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I signed up for Blue Sky, but it's more of an improved Twitter rather than an improved Facebook.

And I hate Twitter.

https://bsky.app/profile/kidkyoto.bsky.social

I am strongly considering ditching all Social Media except message board and my own personal blog.

The rest have gotten so useless and full of stuff I am not interested in seeing or reading.

Plus, I am no longer convinced they are useful for marketing and community building anymore.

I made my social media circle much smaller by making it strictly family and the very closest of friends. Even drastically reduced the amount of hobby pages I follow. Made it much more tolerable, though it feels like FB is on wobbly legs.

With that said, recently got verified on Twitter and that's been a blast. Mostly just to follow current events and on the ground reporting that's nowhere to be found on any major news website of either political leaning.

One FB pet peeve that I have is when a page changes its modus operandi. Like for example, when I joined FB, I had moved into a place with a pretty nice kitchen, so I wanted to cook a lot. Followed a bunch of recipe pages and so many of them go from showcasing great food to "self help", buzzfeed-esque reporting and "lifehack" articles.

 nels1031 wrote:
With that said, recently got verified on Twitter and that's been a blast. Mostly just to follow current events and on the ground reporting that's nowhere to be found on any major news website of either political leaning.

Even before Elon trashed the place, I can't imagine ever getting enough value out of Twitter to warrant paying for it...

One FB pet peeve that I have is when a page changes its modus operandi. Like for example, when I joined FB, I had moved into a place with a pretty nice kitchen, so I wanted to cook a lot. Followed a bunch of recipe pages and so many of them go from showcasing great food to "self help", buzzfeed-esque reporting and "lifehack" articles.

I suspect that's less 'changing their modus operandi' and more that their modus operandi is to pretend to be a cooking page showcasing recipes to trick people into following their clickbait lifestyle blog.

But yes, it's annoying, and one of the reasons I don't tend to follow lifestyle pages.



Also, having seen two different ads in the last two days for scammers pretending to be well-known Aussie game stores selling boardgames at 85% discounts, I am once again furious at Facebook's complete lack of vetting on their advertisers. The reporting process takes too long - one of the ads already had dozens of people sharing it around or claiming to have made a purchase when I saw it, and it typically takes up to a week for it to actually be reviewed. This should be caught before the ad even goes live... in this case, it's as simple as the link in the ad going to a completely different website to who they are claiming to be. Even if they lack the manpower to have an actual person checking and approving each ad, this feels like the sort of thing that a company with the resources of Meta should have no problem catching with modern technology.

Also happened with german store names, advertising black friday sales aimed at people not knowing the stores or non-native speakers not able to spot it is fake

And I guess meta doesn't care as long as someone paid it.

 insaniak wrote:
Even before Elon trashed the place, I can't imagine ever getting enough value out of Twitter to warrant paying for it...

I’d wager we’re on opposites sides of a [rightfully banned topic] spectrum, as I feel its greatly improved since Elon’s purchase. Its less the price of most streaming services and the concept of monetization is intriguing, though I think that ship has sailed for me.

I get value out of it because a lot of the topics that I enjoy are all within reach on that app, and if I can get ads out of the way, I’ll gladly pay that.

The fragmentation of social media is pretty disheartening, but thats the way the real world has been going for some time.

This is the closest I am to social media right now... too much nonsense.

 nels1031 wrote:

I’d wager we’re on opposites sides of a [rightfully banned topic] spectrum, as I feel its greatly improved since Elon’s purchase.

And while you may well be right about our personal politics, that's not the biggest problem with Twitter right now. Despite Elon's supposed efforts to remove all the bots, they're far worse now than they ever were before, and it's amplified by verified users being pushed to the top of the replies, because so many of the bots are verified, which is exactly what the revised verification process was supposed to prevent (and everyone said from the start wouldn't work)

The blatant sharing of misinformation while Elon censors anything he personally disagrees with is annoying, but ultimately less so than having any meaningful discussion just drowned under the weight of all that AI nonsense.

Social Media beyond Forums is mostly bots talking to other bots.

 Easy E wrote:
Social Media beyond Forums is mostly bots talking to other bots.

This is why we need more AdMech in our lives... down with A.I.

I've never had a Twitter/X account and I don't understand why anyone would.
Everything I've seen from that site has been trash. It doesn't matter what politics or opinions it might appeal to, it's all been trash to the point where I can't take people that interact with it seriously.

