Social Media's Effects On Our Minds & Lives

"Zuckerberg has transitioned from alien to woman (I'm not here to judge)" 

award for most PC disinformation

He’s checking off every box on the douchebag questionnaire. 

  On 1/15/2025 at 12:11 AM, Rubin Farr said:

He’s checking off every box on the douchebag questionnaire. 

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  On 1/11/2025 at 2:20 PM, decibal cooper said:

Zuckerberg's Public Relations rebrand (where he dresses like a wigger, complete with his lil bitch boy thin gold necklace)

the hair is the funniest of all. I'm convinced he saw that chadified meme of himself and said "damn I should look like that", and just ended up with a lipstick-on-a-pig version of that.

Will social media as a phenomenon be killed by misinformation and Dead Internet bots? Or will the "new platform which gets weaponised/enshittified" repeat ad nauseam? Dear god I hope it's the former because I can't look my kid in the eyes without despairing for the future

Just now submitted my request to permanently delete my FB, after backing up all my photos I uploaded from the last 17 years. Good riddance.

Now get fucked Zuck, you orange salad tosser.

  On 1/15/2025 at 12:11 AM, Rubin Farr said:

He’s checking off every box on the douchebag questionnaire. 

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Will the AI also finally finish the Metaverse and make it into something someone wants to actually use? The layoffs cannot possibly be because Meta lost something like USD 50 billion in Metaverse development.. Can you imagine spending tens of billions on just R&D for a product that no one wants to use, even for free? It is fucking hilarious.

  On 1/20/2025 at 10:00 PM, zkom said:

Will the AI also finally finish the Metaverse and make it into something someone wants to actually use? The layoffs cannot possibly be because Meta lost something like USD 50 billion in Metaverse development.. Can you imagine spending tens of billions on just R&D for a product that no one wants to use, even for free? It is fucking hilarious.

in a real world he'd have gotten fired for that. 

edit:

apparently peoples facebook accounts are automatically following trump's new presidential facebook page. 

I just open up Facebook and our lovely friend Elon is covering the whole fed just doing the Nazi Salute 

I just going offline now for a while.. I feel it is sort of right time to do that. 

  On 1/21/2025 at 12:53 AM, ignatius said:

apparently peoples facebook accounts are automatically following trump's new presidential facebook page. 

someone on Mastodon mentioned this...it's likely that they were following an Official President of the United States page held by the gov, and it swapped over to being Trump's after the inauguration.

  On 1/21/2025 at 1:23 AM, auxien said:

someone on Mastodon mentioned this...it's likely that they were following an Official President of the United States page held by the gov, and it swapped over to being Trump's after the inauguration.

Completely logical captain. 

edit:

also, 

https://techissuestoday.com/meta-auto-follow-trump-vance-blocks-democrat-hashtags/

Meta under fire for making users automatically follow Trump & Vance on Facebook, blocks #Democrat & #DNC on Instagram

This week I walked away from Instagram.

Had quite a big following on my @intrusivesignals handle and it was quite good for spreading news about music releases or my radio show.  But ive seen more and more hatred / shitposts and division recently, and other genuine artists getting their accounts / content cancelled because they were trans or showed boobies in a very non-offensive way.

And the whole media-storm of Mr.Z sucking up with the other tech big-wigs was the final straw for me.  So that is that.  I am glad forums like this still exist and I shall probably be around a bit more because I plan to keep my blog more up to date and use that instead rather than wasting time doom scrolling and feeling bad about stuff.  Onwards!

  On 1/21/2025 at 1:00 AM, cern said:

I just open up Facebook and our lovely friend Elon is covering the whole fed just doing the Nazi Salute 

I just going offline now for a while.. I feel it is sort of right time to do that. 

Yep time to walk away.  Give it a few weeks/months off and see how you feel and if you miss it at all! 

  On 1/25/2025 at 2:10 PM, Soloman Tump said:

This week I walked away from Instagram.

Had quite a big following on my @intrusivesignals handle and it was quite good for spreading news about music releases or my radio show.  But ive seen more and more hatred / shitposts and division recently, and other genuine artists getting their accounts / content cancelled because they were trans or showed boobies in a very non-offensive way.

And the whole media-storm of Mr.Z sucking up with the other tech big-wigs was the final straw for me.  So that is that.  I am glad forums like this still exist and I shall probably be around a bit more because I plan to keep my blog more up to date and use that instead rather than wasting time doom scrolling and feeling bad about stuff.  Onwards!

