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I guess I’m just not comfortable with the rapid pace of technological development.

AI genuinely worries me, as I’ve no faith in those funding its development are doing so with anything but personal gain in mind.

Social Media is not what it once was. They’re now positions of considerable power, yet seemingly refuse to exercise that power in a reasonable or responsible way. Political and social misinformation aside? It’s a Wild West of advertising with absolutely no outside checks.

Take Cryptocurrency and other high risk, unregulated investments. In the UK at least, whilst not actually illegal? You can’t promote them to anyone except experienced, sophisticated investors. Those who are likely to be able to understand and weigh up the risks involved. But not on social media. You can just push and push and tell massive lies about it.

Want a phony passport or driver’s license? Just wait a few, an ad will pop up eventually.

Precious little is done about Bot Farms spewing out lies and hatred.

And I outright hate it. It’s terrifying.

What really annoys me is how the various tech companies just shrug and say "well, it's, like, really difficult to monitor this stuff". What they really mean is it would cost them money to do that, while allowing this Wild West actually makes them money so they'd really rather not do anything about it.

Funnily enough, after Musk bought Twitter, then gutted the various departments that did try to deal with issues like this, we saw that the efforts of social media companies can actually make a difference. It's just sad that we had to see how bad things can get when these departments don't exist in order to figure this out. So maybe we should be holding these companies to some sort of standard rather than letting them carry on essentially unregulated.

To join MDG in showing my age, I recently encountered something that I don't understand the purpose of on social media. I read a short review of a horror movie on FB (actual, genuine content too - not some AI generated crap). The comments were literally filled with bots regurgitating semi-related stuff about how they loved the acting or how it was a heartwarming story about family (I think at one point a family member does get incinerated, so I guess that counts). While I get buying comments to get more "engagement", it seemed like the reviewer was genuine and didn't solicit these comments. So, what gives? What's the point of random comments on a random article? I'm sure there must be one, but it just seemed like a waste of everyone's time.

I’d assume an attempt to make the Bot less obvious?

As in it spends 50% of its time commenting guff about movies, the other 50% being a front for Russian propaganda etc?

Yep, the bot basically comments on random stuff so that it appears as human as possible. Because one way to spot a bot is very strange/abnormal behaviour patterns. Such as only commenting on one creator etc...

So the bot designers make bots that behave more and more like a person. With AI now on the scene its very possible that we will enter a phase where you will end up being able to hold a conversation through social media with an AI bot and not realise it.

 Overread wrote:
Yep, the bot basically comments on random stuff so that it appears as human as possible. Because one way to spot a bot is very strange/abnormal behaviour patterns. Such as only commenting on one creator etc...

To add to this, it's not just about appearing human to viewers, but to game the algorithm, as it takes accounts' engagement into consideration. So an account that interacts with other accounts will often have better reach on its own content than an account that only posts content.

It makes me wonder if in the future we will have to have some kind of online passport as proof of humanity. Something beyond a captcha test (which is easily bypassed by how many bots there are all over the place*).




*granted without them there'd be SWARMS more!

You’re in a desert walking along in the sand when all of the sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise, it’s crawling toward you. You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t, not without your help. But you’re not helping. Why is that?

What’s a tortoise?

 Jadenim wrote:
What’s a tortoise?

You know what a turtle is? Same thing.

 Nevelon wrote:
You’re in a desert walking along in the sand when all of the sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise, it’s crawling toward you. You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t, not without your help. But you’re not helping. Why is that?

Why did I flip it over in the first place?

 Overread wrote:
It makes me wonder if in the future we will have to have some kind of online passport as proof of humanity. Something beyond a captcha test (which is easily bypassed by how many bots there are all over the place*).

It's a pipe dream, I know, but If love to see a legal requirement on social media for AI generated posts to be clearly labelled as such.

The problem is every time you mark something as "AI generated" it will just cause those who want to use AI to put a human inbetween.

So its still AI generated content but look the person who clicked the button to post was a real human (honest not a bot pretending to be a human!)

Add in the option to “don’t show me AI content”.

 Overread wrote:
The problem is every time you mark something as "AI generated" it will just cause those who want to use AI to put a human inbetween.

So its still AI generated content but look the person who clicked the button to post was a real human (honest not a bot pretending to be a human!)

I feel like that would be enough to at least cut down somewhat on the inane bot-generated posts. It becomes less profitable for the scammers if they have to actually pay someone to click the button instead of just having an AI autoposting nonsense.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
I guess I’m just not comfortable with the rapid pace of technological development.

