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Ma!

Zuck’s doin’ it again, Ma!

He’s showin’ me “recommended” and “you might be interested in” posts, instead of my friend’s posts, Ma!

It wouldn’t be so bad if what’s being suggested wasn’t a) stupid, b) offensive or c) offensively stupid.

For instance. Golf. I have no interest in golf. At all. I don’t watch it. I don’t play it. I couldn’t name more than three golfers. And all those “adult humour” cartoons which aren’t funny, adult or well drawn.

Just show me what my friends are up to, anus.

Three golfers? That's two more than I can name, not counting Happy Gilmore.

Oh I didn’t say modern golfers.

It’s basically Jack Nicklaus, Tiger Woods and Nick Faldo.

 insaniak wrote:
**snip** But the general idea of providing a hub to which you can just add the streaming services you want so that they're all in one place... that's a good idea.

I won't disagree with this sentiment. What I have beef with, is how various things are presented. As in my example. Sportsball team, on instagram, facebook, twitter, truth, what-the-feth-ever they post to will say "catch your team playing tonight at 6:30 on Prime"

To me, saying "on Prime" means that, because I have a prime membership base, for the shipping (of course, why else would one get prime?), if you're advertising a thing as being "on Prime" it should be available. Flat out, end of discussion, I login and it's there. Not, "well, its on Prime, but only if you have this additional subscription". IMO it's worse for the baseball thing because, to my knowledge, if I subscribe to MLB.tv through prime, I only have roughly half the functionality of a direct sub, in that I don't think you can access the radio broadcasts via your prime membership (I haven't really looked into it, so please, if anyone happens to know one way or the other, please feel free to confirm or correct me). It would be far more accurate if the sports team said "catch tonight's match at 6:30, exclusively broadcasting on Prime with Sportsball League subscription" as it does remove the ambiguity of how to watch the thing.

I buy the odd DVD still, but mostly I've just not made the transition to streaming with all my friends and I just don't watch anything any more except the odd hobby based youtube video. Whatever limited free time I get goes pretty much entirely toward wargames, rpgs and brewing these days.

I did buy the odd three month sub to netflix, Disney plus or Primebut in the end I got the feeling I'd seen everything I wanted to and anything else was just looking for things to watch to justify the price. Stranger Things was worth the watch, but the quality dropped off and by season 3 I was pretty much done with the show, haven't watched season 4 and don't really intend to.
Bounced off the Mandalorian despite everyone raving about it, didn't see much else on Disney Plus to interest me after my wife and I watched Wandavision (which was good, but crapped itself in the last act). Gave Prime a go just to watch Rings of Power, which I loathed more than I've loathed nearly any piece of media I watched all the way through. Not because of diverse actors or because of Galadriel (though I didn't love the characterisation) but just because the script was ass.

But by now if I wanted to watch everything my friends are watching and take part in conversations about media, I'd have to have Netflix, Disney Plus, Prime and probably HBO Max and Paramount Plus as well. At that point you're spending a pretty significant sum on all these platforms. Bah, humbug.

I've got a kid now and I'm planning on buying her some Sesame Street DVDs and maybe some Fraggle Rock and other Jim Henson stuff to watch. I don't want her on kids youtube or anything that "feeds" her "content" like slop into a pig trough.

So lately I get constant warnings on FB that I'm scrolling too fast and this feature is being disabled.

Scrolling.

Too fast.

@#$% them.

You need to let the AI spam ads soak in.

I can’t stand AI. Not only is it the death of creativity, but we’re starting to see folks using it at work.

How am I meant to properly consider your complaint when you don’t actually know what you told me, because you let AI write for you.

“Look at it, the peak of your civilisation. Until we started doing the thinking for you, and then it became OUR civilisation, which is what this is all about.” Agent Smith

Indeed.

Plus, I far from trust the people behind its creation.

Not in a conspiracy, tin foil hat, way. I’m not saying they’re out to get us. But we’ve seen social media used and abused to push false political information and narratives. And in the run up to the UK General Election, we’re again seeing very limited efforts made by the platforms to deal with false and malicious information.