 

Yep time to walk away.  Give it a few weeks/months off and see how you feel and if you miss it at all! 

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i quit FB at start of the pandemic. the only reason i was still there was to manage the page for the synth shop i worked at. so, once i wasn't working there i left and gave control to the dude who owned the shop. haven't missed it at all. i had my own feed narrowed down to 2 or 3 people's post. everything else was hidden. it was kinda hilarious.. but i was so glad to be done w/it. 

i still have an instagram account but logged out a week ago and haven't gone back except to make a post and pin it to my profile letting people know i won't be around so don't message me... i'll probably keep the account a while longer.. maybe until i make another album.. then i'll post about it there and log out again. maybe pixel fed or the blu sky photo app will be ready for business by then.. but maybe i'll just dump it entirely. i have around 1500 followers though so it'd be a bummer to dump that. 

  On 1/25/2025 at 6:20 PM, ignatius said:

i quit FB at start of the pandemic. the only reason i was still there was to manage the page for the synth shop i worked at. so, once i wasn't working there i left and gave control to the dude who owned the shop. haven't missed it at all. i had my own feed narrowed down to 2 or 3 people's post. everything else was hidden. it was kinda hilarious.. but i was so glad to be done w/it. 

i still have an instagram account but logged out a week ago and haven't gone back except to make a post and pin it to my profile letting people know i won't be around so don't message me... i'll probably keep the account a while longer.. maybe until i make another album.. then i'll post about it there and log out again. maybe pixel fed or the blu sky photo app will be ready for business by then.. but maybe i'll just dump it entirely. i have around 1500 followers though so it'd be a bummer to dump that. 

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I dropped FB a while back but stopped using IG over the pandemic. Neither appeals to me anymore, especially with fuckerberg cozying up to Adolph2.0.
I deactivated my FB but still need to delete it.
My IG is there but gone dark, my friend actually called me the other day to tell me that his wife freaked out when she saw that she somehow was following the “new president” and that she noticed I was somehow following him too. This just isn’t possible unless someone chose to follow him for me. I know there’s a theory that people who were following the POTUS photo account were then migrated after a name change but I never followed that account. It’s disgusting and sad that a president has to pull a U2 and intrude into people’s accounts to add followers to make himself look more popular. It’s also a little scary that this is happening.

  On 1/26/2025 at 5:39 PM, J3FF3R00 said:

I dropped FB a while back but stopped using IG over the pandemic. Neither appeals to me anymore, especially with fuckerberg cozying up to Adolph2.0.
I deactivated my FB but still need to delete it.
My IG is there but gone dark, my friend actually called me the other day to tell me that his wife freaked out when she saw that she somehow was following the “new president” and that she noticed I was somehow following him too. This just isn’t possible unless someone chose to follow him for me. I know there’s a theory that people who were following the POTUS photo account were then migrated after a name change but I never followed that account. It’s disgusting and sad that a president has to pull a U2 and intrude into people’s accounts to add followers to make himself look more popular. It’s also a little scary that this is happening.

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went to check IG to make sure i wasn't unknowingly following el presidente douchebag. all clear.. logged out.. gonna leave it dark a while.. but made it public so anyone who tries to follow me can see the post about not being around and where else to find me. seems a compromise until some day i fire it into the trash bin. 

  On 1/26/2025 at 6:58 PM, ignatius said:

went to check IG to make sure i wasn't unknowingly following el presidente douchebag. all clear.. logged out.. gonna leave it dark a while.. but made it public so anyone who tries to follow me can see the post about not being around and where else to find me. seems a compromise until some day i fire it into the trash bin. 

I actually logged in to unfollow (first action I’ve done in years) and went on a unfollowing rampage. Who did I find another follow of but… JD Vance. When I tried to unfollow him I received an error that I couldn’t proceed. Wtf??

