly high fidelity (for sighted people) model of you. This is not an issue if the photo is kept just by people you know (common in analog era) or after you are dead, but otherwise if published[1] it means people can somehow relate to “you” without the actual-you knowing or having met them. Some people may feel some sort of satisfaction from this, others it can make uncomfortable.
Third, as someone noted, soul could map to another nebulous concept: identity. It could range from problematic cases (someone pretending to be you to resell work you made) to twisted but benign (stories about people making fake profiles pretending to be successful SV employees come to mind).
[0] If you are secretly photographed[2], this can happen for a number of reasons. Some may imply a missing interaction (if that photographer could not photograph you, maybe they would talk to you instead). Some may be done with intent of sharing your photo in unknown context where again people may relate to you in specific ways that can be unpleasant (e.g., mockery).
[1] Now when generative models start to be trained on what we thought is our private photos, the idea of “published” is blurred.
[2] In most cases here “photo” can be swapped with “video”.
True, this is something that bothers me a lot too. But especially GenZ has a problem with that (surprising because they grew up with ubiquitous photography) and I see more and more parties that tape off phone cams. They are indeed wonderful.
I don't agree this doesn't apply when it is arranged though. For me that has always been awkward.
Now, realising they were 100% right.
if (userId == 1) {
// don't add mark's data to training set
}Nothing is a social network anymore.
Everything is a content-consumer a platform now.
People just want to scroll and scroll
Perfect storm.
[1] https://time.com/4882372/social-media-facebook-instagram-unhappy/ [2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-social-media-makes-people-unhappy-and-simple-ways-to-fix-it/ [3] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/navigating-the-maze/202506/why-social-media-makes-you-feel-worse
I remember complaining like hell when the wall came out, that it was the beginning of the end. But this was before publicly recording your own thoughts somewhere everyone could see was commonplace, so I did it by messaging my friends on AIM.
And then when the Feed came out? It was received as creepy and stalkerish. And there are now (young) adults born in the time since who can't even fathom a world without ubiquitous feeds in your pocket.
Call me nostalgic, but we were saner then.
It wasn't the first time I've had a generational digital (ha) communication failure, but it was the first time I've had one because I'm old and out of touch with what things mean these days!
The change to being able to post things on your own page and expecting other people to come to your page and read them (because, again, no Feed) wasn't received well at first.
Keep in mind, smartphones didn't exist yet, and the first ones didn't have selfie cameras even once they did. And the cameras on flip phones were mostly garbage, so if you wanted to show a picture, you had to bring a camera with you, plug it in, and upload it. So at first the Wall basically replaced AIM away messages so you could tell your friends which library you were going to go study in and how long. And this didn't seem problematic, because you were probably only friends with people in your school (it was only open to university students, and not many schools at first), and nobody was mining your data, because there were no business or entity pages.
Simpler, simpler days.
That's what turned it from a method of reaching out and sending messages to specific people when you had something to say to them to a means of shouting into the void and expecting (or at least hoping) that someone, somewhere, would see it and care what you had to say. It went from something actively pro-social to something self-focused.
Blogs and other self-focused things already existed, but almost nobody used them for small updates throughout the day. Why do you think the early joke about Twitter was that it was just a bunch of self-absorbed people posting pictures of their lunch? Nobody knew what to do with a tool like that yet, but the creation of that kind of tool has led to an intensity of self-focus and obsession the world had never seen before.
There is no benevolent original version of FB. It was a toy made by a college nerd who wanted to siphon data about chicks. It was more user friendly back then because he didn't have a monopoly yet. Now it has expanded to siphoning data from the entire human race and because they're powerful they can be bigger bullies about it. Zuck has kind of indirectly apologized for being a creeper during his college years. But the behavior of his company hasn't changed.
Unfortunately parasocial behavior is good for engagement.
The AI is given a proxy goal- 'maximize engagement'- which it achieves perfectly.
The user's goal - 'foster genuine connection' - is completely secondary.
