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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • I’m glad i ran into this article, because it spells out something I’ve been suspecting for some time. Back in 2016 i got a sour taste from Facebook, mostly because it helped expose how shitty a disappointing amount of my acquaintances were.

    In addition to that though, i was finding less of my feed was posts from friends and were more from ‘Liked’ groups and suggested groups etc. I gradually found myself stopping there less and less and eventually stopped going at all. Years later, i finally decided to come back and see what I’ve been missing and it’s an absolute shitshow now.

    Just the other day i went on and started scrolling on my Facebook feed and after several pages, it occurred to me that i hadn’t seen a single post by any of the friends. I don’t have a lot of friends/family/acquaintances on there to begin with (~150 i think) so it wouldn’t surprise me if they aren’t sharing that much anyway. Still, I became determined to see how many posts i would have to scroll past before they inject one of my friends posts into the feed. It was the first time i reached the ‘end’ of my feed–I actually reached 250 posts (given my count was correct) when it told me i reached the end…and by that point i didn’t see a single post or anything pertaining to any of my friends in that session…just liked groups and suggested groups.

    So when i read this article, i perked up when I caught this particular part.

    "And then we went into this era where we added in creator content too, where now a very large percent of the content on Instagram and Facebook is not from your friends. It may not even be from people that you’re following directly. It could just be recommended content from creators that we can algorithmically determine is going to be interesting and engaging and valuable to you.”

    Unsurprisingly, Facebook is trying to do what every social media company is trying to do these days–create an endless feed of content… They’re just trying to make it “curated” by AI so that the user has to do little/nothing to find stuff that’s speaks directly to them, get hooked and begin endlessly scrolling (sounds like paradise, right?)…

    It gets worse though! Many of the groups i was suggested (and some I had chosen to follow) were simply posting AI-generated garbage. One thing i kept seeing is Art-focused groups misattributing works to famous artists. How many times I’ve seen a work supposedly by Monet and it was stupidly obvious that it wasn’t. The comments will be in the hundreds or even thousands, and 99% of them will be one-word praises like “beautiful” or “wow” or other useless stuff like that, and the 1% remaining are people appalled that their favorite artist is being mis-credited and that the group should know better being dedicated to that very artist.

    Don’t even get me started on the AI-artists suddenly becoming Facebook-famous like “Juan Brufal” who i strongly suspect isn’t even a person at all, but a company/schemer/who tf knows. Bonus points to that fucker for posting their works captioned with something to the effect of “Juan Brufal 1976” as though that’s when it was painted (surprise! it’s not a real painting)… After a bit of googling it turns out 1976 is when the AI “artist” was born. None of that is openly shared though, and the name/year format is the same as many others use when attributing other artists works, so it’s easy to convolute the meaning. Hardly anyone even send to care though, and the few that do are drowned out by the “beautiful” comments flooding every post. You can’t even avoid some of these fuckers because Juan Brufal et al are in all the popular art groups – and in many of the groups that the algorithm is going to recommend to me as well. Can’t avoid these assholes, so the play is not to go there anymore—which is all the easier knowing I’m not likely to see anything my friends are posting there in the first place. Maybe they’re already as tired of this shit as i am ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

    The bottom of the barrel is a distant memory at this point, Facebook is becoming shit on a primordial level lol


  • Billionaires own the way most people in the US (the world too) consume their news.

    Fox News has been the most-watched news station in the USA for 22 years, trailed distantly by MSNBC and CNN. I very much agree this is the main reason. They’ve been crafting narratives that speak directly to conservatives fears, and keep them in a constant state of panic/hate so that they will vote squarely against their own interests when they elect the guy Fox tells them will solve their problems.








  • Here’s my proposal:

    I’ve heard the claim numerous times that people leave a tremendous carbon footprint. Each person would be assigned a certain amount of “carbon credits” that their life is worth, and the value slowly declines as they get older. If they choose to, one can hop in the expiration bin and donate those remaining credits to a cause of their choice: they can give them to their children, family, or friends, donate them to a charity or research group, etc.

    I can just imagine the ads where companies try to compel you to take the early-expiration route while relinquishing your credits to them “for the greater good” or some other such nonsense

    Children mass-produced for the glorious stream of carbon credits it would award

    Microsoft, Amazon, Tesla et al provide “expiration tanks” in convenient places that send the credits directly to them after each “donation”

    Wtf i need to go back to sleep, lol

    Night night lemmy ✨



  • This song is fuckin hilarious! Reminds me to be thankful that in modern times we have more choices for our entertainment…fuckers like Jerry Lewis can’t fuck up my labor day bc I’ve got plenty of other options.

    That said, i can totally relate to this song from back when he could single-handedly fuck up your holiday