Also, since I don’t have the app, I am logged in with safari. When I unfollow multiple accounts in the “following” list, the load speed seems to be throttled so that it starts out smooth, but the more accounts you unfollow, the slower the load speed gets, until it becomes so slow (each unfollow taking 30 seconds or more) that you get a black screen, even on 5G. 
My thought is that it is that the speed is throttled to force you to go to the timeline so that you’re forced to view sponsored content.  Evil fucks. 

it's been good to see Mastodon getting a little more interest and energy over the last week. i'm still not touching Bsky, but it's clear that a few more folks are spinning up their old accounts on Mastodon that they've not touched and new folks starting up accounts and interacting. a number have/are going towards Bsky it seems...i'm sure it's interesting at the moment but just keep in mind, in a year or two there'll be tons of spam, bots, trash, eventually ads, etc. i guarantee it's heading in the direction of Twitter. if there's an ad-free version of it longterm, it'll be a paywall aspect for that experience (not saying this isn't a valid model, just saying excessive size consolidated is going to need money, ads are the way to get money on the internet).

Mastodon/fediverse? no ads. ever.

very few huge weirdo celebs/'influencer' accts to eat up all the air in the space. lots of just normal humans doing normal human-in-2025 things. lots of artists and musicians and developers and crafters and folks who just enjoy that sort of stuff. it's fucking lovely once you get a good curated list that you're following...feels a bit like Tumblr in that sense....the feed/activity you see is largely designed by you and who/what you want to see. i guess maybe that's difficult for some people, idk...

no ads btw, did i mention that? first thing i puked a bit about logging back into IG last night...just ads ads ads ads ads.

i found out about a (small) earthquake near my house because of my Mastodon feed last weekend. the AE 2025 USA tour? saw that mentioned on Masto by sean himself before anywhere else. i'm starting to catch some news/breaking/etc. stuff but largely the new organizations aren't active there...lots of RSS feeds you can nab tho if that of interest to you. it's really a pretty impressive quantity of options. if you're at all curious i'd say start up an acct (on any server, really doesn't matter) and play around, you might b e surprised. hmu here or there if you've got questions.

there's a really good Pixelfed/photo-only Mastodon app for iOS called Impressia btw https://mastodon.social/@impressia just found it yesterday, it's smooth.

My problem is in Japan, so many stores use IG. So all the little craft beer pubs or breweries I like here use IG.

  On 1/26/2025 at 8:14 PM, auxien said:

a number have/are going towards Bsky it seems...i'm sure it's interesting at the moment but just keep in mind, in a year or two there'll be tons of spam, bots, trash, eventually ads, etc. i guarantee it's heading in the direction of Twitter.

In the last week, the number of absolute trash users coming into comments on the feed has multiplied exponentially. I would be surprised if it even lasts a year before it becomes as bad as twitter. People/govts/corps have figured out how to game social media, and they will continue to do so. i really hope mastodon remains...human.

  On 1/27/2025 at 9:51 AM, chenGOD said:

My problem is in Japan, so many stores use IG. So all the little craft beer pubs or breweries I like here use IG.

In the last week, the number of absolute trash users coming into comments on the feed has multiplied exponentially. I would be surprised if it even lasts a year before it becomes as bad as twitter. People/govts/corps have figured out how to game social media, and they will continue to do so. i really hope mastodon remains...human.

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I looked at bluesky and it's so obvious the cycle will repeat. social media in its current form is doomed by concept. the chatbots can already perform as normal users browsing the web and all that. I tried one myself yesterday. I could even make it register in this very forum and pose as a user if that's what I wanted. We will have to think about how to stop this to be happing on this very platform in the future.  I much prefer to have a chatbot that I control myself then ones that pose as real people trying to get what ever message they are promted to get across 

  On 1/27/2025 at 11:16 AM, o00o said:

I tried one myself yesterday.

Lol you paid to help them do research?

  Quote

We’re making CUA available through a research preview of Operator, an agent that can go to the web to perform tasks for you. Operator is available to Pro users in the U.S. at operator.chatgpt.com⁠(opens in a new window). This research preview is an opportunity to learn from our users and the broader ecosystem, refining and improving Operator iteratively.

So you're paying to help make the web a worse place, populated by bots or "Operators" that perform tasks online and in OSes just like humans do, who have learned, however little you contribute out of the hundreds of thousands of pro users, off your work. Why?

  On 1/27/2025 at 2:03 PM, chenGOD said:

Lol you paid to help them do research?

So you're paying to help make the web a worse place, populated by bots or "Operators" that perform tasks online and in OSes just like humans do, who have learned, however little you contribute out of the hundreds of thousands of pro users, off your work. Why?

I am just curious about technology and need the pro version of the chatbot for work. with the pro subscription comes option to try the operator bot as well. Its very slow and inefficient in its current form but could do things like post on this forum. I would never pay for the agent bot on its own. Its not worth it yet