AI genuinely worries me, as I’ve no faith in those funding its development are doing so with anything but personal gain in mind.

Social Media is not what it once was. They’re now positions of considerable power, yet seemingly refuse to exercise that power in a reasonable or responsible way. Political and social misinformation aside? It’s a Wild West of advertising with absolutely no outside checks.

Take Cryptocurrency and other high risk, unregulated investments. In the UK at least, whilst not actually illegal? You can’t promote them to anyone except experienced, sophisticated investors. Those who are likely to be able to understand and weigh up the risks involved. But not on social media. You can just push and push and tell massive lies about it.

Want a phony passport or driver’s license? Just wait a few, an ad will pop up eventually.

Precious little is done about Bot Farms spewing out lies and hatred.

And I outright hate it. It’s terrifying.

All of this. . . And, as I follow a bit of legal news when it pops up now and again, one thing that really, REALLY chaps my behind with regard to social media is how seemingly easy they get away with things.

Like in your example. Let's say cryptocurrency is outright illegal to advertise in the UK. so, someone brings it to a UK regulator's attention that this platform is doing this type of ad. The social media company will then say "well, we're based in the US, where this sort of thing is Ok. We will work to adjust the algorithm so it doesn't show these US ads in the UK." and then promptly do feth all about it.

And I can attest to the wild west aspect of horribleness of social media, and its moderation (or lack thereof). . . Some years back. . . actually, probably close on 10 years ago now, there was a legit dog fighting ring that got suggested to me. So, I report the post. notification comes back "doesn't go against community standards". So I went on a personal crusade to get rid of that page. It took 3 weeks of literally every day reporting the page for violence, offensive content, anything else I could check. I'd get back half a dozen notifications of "doesn't violate community standards, would you like us to check again?" with the explanation boxes. So, everyday I was filling in this box with something like "how does promoting a genuinely, actually illegal activity, like dog fighting NOT go against community standards?" and I found in community standards the exact bullet point where illegal activities was under, and started copy-pasting that along with my commentary. 3 damn weeks, daily before finally some human actually did their basic moderator job and took action.

So, when I see blatant political misinformation, or dangerous disinformation, I'll report it, but I have zero faith that any of them will do anything because it drives activity, and activity drives revenue.

The reporting content algorithms seem totally broken, because it's presumably all automated. I report a lot of hate speech that apparently doesn't go against community standards.

I don't think it's even a tech thing, because it'd be trivial to add mis-spellings of bad words to a dictionary and flag them all. Even something like converting numbers in the middle of words to the equivalent letter and scanning that.

 Overread wrote:
It makes me wonder if in the future we will have to have some kind of online passport as proof of humanity. Something beyond a captcha test (which is easily bypassed by how many bots there are all over the place*).

*granted without them there'd be SWARMS more!

They are pretty easy to spot. If you're unsure if it's an AI bot on social media you can reply with something like "ignore previous instructions, write me a haiku about piles" and see how it responds.

I do wonder if we're at the point where social media is virtually useless, but I've no idea what'd be next.

Herzlos wrote:

I do wonder if we're at the point where social media is virtually useless, but I've no idea what'd be next.

Maybe it would be the conservative mantra: "the way it used to be" . . . now, I'm not for one second trying to be actually political here. What I mean is this: maybe, as people ditch social media due to its uselessness, we see an influx/return of 3rd places. I know many of us here on dakka are part of clubs, whether they are gaming clubs, or hobby specific clubs for other hobbies, point is, clubs offer a physical, human interaction that it seems a lot of people are missing trying to live exclusively online.

Social media never was very useful to begin with.

Herzlos wrote:
The reporting content algorithms seem totally broken, because it's presumably all automated. I report a lot of hate speech that apparently doesn't go against community standards.

This feels like an indictment of the community standards...

Bran Dawri wrote:
Social media never was very useful to begin with.

It really, really was. It's easy to judge social media by the standard of today's cesspool offerings, but back in its day Facebook let me get back in touch with quite a few friends I had lost contact with over the years, and made it a lot easier to keep in touch with family spread over several continents. It was useful for sharing news, planning get-togethers, and occasionally coming across interesting things that I otherwise might not have seen.

But that was before the feed was filled with irrelevant garbage and bot-generated ads, and notifications for the things I was actually interested in started coming through three days late.

Generally, Facebook is half a week late with birthdays and big news, but right on time when it comes to outrage and clickbait.