What happens when someone starts using automated video fakes to create similar, deliberately misleading nonsense? When you create and profit from something so potentially dangerous, there’s a social and moral, if not legal, obligation to ensure your creation is used responsible.

Yep, but under capitalism, companies and corporations aren't moral entities and not responsible or even actors in the game because supp...

Which is clearly false. But that's the lie we've been sold.

What type of capitalism, that is a useless blanket statement.

Also any other alternative so far has been if tried collapsed in on itself whilest oldschool coporatism can't really support a modern state of affairs either. The less said about the hammer and sickle and adjacent moronicism the better.


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 Kid_Kyoto wrote:
So lately I get constant warnings on FB that I'm scrolling too fast and this feature is being disabled.

Scrolling.

Too fast.

@#$% them.

Lol that is asinine.
just get off facebook. The implementation of algorithmic social media was already a massive feth off mistake in regards to society, personally i think with LLM AI bots probably the vast majority of anyhting online will get fethed anyways. Including multiplayer games.

Not Online!!! wrote:
Lol that is asinine.
just get off facebook. The implementation of algorithmic social media was already a massive feth off mistake in regards to society, personally i think with LLM AI bots probably the vast majority of anyhting online will get fethed anyways. Including multiplayer games.

Given the rampant cheating in online games and the resultant arms race between cheat makers and developers, we're already past that point, methinks.

Not Online!!! wrote:
The implementation of algorithmic social media was already a massive feth off mistake in regards to society, ...

Algorithmic social media isn't an issue in itself. As a concept, it was originally intended merely to help people see the things they were interested in and/or more likely to engage with, rather than just the things posted the most recently. And that improves the experience for those following large numbers of accounts and/or with limited time on social media.

The problems came from the focus shifting to making money for the platform rather than facilitating social interaction. Facebook now is a barely functional mess, where anything you actually want to see is buried under the masses of ads and 'recommended' content, but pre-advertising, it was a good platform.

 insaniak wrote:

The problems came from the focus shifting to making money for the platform rather than facilitating social interaction. Facebook now is a barely functional mess, where anything you actually want to see is buried under the masses of ads and 'recommended' content, but pre-advertising, it was a good platform.

Agreed, its the same as how MS changed how you save in MS Office programs now and they heavily default to saving in the cloud rather than local.

A lot of interfaces and automated systems went from doing what the user wanted to doing what the CEO and marketing division want.


Along side that the "average person" also wants software to do stuff for them; and the more they've allowed that hte more software has pushed that approach. The result is manual or more custom setups and options get left out; moved; hidden or made less functional. So when a more advanced user wants to do something even quite simple, if tis not what the software automatically does - pop - it won't do it.

This is another one of those "well humans do X a lot so we made the software only do X, promote X and tell people that X is what you do". Which is the other layer; we've readily gone from systems reading human behaviour to systems defining human behaviour. Search algorithms are very much like that, mostly because people only use the one on the site/google. So its insane market dominance with no competing option.

Hmmm, I wonder if we’re leading up to a collapse with AI, a bit like a market crash. If the algorithms are dictating people’s behaviour, rather than simply monitoring, but are also learning from the behaviour that they’re dictating, then you could get some nasty reinforcement loops that are actually diverging from “normal” human behaviour. Eventually you’ll hit a critical mass where people will just go “feth it” and abandon the system (which is kind of what we’re describing here with Facebook, it’s getting close to being useless for its intended purpose).

Effectively groupthink for computers. Interesting.

 insaniak wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:
The implementation of algorithmic social media was already a massive feth off mistake in regards to society, ...

Algorithmic social media isn't an issue in itself. As a concept, it was originally intended merely to help people see the things they were interested in and/or more likely to engage with, rather than just the things posted the most recently. And that improves the experience for those following large numbers of accounts and/or with limited time on social media.

The problems came from the focus shifting to making money for the platform rather than facilitating social interaction. Facebook now is a barely functional mess, where anything you actually want to see is buried under the masses of ads and 'recommended' content, but pre-advertising, it was a good platform.