The AI isn't malicious, it's just ruthlessly effective at optimizing for the wrong thing.
the problem with meta is three fold:
1. zuckerberg is completely misaligned
2. facebook has hundreds of billions dollars of resources
3. zuckerberg has total control of facebook
normally a company with this level of resources would not be under the total control of a single individual
other shareholders would have pushed back on the obviously bad ideas of "metaverse" and "training AI on private photos of children"
but with facebook: misaligned zuckerberg is in total control, and no-one can stop him
so the rest of the world has to suffer whatever this amoral asshole wants to inflict upon them this month
now add AI into this, and zuckerberg can inflict even more damage onto society with fewer and fewer people to get in his way
(the same applies to Google and Musk's empire too)
You need to already know someone to find them here.
Check out the waitlist!
https://waitlist-tx.pages.dev/
Edit:
Here are some rough layout designs https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1uLwnXDdUsC9hMZBa1ysRwINNvlv8LH__
It's intentionally simple
It means really a lot to us.
We are working on a better name and the site!
I'll send you the welcome email manually soon!
No "People you may know" or "select at least N interests or follow N accounts to continue".
I think early adopters will invite their friends to join and that is the only way.
Got any suggestions?
But we are not interested turning into Facebook. You will only see posts of your friends and nothing more.
I was spending 8+ hours a day doom scrolling which led to this idea. I just want to see what my friends want me to see and that's it.
Few others have suggested the same. But it kind of defeats the purpose since the goal is to see updates from your close friends and have only private profils. Even though empty feed is not good, it's a feature in our platform. We want to see what users do when the feed is empty. Only real way to have a non empty feed without compromising the core idea is letting users invite friends.
I am thinking along those lines!
Perhaps it already exists but I have thought about writing something that takes what is provided by "Download your data" and produces a local SQLite database, a local webpage, local website or some combination thereof that is served from the user's computer instead of Meta servers.
However I do not use Facebook enough to justify the effort, and when I do I never look at the "feed".
A really private place with only people that matter.
"A really private place with only people that matter."
Including an unnecessary third party at the controls.
Hmmm.
If the posts are more long form, what is the difference between this and a blog where the "secret code" is the URL?
Or even a finsta account currated the way you want.
I don't say these as a "it's not gonna work" as in consumer its about the experience, I genuinely wonder why the experience will be better
> Group chat Group chats work when everyone in one know each other. I have N different circles which don't overlap so group doesn't chat makes sense. Messages in group chat are more "in the face" - everyone has to. I just wanted a place where I can dump my thoughts without feeling like seeking immediate attention.
> Blog PostX is indeed something like a private blogging space. It's something I wanted for myself.
Honestly I am not fully sure how it's going to be used by people but I have built something me and my friends like and use.
> Blog
PostX is indeed something like a private blogging space. It's something I wanted for myself.
Honestly I am not fully sure how it's going to be used by people but I have bi uilt something me and my friends like and use.
Many early adopters have asked for photo support so we will be definitely supporting it in the next release.
We are just trying to figure out how to do it without it turning into a clout-chasing machine.
We can add an option to export all data (in the pipeline) and let users delete account and data in one click (available on first release) but I don't know what else can be done.
End to end encryption is hard and I am not a programmer capable of implementing it safe enough to stop NSA level threats.
We will do what we can.
I don't think there's anything technical you can do. I think it would require:
1. A stable income stream that doesn't depend on something at odds with your goals (i.e. not like Mozilla).
2. Incorporate as a non-profit with rock-solid "we're never going to transition to for-profit" legal terms.
I think Wikipedia is probably the closest thing we have to that, but even they don't have a reliable income source. I mean, they have more money than they know what to do with and waste most of it on outreach nonsense rather than putting it into an endowment... but it's not exactly a reliable source of money.
What can you possibly offer in this space that can not be done with a messaging group on WhatsApp/Signal/Matrix/XMPP ?
- They are invite only
- They are not public
- People share updates in chronological orderBasically group chats work only when everyone knows each other
That is (a) not true and (b) a non-issue, because you can create as many groups as you'd like.
> PostX is indeed something like a private blogging space. I just wanted a place where I can dump my thoughts without feeling like seeking immediate attention.