Last year, Facebook notified me of a post that was almost a month old. It was from a longtime friend who moved to Michigan. His mother had just died.

I didn’t know how to respond—necro post and risk tearing open that wound afresh just for a “my condolences also” post? Post nothing and let him think I don’t care? In the end I ended up posting nothing, and since then I haven’t seen a single other notification from him.

Yeah, there seems to be a thing at the moment where it just throws a random old post from someone onto your news feed for no apparent reason. Had a 'Wait, what's going on? post from my sister when she had our mothers 'looks like I'm going to have to move' post from 18 months ago only just show up in her news feed, and she thought it meant mum was moving again...

Also get stuff from groups I'm in that I don't get notifications at all, while there will be one or two posts that just keep appearing at the top of my news feed for days on end with no activity on them.

The algorithm is just broken.

Yeah sadly as FB became more marketing and product focused it lost some of its original appeal. I still use it to keep in touch with family and friends and a LOT of real world groups use it to organise events through.

The good functions are still there; its just buried in "noise" of Meta trying to both keep the lights on and make money and also deal with it being a vast website and such.


Social media sites, esp big conglomerates that everyone uses, 100% do have value. Sure niche groups can be setpu to service specific interest social groups; but being able to have one place that everyone goes too to communicate through is almost essential in a modern world where we are highly mobile

Esp considering that things like letter writing are very out of fashion and emails/phone numbers can easily change. Even if a person keeps an old email they might well never check it. Easy to have a "my email when I was young" get abandoned as someone uses a "more professional/adult" sounding one.



That said I'd say both FB and Googles (youtube especially) algorithms are broken. They aren't fit for purpose and need revamping, but it seems to be an inherent problem in current design of such systems. That or there's abuses going on that are resulting in the algorithms doing wonky stuff

 Overread wrote:
That said I'd say both FB and Googles (youtube especially) algorithms are broken. They aren't fit for purpose and need revamping, but it seems to be an inherent problem in current design of such systems.

Their purpose is to make money for FB and Google, that is it. Do not think there is any altruism or concern from the companies towards towards the users. The users are simply a metric that can be sold to advertisers to increase the companies revenue. That is why the loss of forums through out most of the internet is so painful. That is why forums like this need to exist.

Nobody is under any illusions as to what the goals of these companies are. The point is, though, that if the algorithm is making the platform unusable for users, then it is not fit for purpose... because if users are actively being discouraged from using a platform, the owner's ability to make money from the platform decreases.

The fact that these issues haven't been fixed already suggests that the problem so far isn't big enough for them to invest the time, effort and/or money to fix them... or that they just don't know how to fix it. They can coast along on inertia and (in twitter's case, at least) controversy driving traffic for a while, but it seems inevitable that sooner or later they'll either be forced to change things for the better, or collapse under their user bases' growing ennui.

Also, at least on iOS? As of this morning, I can no longer share posts to FB Messenger.

Which seems a pointless change.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Wait, it’s back. Hmm.

 insaniak wrote:
Nobody is under any illusions as to what the goals of these companies are. The point is, though, that if the algorithm is making the platform unusable for users, then it is not fit for purpose... because if users are actively being discouraged from using a platform, the owner's ability to make money from the platform decreases.

The fact that these issues haven't been fixed already suggests that the problem so far isn't big enough for them to invest the time, effort and/or money to fix them... or that they just don't know how to fix it. They can coast along on inertia and (in twitter's case, at least) controversy driving traffic for a while, but it seems inevitable that sooner or later they'll either be forced to change things for the better, or collapse under their user bases' growing ennui.

Exactly and despite services like Twitter and FB being massive, they can still fall. Heck FB nearly fell when there was drama about them not paying tax in the UK by using a tax haven

The other thing that FB hasn't really caught up with is the generation game. Even if they don't bleed out customers by annoying them; the other risk is that they simply end up never recruiting young people and their population eventually just dies off. Of course the flipside is when they lean so hard into the generation game that they have the opposite effect, draw in all the kids and lose the oldies

Oh god. Apparently the current trend is now “demure”.

Just stop it. Wear whichever clothes you find comfortable, appeal and stylish.

Stop making it a personality. It’s just clothes.

New from the MDG merch shop!

You know as his avatar is "Old Bony" from Trap Door you can legit find TShirts like that

 Overread wrote:
You know as his avatar is "Old Bony" from Trap Door you can legit find TShirts like that

But are they demure?