Maybe it's just my rose-tinted glasses, but I seem to recall a point in time - maybe 10 years ago? - when various online platforms actually seemed useful and designed to help the individual rather than the platform owners. Youtube and FB algorithms seemed to work well and show new, relevant content alongside adverts that were at least somewhat useful. Now the endgame seems to be making ads obnoxious enough to force people to pay for ad-free "premium" services.

Youtube still seems to be trying to provide relevant content suggestions and ads. It's not great at it, but it's infinitely better than FB. My FB feed has recently decided what I really want is a steady stream of 10-pin bowling and gardening content. No idea how it's decided that, but it's kind of hilarious watching it dig deeper and deeper into this self-made hole every day.

 insaniak wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:
The implementation of algorithmic social media was already a massive feth off mistake in regards to society, ...

Algorithmic social media isn't an issue in itself. As a concept, it was originally intended merely to help people see the things they were interested in and/or more likely to engage with, rather than just the things posted the most recently. And that improves the experience for those following large numbers of accounts and/or with limited time on social media.

The problems came from the focus shifting to making money for the platform rather than facilitating social interaction. Facebook now is a barely functional mess, where anything you actually want to see is buried under the masses of ads and 'recommended' content, but pre-advertising, it was a good platform.

That just isn't accurate, because soft guidance is still just soft manipulative guidance and is the core reason as to why we have echo chambers out the wazoo nowadays.

As for facebook, honestly never was on it . Don't like the lizard owner or anyone out of silicone valley, personally all of these companies including microsoft should've been long since split appart forcefully.



Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Manfred von Drakken wrote:


Given the rampant cheating in online games and the resultant arms race between cheat makers and developers, we're already past that point, methinks.

IF you have heard of the state of TF2 you know it's not an armsrace at all...

Slipspace wrote:

Spoiler:

 insaniak wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:
The implementation of algorithmic social media was already a massive feth off mistake in regards to society, ...

Algorithmic social media isn't an issue in itself. As a concept, it was originally intended merely to help people see the things they were interested in and/or more likely to engage with, rather than just the things posted the most recently. And that improves the experience for those following large numbers of accounts and/or with limited time on social media.

The problems came from the focus shifting to making money for the platform rather than facilitating social interaction. Facebook now is a barely functional mess, where anything you actually want to see is buried under the masses of ads and 'recommended' content, but pre-advertising, it was a good platform.

Maybe it's just my rose-tinted glasses, but I seem to recall a point in time - maybe 10 years ago? - when various online platforms actually seemed useful and designed to help the individual rather than the platform owners. Youtube and FB algorithms seemed to work well and show new, relevant content alongside adverts that were at least somewhat useful. Now the endgame seems to be making ads obnoxious enough to force people to pay for ad-free "premium" services.

Youtube still seems to be trying to provide relevant content suggestions and ads. It's not great at it, but it's infinitely better than FB. My FB feed has recently decided what I really want is a steady stream of 10-pin bowling and gardening content. No idea how it's decided that, but it's kind of hilarious watching it dig deeper and deeper into this self-made hole every day.

The process is known as engakkification (translated into Dakka-speak).

Essentially comes down to an issue of profit extraction. Once a market is saturated and the platform is no longer able to attract new users, it turns to new methods of value extraction to appease shareholders, because companies are expected to continue growing. Merely remaining profitable at the current size is not acceptable (especially to venture capitalists who funded a lot of the tech boom and want their return on investment). That is how you get even the obviously-profitable platforms like Patreon engakkifying to maintain growth and appease their shareholders.

There is not a lot of long-term thinking in any of this.

Agreed, its a lot of short term focus on greed, you can see the same in how Hasbro has been acting with Wizards and MTG; heck you can see it with the huge number of video game firms collapsing this last year as the Embracer groups huge move to sell itself for a huge profit failed and they are now falling apart to maintain itself.

There are a lot of people at the big end of business these days who are only concerned with return on investment in short timeframes and who have enough income that if the firms collapse they are financially totally fine.