So, you are working on yet-another blog engine and you are promoting it like it's some revolutionary new idea? It may be interested for you if you want to treat it as some exercise, but do you see how underwhelming this seems to anyone else?
Social media is dead to me.
You know, HN is social media.
That's the trick with these social systems. They don't care about the features each person dislikes or doesn't use.
It’s easy to dogpile. I’d like to see more proof, that’s all. “It’s obvious” doesn’t cut it for me. For one, we have major societal problems that are being exposed through these platforms, and the mere knowledge of the problem has a negative impact on the individual. Do we shut the platform down because it’s showing us things we don’t want to see, or do we fix the societal problem? And many others.
It varies by demographic, but yeah, social media are pretty universally awful for humans, and that's not just conjecture.
That's the issue, and it is what you attempted to answer.
Causation is much harder to tease out from the noise.
It was also one of the first to drop genuine user-sercing features like the old timeline (just all the posts of people you followed which you came there to see) which it replaced with the algorithmic feed which recommended stuff you never asked for or wanted.
Instagram did keep that feature though until 2 years and still has it although it's constantly switching it off.
I wonder how many people can give up effortless doomscrolling to see a limited length chronological feed made up of their friends' posts
Facebook came out and was a whole different thing. Facebook is a "database with a web (and later mobile app) frontend". It's all about data mining. Always has, always will be.
For "seeing what old friends are up to", that's entirely shifted to IG. (Yes, pedants, I know that this is an FB product.)
The only time I ever open FB nowadays is for the marketplace, and when I do, all I see in the feed is garbage brainrot from big slop accounts.
Sure, younger people use other apps / platforms, but society as a whole here is way, way too invested in FB.
> Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
> Zuck: Just ask.
> Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
> [Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
> Zuck: People just submitted it.
> Zuck: I don't know why.
> Zuck: They "trust me"
> Zuck: Dumb fucks
However, I wish they’d grow a pair and just outright block the FB and other similar dependencies that make such stuff necessary.
When the giants fight, which one of them is an evil monopolist, and which is the defender of freedom?
(This is why I actually like the iPhone approach more than the macOS approach these days; thought I do miss the late 90s when I didn't need to care because nothing had any mechanism to spy on me anyway).
Maybe this will finally convince people to throw out their smartphones.
If you hire a large amount of photographers and assign each of them to capture photos with certain themes you will be far more efficient and get cleaner data. And you can get images from places where people do not use meta products.
"Meta tells The Verge that, for now, it’s not training on your unpublished photos with this new feature. “[The Verge’s headline] implies we are currently training our AI models with these photos, which we aren’t. This test doesn’t use people’s photos to improve or train our AI models,”
As someone who is familiar with the ML space, it seems unlikely that the addition of private photos will significantly improve models, as you have mentioned.
I saw this line in the article: "Meta tells The Verge that it’s not currently training its AI models on those photos, but it would not answer our questions about whether it might do so in future, or what rights it will hold over your camera roll images."
It would seem important to share this with people who may 'not read the article'
> On Friday, TechCrunch reported that Facebook users trying to post something on the Story feature have encountered pop-up messages asking if they’d like to opt into “cloud processing”, which would allow Facebook to “select media from your camera roll and upload it to our cloud on a regular basis”, to generate “ideas like collages, recaps, AI restyling or themes like birthdays or graduations.”
> By allowing this feature, the message continues, users are agreeing to Meta AI terms, which allows their AI to analyze “media and facial features” of those unpublished photos, as well as the date said photos were taken, and the presence of other people or objects in them. You further grant Meta the right to “retain and use” that personal information.
The straightforward explanation is this: they have a feature where it is helpful to group people together. For instance suggesting a photo of you and a friend to be posted on their birthday. In order to make this work, they need to perform facial recognition, so they ask for permission using their standard terms.
Can they train their AI with it? Yes, you are giving them permission to do so. Does the information available tell us that is what they are doing? No, it does not. In fact, a Meta spokesperson said this:
> “These suggestions are opt-in only and only shown to you – unless you decide to share them – and can be turned off at any time,” she continued. “Camera roll media may be used to improve these suggestions, but are not used to improve AI models in this test.”