At least something like Facebook was remotely justifiable at one point because it about interacting with your friends. The second social media crossed the threshold from people you know (or people that know people you know) it went absolutely mad.

trexmeyer wrote:
I've never had a Twitter/X account and I don't understand why anyone would.
Everything I've seen from that site has been trash. It doesn't matter what politics or opinions it might appeal to, it's all been trash to the point where I can't take people that interact with it seriously.

At least something like Facebook was remotely justifiable at one point because it about interacting with your friends. The second social media crossed the threshold from people you know (or people that know people you know) it went absolutely mad.

You need to invite 30 more friends to reach the next level of Farmville.

I do have a Twiiter/X but I'm doing it wrong it seems. I follow people I like but it seems the way to do it is follow people you don't like and then hose them when they say the slightest thing you can rant at.

MarkNorfolk wrote:
I do have a Twiiter/X but I'm doing it wrong it seems. I follow people I like but it seems the way to do it is follow people you don't like and then hose them when they say the slightest thing you can rant at.

Or repost crap to Reddit for Karma.

Facebook and Instagram said they're adding AI accounts with AI generated photos and profiles, which is something that everyone has been asking for.

 Ahtman wrote:
Facebook and Instagram said they're adding AI accounts with AI generated photos and profiles, which is something that everyone has been asking for.

The people I know in real life who are enthusiastic users of AI writing and art are the people I would least want to follow on social media.

 Ahtman wrote:
Facebook and Instagram said they're adding AI accounts with AI generated photos and profiles, which is something that everyone has been asking for.

Reinforce your sense of loneliness, isolation and lack of meaningful human contact by chatting all day with one of the AI bots.

Which will either people down a line of madness and self reinforcement of bad habits or even more erode away their self confidence and self worth by driving home that the only people who talk to them are AI robots

Well, I think that might about the line for me.

I don’t like dealing with real, genuine, morons. I don’t want to deal with fictional morons.

Plus, the first post on my FB feed is increasingly an ad, for a service or news article I don’t care about.

I think my big question is, where are folks going next?

It looks like Bluesky is gaining traction.

I predict the FB AI will either turn out to be nothing at all or it will be pushed back on hard and they'll roll back on it.

In the end FB's strength is "everyone is there" and its very hard to emulate that

At least they will be flagged as AI?

Not a huge fan of AI in general. I don’t see how having bots included in social media spaces will add value. Make it seem less lonely? I get using them like a search engine, but you should need to go ask them directly. If I’m posting on my feed asking if anyone knows a good plumber, I don’t want a google hit. I want to know if people I know have an opinion or recommendation. If I’m posting on someone else’s threads, I’d like to know who’s real and who’s not.

That said, I keep my facebook pretty locked down. I only post visible to friends. And if you want to be on my friend’s list you need to meet 2 criteria: I must have shaken your hand, and would not mind if you showed up to one of my potluck cookouts. If AI bots start posting on my timeline and I can’t find the option to make them stop, then I’ll start to worry.

Great, first Robocalls, next Robochats?

All my joking and playing with the ChatGPT toy was fun, but I can't see anyone trying to have a conversation with it.

Unless you want your own personal pscyhofant to tell you how awesome you are. (I tried to feed it one of my storles I wrote, and all it did was tell me how great my writing was.

It was like asking my Mom for a critical response.)

I'm glad I avoid 99% of social media.

To be fair to the robots, they do have a place. From an end-user POV if I need to call a company and get some information, I’m OK with a chatbot hooked up to their database pulling the info for me, instead of waiting on hold for half an hour. Sometimes I still need to hold for a representative, but the bot can field the easy questions. At least one company I need to deal with has Hugo the chatbot doing the same thing via their webpage. Saves time, frees up the reps to answer questions that actually need help, etc. Chatbots making life legitimately better.

But I don’t need roBob, the AI friend, liking my posts and adding useless “looks good!” replies to my posts. I’ve got my extended family for that.

 Easy E wrote:
I think my big question is, where are folks going next?

It looks like Bluesky is gaining traction.

Me? Probably nowhere. I’ll keep messenger for family stuff, and for friends to contact me on.

Right now I think there is a lot of big tech companies in need to justify the Billions upon Billions spent on this Ai.