Thing is FB, Google etc... are big and Musk is doing his level best to kill Twitter (X) and its still going. X is indeed showing how resilient such a system is even when the person at the very top is almost trying to kill it intentionally. These big platforms are like the banks of the internet - so much is plugged into them now that them failing isn't just them failing; its the house of cards built around them. Thus the house of cards will try to support them, intentionally or not.

At the same time banks HAVE fallen and the internet giants can fall. I could certainly see that if Googles results get more and more unreliable it could leave room in the market for others to take over and try to rise up as a new search engine.
A core issue is scale - the internet is vast and it takes a vast amount of resources to try and replace a major service provider. That means either having insanely deep pockets; or a very long steady game plan.

Or a truly revolutionary product / approach; Google destroyed some very, very big companies in the search engine market without stupendous resources or a slow build, but by “just” offering a vastly, vastly superior product.

Same with Facebook; there were various nascent social media networks (Friends Reunited, MySpace) at the time but they were either subscription based or built around niche communities. Facebook dropped in and could connect everyone you knew for free; that was a complete step change.

I await the chinese government platform that operates on a sensible basis and doesn't annoy users. People will flock to it and trade being spied on for no facebook hassles...

I use it now for the wargames club. And I am struggling to think what else.

Kids have a totally different relationship with the internet anyway. Facebook is a zombie platform because kids think it's for old people, and it generally is. Instagram is where the young people for Facebook are, toxic stew of harm that it is.

Whatever the kids move on to will be the next big thing. I'm not normally doom and gloomy about kids, but I have noticed the brainrot from short form content oversaturation impacting my students, and OECD shows a pretty dramatic plunge in attainment that starts around the widespread adoption of smartphones.

It gets steeper post pandemic but the decline was already there. I see this with my students, especially in maths, it's really shocking how badly standards have collapsed. The gap between the top and the bottom is enormous, and the middle is disappearing.

It doesn't help that the people in education I talk to are mostly in denial about all this - it's trendy to be a tech optimist in education and you'll get blasted as "conservative" if you disagree with that. Most of them take the free and open internet for granted, and think of something like Google as being a public utility. They believe kids can just research and construct their own knowledge now, so focus on factual content is irrelevant. Given how crap the Google search engine has become and how they've reduced user control over searches, I think this is a huge mistake. The kids think "research" is a synonym for "google". Huge focus on correctly citing sources in MLA format as well, which I think is missing the forest for the trees when it comes to school aged kids (and shows the way academic ideals backwash into education).

I hope it's just a blip and will reverse, but if I was a business owner and had seen what I'd seen I'd be instituting cognitive tests for my new hires rather than trusting the educational institutions to do anything about it.

I think it doesn't help that a lot of education has become insanely paper-heavy for teachers. The amount of prep-work for a single class is bonkers and then you've got to do dozens of them a week and mark schoolwork and, you know, actually try and teach.

It feels like they've gone for a paperwork heavy approach so that there's so much tracking and accountability and the result is teachers burned out. It doesn't help that syllabus teaching will also punish any student that does use the ease of the internet to research their chosen topic in more depth (if its not on the mark scheme in the exam - no points); or that some are going for multi-choice exams to speed up marking and the result is students who learn how to read and tick boxes instead of learning the actual information and subject.


Honestly I don't know if its the internet to blame in isolation here; I feel like the way we teach is in a strange spot. Where we recognise that there are a LOT of tools we can and should be using; that a good many "special needs" are simply a reflection of a scale of learning differences and that he more we've pushed into a single approach the more its created a false concept of normal learning

But at the same time a system that only allows for one method; that pushes hard for academic storing that is increasingly invalid in the workplace (something that really becomes apparent in how University degrees are almost considered mandatory just to get your application looked at and yet often have no practical skills outside of academia)


Reading dropping surprises me- cause the internet is all words; but then again if all you're doing is watching tiktoks on rotation over and over again yeah I can see how that would end up lowering reading if its all just video. Then again I also recall that everyone doomed about the TV when I was growing up; though in them days you couldn't take the TV with you on a walk.