Could they be lying about this? Sure, I guess. But don’t publish an article saying that they are doing it, when you have no evidence to show that they are doing this and they say they aren’t doing this.
Might they do it in the future? Sure, I guess. But don’t publish an article saying that they are doing it, if the best you have is speculation about what they might do in the future.
Does it make sense for them to do this? Not really. They’ve already got plenty of training data. Will your private photos really move the needle for them? Almost certainly not. Will it be worth the PR fallout? Definitely not.
Should you grant them permission if you don’t want them to train on your private photos? No.
This could have been a decent article if they were clearer about what is fact and what is speculation. But they overreached and said that Facebook is doing something when that is not evident at all. That crosses the line into dishonesty for me.
The company that is destroying children's mental health with phone addiction is developing VR glasses.
I guess nobody cares
Some people do but other people don't elect them.
So, the other people don't care.
Idiocies like this are why AI should absolutely never (at least at any present level of technology) be an inescapable means of filtering how a human is responded to with any complaint. Truly, fuck the mentality of those who want to cram this tendency down the public's throat. Though it sadly won't happen thanks to sheer corporate growth inertia, companies that do push such things should be punished into oblivion by the market.
Before you start justified screams of horror, let me explain the simple honesty trick that ensured proper ethics, though I guess at cost of profit unacceptable to some corporations:
The model could only decide between auto approving a repayment, or refer the bill to existing human staff. The entire idea was that the obvious cases will be auto approved, and anything more complex would follow the existing practice.
The system will become evil even if it has humans in it because they have been given no power to resist the incentives
Were humans working on health insurance claims previously known for being warm and tend to err on the side of the patient?
There will always be people who "try to do their best" and actually read the case and decide accordingly. But you can drown them out with malleable people who come to understand if they deny 100 cases today then they're getting a cash bonus for alignment (with the other guy mashing deny 100 times).
Technology solves technological problems. It does not solve societal ones.
I am just saying that the perverse incentives already exist and that in this case AI-assisted evaluation (which defers to a human when uncertain) is not going to make it any better, but it is not going to make it any worse.
I totally agree that the injustices at play here are already long baked in and this is not the harbinger of doom, medical billing already sucks immense amounts of ass and this isn't changing it much? But it is changing it and worse, it's infusing the credibility of automation, even in a small way, into a system. "Our decisions are better because a computer made them" which doesn't deal at all with how we don't fully understand how these systems work or what their reasoning is for any particular claim.
Insofar as we must have profit-generating investment funds masquerading as healthcare providers, I don't think it's asking a ton that they be made to continue employing people to handle claims, and customer service for that matter. They're already some of the most profitable corporations on the planet, are costs really needing cutting here?
This is the root of the problem, and it is (relatively) easy to solve: make any decision taken by the computer directly attributed to the CEO. Let them have some Skin in The Game, it should be more than enough to align the risk and the rewards.
I know that in the continuously audited FEP space, human claims processors were at 95%+ accuracy (vs audited correct results).
Often with sub-2 min per claim processing times.
The irony is that GP's system is exactly how you would want this deployed into production. Fail safe, automate happy path, HITL on everything else.
With the net result that those people can spend longer looking at more difficult claims. (For the same cost)
It helps, as you can suspect from "union" comment, that it wasn't an american health care insurance company.
Maybe it’s time to adjust your internal “MBAs are evil” bias for something more dynamic.
Nadella said this yesterday at YC’s AI Startup School:
== “The real test of AI,” Nadella said, “is whether it can help solve everyday problems — like making healthcare, education, and paperwork faster and more efficient.”
“If you’re going to use energy, you better have social permission to use it,” he said. “We just can’t consume energy unless we are creating social and economic value.”==
This is all an aside from the original point, which was that I think it is unfair to pin the proliferation and promises made about AI on some cabal of MBAs somehow forcing it. The people building the tools are just as at fault, if not more.
But that was when I bought my domain and mail hosting service and few months later I had moved my email to my domain almost everywhere.