They also need more data, So getting people to freely act and interact with the Ai is a good way to get it.
There also is company looking to sell Dateing chat bots, that will chat with your matches to get you a date then pass it over to you.
Men do you need help! This is highly targeted at men, and this is going to backfire I feel.

I moved away from Facebook and Twitter for good reasons. Bluesky has been great, they trying hard to keep it not sucking. But you already need a blocklist or two just to handle bots.

I feel like there’s a tremendous disconnect between the customers and the tech people who keep adding AI (now enhanced with AI!) to products that don’t really benefit from AI. Just scrolling on forums with ads, AI has to be the most common buzzword, which I find baffling l.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
I feel like there’s a tremendous disconnect between the customers and the tech people who keep adding AI (now enhanced with AI!) to products that don’t really benefit from AI. Just scrolling on forums with ads, AI has to be the most common buzzword, which I find baffling l.

It's round 3 of the tech buzzword pump and dump, just with even more resources wasted.

First it was crypto and adding 'blockchain' to everything. Then it was NFTs and now it's AI.

Much like the slump in the movie business maybe these companies should just make things that people want.

 Nevelon wrote:
To be fair to the robots, they do have a place. From an end-user POV if I need to call a company and get some information, I’m OK with a chatbot hooked up to their database pulling the info for me, instead of waiting on hold for half an hour. Sometimes I still need to hold for a representative, but the bot can field the easy questions. At least one company I need to deal with has Hugo the chatbot doing the same thing via their webpage. Saves time, frees up the reps to answer questions that actually need help, etc. Chatbots making life legitimately better.

The one time I didn't just 'nope' off the page when confronted with a customer service chatbot to deal with a basic request, it wasted ten minutes of my time before telling me that I needed to call customer service the next day. Which pretty much reinforced my complete lack of interest in dealing with customer service chatbots.

 Easy E wrote:
I think my big question is, where are folks going next?

It looks like Bluesky is gaining traction.

Bluesky is by far the best alternative for twitter. There really isn't an alternative out there for Facebook. Which sucks, given that Facebook no longer functions and management seems determined to keep making it worse.

I work in Contact Centers for mega-corps (Boo hiss! Keep it down in back) and have gotten a pretty close look at a lot of what is called AI right now. Frankly it is not even ChatGPT level. It is the same old Natural Language Processing, text to script, and picking out keywords from a queue we have had for decades now, given a new marketing spin on the name.

The real play is that many of the providers are demanding that you provide your corporate data for their actual AI to learn from. At least, that is the rational. They really just want to data mine any Corporation that signs up with them. That is where the real money is. It isn't enough to data-mine individual users, there is bigger potential profit grabbing from these larger data-sets that Companies all ready have access to.

A lot of the big companies are wise to this and are pushing back or refusing to give access to their data, but not all. I mean, they want to gain the profits from data-mining their own customer base, why give it away to someone else?

Social media can have a purpose. It's a tool... though people do like trying to use a wrench to hammer in nails.

I'm on FB for the connections to friends with most of my action happening in DMs. The page has increasingly become a handful of friends posts or groups-that-I-follow posts then reams of adds and 'suggested'. I still connect with a lot of family through FB, and what's left of my DJ network.

I signed up to Twitter (now X) for gaming purposes but it has become so full of trash that I might visit once a month now.

I have an IG for sharing photos of minis, gaming stuff and I collect vintage menswear so there's a big community on IG to hook up with.

I am a late adopter, generally, only hoping onto a platform once I have determined that the time and energy it'll need will pay off in some form of benefit (and not just cat memes and happy brain chemicals).

The AI thing... Meta/IG will stuff with "AI Profiles" which can interact in order to increase interaction, make the place look busier and more populated. The old joke about "the internet will soon just be bots talking to bots..." is kind of leading in that direction.

I work middle management in the Customer Service/Call Center industry among medium and larger companies... and chat with a lot of others in the business.
We are watching the frantic "application of AI for ALL things!" as they try to turn it into a tool that will do absolutely everything so that we can cut actual agent numbers down to a tiny handful at best and remove middle management entirely. Lately I am mostly working with AI in a very obvious attempt to replace my self and wow, it takes a hammering to wedge it into any kind of useful shape. Like anything else AI is a tool... but everyone is looking for the golden eggs and making huge promises so they're trying to turn it into an everything-burger...
I predict it's gonna cost a lot of jobs before imploding horribly.