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 Da Boss wrote:
. The kids think "research" is a synonym for "google".

Not just kids - adults think this too. Heck from being on forums where people ask basic questions "go google it" was often given by some snarky members. That was adults telling other adults to just use google for everything.

Yeah a good chunk of the kids get all their internet content through video, generally short form.

Teaching certainly has become a lot about paperwork and box ticking, and I think that's more to do with how modern workplaces are structured in terms of hierarchies than anything internet related. What the internet has definitely done is add a burden of endless online platforms onto teachers - I've got to use 5 different online platforms to enter data and curriculum stuff on, and all of them are designed by the lowest bidder, subject to baffling UI re-organisations, and obviously designed more for ease of use of my supervisor than myself or my students. We're constantly being sold the new platform that will solve all our problems and all of them are crap (though I hate Google, Google Classroom was probably the best of them, so of course we had to stop using that!).

And the other aspect is the creeping expectation that I'll be able to provide online lessons at the drop of the hat for students who are ill which has come along with us pivoting to online learning during the pandemic (in my school I did video lessons for every one of my classes and only missed some classes at the very start, other than that I worked my normal timetable just teaching through Zoom. And it was not a small amount of work to convert my curriculum into a format that was teachable through online learning, and students mostly did not pay attention at all and learned very little anyway.).

It's increasingly hard to hire teachers because of the various pressures making it an unpleasant job, but it doesn't have to be like that either.

But moreso on the topic of this thread, I do a survey every year with my 12 year old class to find out what social media they are on. And for the last few years absolutely 0 of them are on Facebook and laugh at the suggestion. So I doubt Facebook will be around for too much longer anyway. They're all on Tik Tok, Youtube, Roblox, and whatever the latest flash in the pan app is - it was B Real or something last year, some anonymous chat app the year before that, and the big name social media is generally considered uncool and for old people. They don't know what a forum is.

Even adults don't know what a forum is (though I've yet to see any website beat forums for what they offer and allow! Even Discord is basically slowly becoming a forum in structure)


The other thing with FB that might save is companies. A LOT of firms now use FB as hteir front-page for interaction and many times you get a reply faster and better than through email; with some not even using email.

I know for me I got more into using FB during the pandemic just because that's where all the businesses had an online active account on to communicate with to find out if they were open or anything.

Nothing intrinsically wrong with multiple choice, it just needs to be crafted well to be useful (like any question format). My university medical degree primarily used multiple choice for the written exams because it minimised marker bias compared to short and long answer questions. They'd entirely removed long answer questions from timed exams.


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Regarding impacts of tech on kids, I think the picture is very mixed and some aspects are presented in a misleading way.

Confounding is also an issue. For example, I think smartphones in and of themselves have not been shown to be harmful beyond some fairly correctable issues (like increasing development of short-sighted vision, something that also happens with increased book use to a lesser degree). But (IIRC) algorithmic social media has been shown to be harmful. So the problem isn't really smartphones, but what is being commonly accessed via those smartphones.

 Da Boss wrote:
But moreso on the topic of this thread, I do a survey every year with my 12 year old class to find out what social media they are on. And for the last few years absolutely 0 of them are on Facebook and laugh at the suggestion..

Are most social media sites 13+? I know most people (parents and kids) ignore that, but having 12 year old telling you that is worrying.
No wonder so many of them are disturbed by a young age, and teens and young adults have so many problems.
I still have a link to a gaming forum in my seg. Not that anyone's posted in there for a good couple of years.

Kids absolutely ignore the age restriction and the sites make no attempt to enforce it. Social media doesn't worry me as much as the deluge of extreme pornography. We have 11 year olds showing extreme and degrading videos to girls in their class and saying 'that's what you should do' and it is really widespread. Some kids parents are obviously super strict and they are very innocent, and then get picked on for it by others. It has made me in favour of ID being required to access pornography online tbh. The harms to children are very real.

11 year olds accessing hardcore pornography is child abuse, it is too early.

Social media definitely plays a part too- inappropriate ads linking to this stuff is getting more common.