Years later Google also killed my primary Gmail (i.e what was primary email earlier) Google Play a/c (for lack of use; true I had never published an app) and didn't refund the $25 USD even though I had finished all the tasks needed to keep the a/c alive 3 days before deadline and I had also requested them to tell me "how to add the bank a/c" to get the refund (asked at least 5 times over a span of 40 days) - because they kept telling me "add the bank a/c for refund" and never telling me "how" or sharing an article or page that told me how. I could never find out how.
They kept the $25 - not even appeals were allowed/entertained. I got "final.. no further response" and that was it, literally no further response on it.
I stop to think sometimes why.. just why we gave these trillion dollar companies this much power - the likes of Apple, Google, AMZN, Meta, MSFT.. why?? Now we literally can't fight them - not legally, not with anything else. It seems we just can't.
It's the kind of thing I'd send to the small claims court out of spite.
What can I use to "poison" their training? I'll just send them privately to the friends that would consider that fun.
Now the definition may vary, but the camera roll is probably the list of images on your phone (which the app accesses when you pick an image to post), not a list of pictures you already posted privately...
(Or so I hope.)
This means deleting real-world social connections. Meta owns the interwoven communication hubs of many local communities.
Let me provide an example. My swim team coach uses WhatsApp for all communication, including frequent pool schedule changes. They have strongly resisted change, as it is too much work to get 50+ subscribers to move to an alternative platform. They are the only local choice; this team is where my friends swim. Sure, I could work tirelessly to convince everyone to switch. However, most of the members use WhatsApp for other communities (eg triathlon and open-water clubs). Introducing an alternative incrementally means each member has to manage N+1 apps, etc. Importantly, super nodes (coaches, multi-club parents) with the most connections offer the most resistance: things work for them, why should they change?
Never did a 180 so fast in my life.
I guess I simply won't communicate with anyone selling anything there, even if it's the best deal possible or not available anywhere else
Found great smaller shops already when looking for things that do care for my business
you know they still collect data about you and build a profile, right?
A company that's right up there with gambling and tobacco: designed to keep you hooked, no matter the cost.
I've never, ever seen an algorithm as evil and anti-social as the one Facebook's programmers created. At one point, it was showing my family and friends a comment my cousin had made about a politician, and they started getting into heated arguments with him. And this kept happening again and again. It honestly felt like the algorithm was trying to polarise entire families and friend groups, driving engagement by surfacing exactly the things people disagreed with or didn't want to hear. During the pandemic the algorithm drove everyone insane.
At one point, I compared Facebook to a virus. It hijacked conversations, infected relationships, misled people, and distorted their perceptions of others.
instagram is still bad now that they push more ads and content from people you don't follow onto you, but at least it's only things that are explicitly posted, and it's easier to maintain multiple profiles with different feeds
I find keeping an account open solely for desktop marketplace is a fine compromise
Now info you search for online about cars comes from forums that haven’t had a post in the last year, yet in 2009 someone asked a great question about part compatibility.
We need a pirate effort to exfiltrate this data back into the public domain.
No, even that is terrible compared to forums – it doesn't get indexed by search engines!
This is a larger cultural issue. The general population finally got used to being on the Internet, and the Internet adapted to serve its needs and modes of thinking - which are predominantly social. Objective reality, information and access to it is of secondary importance (if even that) - what matters is socializing with friends and having experiences.
Unlike Facebook and Twitter, WhatsApp and Discord are the true social media - they work much like real-life interactions. So to join a topical group, or even know it exists, you literally have to know the right people. Don't have friends who are into something? Don't have friends? Tough luck. It's high school again, but the Internet is owned by jocks now.
--
Edited to add:
The shift from e-mail and mailing lists to bulletin boards to link sites with threaded discussions (like HN, or Reddit), to Facebook and finally to Discord and WhatsApp, tells the story of objective reality and information becoming less important to the Internet as more people are on it.
To put it bluntly: the old tools forced the more social people to engage in exchange of actual information. Electronic mail, posts, comments were all forms promoting information hygiene. Even the shitposts were publications which could be referred back to in the future. It all felt like writing something, so people cared, even if only a little bit. Now, the new tools are catering to what the more social/extrovert population really wants: endless chit chat. Talking, talking, talking, talking. Everything ephemeral, access managed by interpersonal relations, navigating it requires engaging in the social games.
Objectivity? Verifiability? Accuracy? Truth? They don't matter much, because outside of crisis situations, they don't matter to most people. That the Internet was briefly oriented around information and knowledge, was a temporary aberration, mostly thanks to it being built by nerds for nerds. But now the whole of society is here, and the Internet finally became social.
I'm not sure what you mean by that in this context. Just like I have to be part of my local "nerdy" store to play MtG every Friday, I kinda have to be part of local MTB groups to know when they are riding. I could like you say, be a leader and organise my own rides I suppose? Is that what you mean? If so, then I'm sure you can see limitations to this approach.
Searching the forum archives is much worse with facebook, slack or discord than it ever was with even the jankiest phpbb forum or mailman list. Hell, before they grew it up, Yahoo! groups were better from that perspective. And a big part of what made forums for either tech or non-tech hobbies so nice was the ability to search and reference prior discussions.
I was actually hopeful that "login with facebook" and "login with discord" would bring those more search-friendly alternatives back a little bit, but so far I haven't seen it.
As a result it's far better than "omnisearch" options on social media that only sometimes surfaces what you were looking for.
A couple of times I've looked back at my messages and photos from the annual data downloads I did back then. I can't believe how angry I was, and that I would think it was O.K. to talk that way to perfect strangers.
Then I dig a little deeper, and see that the early messages were fine. I was a nice to strangers. But as my Facebook use continued, the tone and unpleasantness of the messages becomes palpable. It's like watching a malignant Facebook disease spreading in my own brain. Kind of horrifying now that I put it into words.
Glad I'm Facebook-free today, and enjoying life almost as much as someone in an Apple commercial.
- Coordinating with Gen Xers’s burning man camps. They are just stuck in their ways. Like they say, nobody can prevent you from becoming like your parents
- A couple times I want to use Facebook marketplace, a new profile looks like a scammer. Which is the platform’s problem
This is false; and considering the hundreds of thousands of companies that people encounter every day that do not operate with your singular mindset, I can only assume the comment was not made in good faith.
Facebook (and other Meta properties) has sadly become the only popular channel for many sorts of offline activities. The average local sports group, DIY group, parents group, outdoors group etc around me are all on Facebook. The average musician and local business is on Instagram. Not to mention the millions in Europe and Latin America who only use WhatsApp for online communication.
Which is to say for many people the choice is not between Facebook and no Facebook. Their choice is between Facebook and inability to participate in their communities. Yes this sucks, but this is the reality. You cannot ask individuals to make expensive individual decisions to solve a society-wide problem. Instead you should look for regulations, and start building reasonable alternative to facebook and make it palatable to the average person.
You mentioned tobacco and gambling and I think they are actually apt examples of why the change must happen at the society level. Tobacco usage plummeted after decades of anti-tobacco education, smoking bans, advertising bans etc. And we also don’t just ask people to stop smoking, we prescribe nicotine patches to make it easier to quit. Similar for gambling. We don’t just ask people to not gamble, we regulate the industry (or outright ban it) and even in places where gambling is legal and prevalent there are still regulations like making it possible to ban yourself from gambling if it is becoming a problem.
This inertia and naivete is harmful and dangerous to everyone involved. It's like if they met in a sketchy part of town or were using tools unsafely to the point where they could injure someone. Going along with that, and especially without saying anything, or trying to change the situation makes you complicit.
The anti regulation clause sneaked into the "Big Beautiful Bill" ($5 trillion new debt) facilitates consumer exploitation and has no impact at all on military applications.
If China dominates consumer exploitation, let them and shut off their Internet companies.
Strangely enough, why not invest $500 billion in a working fusion reactor if these people are so worried about U.S. dominance?
I'm so glad I didn't pass their (ridiculous, redundant) set of interviews.
Doesn't seem very unanimous to me.
(My comment makes less sense now. OP had originally said the replies were unanimously negative, but has since edited the comment to remove that.)
It's just a job. You will get fired if you question people above you.
I wish there was an alternative to Facebook and Instagram, even if it had no users. We, as users, can solve the "no users" problem for you. Facebook and Instagram became popular, contrary to popular belief, not because it had "critical mass" or some Hoffmanite bullshit like that, but because it had the technical community using them, and they brought their friends and family.
Someone just needs to build it.
As for Instagram, again, I was there. Had that been a platform primarily for a technical audience, it wouldn't have taken it off.
The one platform you can say this about is Twitter. That, undoubtedly, started off with a much more tech audience, and grew so popular due to API integrations.
As for someone just needing to build alternatives. There have been dozens upon dozens over the years. Where are they now?
Luckily the fediverse already seems to push away a lot of trolls, bigots and capitalists, but it's just a matter of time.
Edit: FWIW I come from a country where people considered themselves communists. Grandpa of my better half has a red star on their grave cross. IMHO ideologies are somewhat fucking people up.
But yes, there are a lot of self-described communists, socialists, anarchists and other leftist types there as well.
> There have been dozens upon dozens over the years
Such as? I think you'll find that all of them were created back when Facebook wasn't completely evil (and thus couldn't even get the backing of "technical" people), or they were created with some congenital flaw that made them completely unattractive to the average person. You have to have a Steve Jobs level of eye for detail with this stuff, and sadly most people cloning Twitter in a weekend are just doing it for fun.
At this point, is there really a lack of clarity? I think we all know Facebook is going to interpret any permission to look at anything, as full permission to do whatever the hell they want with it.
There are people who care about this, and people who don’t. Telling ourselves there’s confusion… I think is not going to produce an accurate model of reality.
I think these social media companies are evil. I just don’t see the point in deluding myself into thinking that they are outsmarting everybody. It is a difference of priorities, not smarts.
What stinks is the original concept: keeping up with disperate friends, its pretty awesome. I enjoy seeing my friends' kids grow up even though I don't really know them.
Oh, what's that, I can't actually initiate any conversations without giving that up? Well, that's just the free market, baby. Use something else if you don't like it.
You're telling me that all over the world WhatsApp is basically mandatory to communicate with most people and businesses? Well in this land of freedom, network effects cannot stand up to my Free Market Principles good sir!
Zuck should find a quiet part of the internet or the metaverse to curl up and fade away. The guy just doesn't have any redeeming qualities.
It's actually kind of fun seeking/using less-global alternatives, even if just for the different perspectives.
e.g. Bing maps is my favorite way to explore cities (yes, I know they're a MSFT product, their code/login doesn't permeate across my internets).
I first saught out Bing Maps because the aerial views can be set askew from cardinal directions, which allows you to (sometimes) discover objects beneath tree-cover (hidden in top-down views).
I've continued using Bing for digital explorations because the physical printouts have more contrast (i.e. are easier to read; however, alltrails has the best printouts).
Bing seems to list more businesses than other platforms, and presents the information with less clutter.
But ultimately, I use Bing because I can use it while still blocking all other tracking products of its parent company (which is very difficult to do with e.g. Google products — which I just ban entirely).
As an aside, there was a discussion a few days back where someone argued that being locked in to popular and abusive social/messaging platforms like these is an acceptable compromise, if it means retaining online contacts with everyone you know. Well, this is precisely the sort of apathy that gives these platforms the power to abuse their marketshare so blatantly. However, it doesn't affect only the people who choose to be irresponsible about privacy. It also drags the ignorant and the unwilling participants under the influence of these spyware.
You don't buy a bike and complain about the missing roof
Edit:// on my last Xiaomi I could remove anything with ADB, even definitely necessary apps, without root, do try it.
I should sit down and try something like postmarketOS or Mobian as a portable Linux machine is what I really want ...
For example, let's say that you avoid a certain abusive messaging platform. But what if your bank or some other essential institution insist on using it to provide their service? We can complain all they want. But they will probably just neglect you until you concede in despair.
To fight this, you need affordable and ethical alternatives for the device, platform and applications. You also would need either regulation or widespread public awareness. Honestly, the current situation is hopeless on that front.
Or you can buy Librem 5 with preinstalled Debian-like OS. Works for me.
If you buy a phone with this kind of business practice. It's still your own choice to do so. Many good brands let you remove any app.