AFAIK, these companies are making record revenue.
From scams
I think this is what makes me the most angry.
My daughter wanted some toy, so I Google it, and go to one of the top results for it, thinking it’s a legitimate website. I go through the checkout process, but it’s weird and hanging. And then they text me some “verification code” I’m supposed to enter which is actually my CC code for my account. A total scam. I do some more searches and this is a common scam for this toy. So I cancel our credit card immediately.
But what pisses me off is that this totally fraudulent website was a top results from Google. They could have verified that shit! But instead they chose to serve me up to wolves.
They could have verified that shit!
There’s no “They”. There’s nobody home. Nobody’s looking at this shit, it’s all just algorithms and machine learning, there’s nobody customer-facing at Google who’s job it is to vet this crap. That scammy website passed some set of automated metrics Google uses to determine scamminess, so it’s off to the front page of search results it goes.
Just because Google doesn’t do it doesn’t mean they can’t. I don’t believe you that they couldn’t implement some automated means of vetting it; it’s just more profitable not to.
From what? Is my mom clicking on that many ads and buying their shit?
Spoiler: >!Yes she is.!<
Just because they buy ad space doesn’t mean those ads are effective.
My mom: I don’t want ad blocker I want to see what the ads are selling!
Also my mom: Malware ridden phone I have to clean every two months
She has a constant stream of useless, scammy shit from temu ripoffs being sent to her house constantly and I just had to get some AI face filter subscription she swears she didn’t sign up for off her bank account.
But she’ll constantly tell you how much she hates technology.
The cringe I crunge at “I want to see what the ads are selling” like that is some straight up boomer mindset, like nothing against your mom, but like it’s insane to me that there’s an entire cohort of people who kind of think this way. Like they always had so much money they needed ads to help them figure out how to spend it. Must have been cool
Nah, I agree entirely. I cringe very often when in her presence. She is the stereotypical oilfield money boomer.
Yep iv have read and thought for minimum 2 hours, probably way more, for a 50 euro mouse
Ive done the same for a keyboard,i know some of the flaws in the software used for the fucking remaping of keys, i could probably reflash the firmware with minimum additional research, for a keyboard i dont actualy have
And people are out there buying the crap on ads
Im simply haveing a hard time imagening what exactly they are thinking
Do we have the same parents?
Hello brother
Facebook shows an after every two posts in my feed.
Let’s get it to 85%
Status update: I am pooping
Is it out yet?
Nearly there!
It died when it went beyond dial up and ASCII. The vibe of BBS culture in the 1980s and early '90s was so much more social than the dogshit people do now.
No one gives a shit what I ate for lunch.
What about your shit after lunch?
You think I’m just gonna give that away for free?
deleted by creator
Yeah! You could even make like a business model out of… nevermind.
If you have a Dutch shelf toilet, it’s there in all splendor.
Do the Dutch sit facing the other way or something?
What do you mean? They sit the correct way, where they have a little shelf for their chocolate milk.
Its to allow inspection of faeces prior to flush, I believe. For health purposes.
I can examine my turds equally well in a regular toilet.
What if you didn’t have solid turds, generally?
Now that’s an odd design. Is there some reason they made it wrong?
Ah the famous lay and admire toilet.
Wait, have I been sitting on it the wrong way around?
Germans call them “Flachspüler” (flat washer). I appreciate that the falling dookie doesn’t splash water onto your ass. A fine feat of engineering and VERY off-topic. 🤣
Now we are talking, go on…
You have an @lemmy.world account We already know what you ate.
Beans.
deleted by creator
What did you eat for breakfast?
If I ate something new or interesting, my friends actually cared. Unfortunately Facebook decided no one wants to interact with the people they know and started pushing news posts down everyone’s throat. It’s not a social network if you actively work against me interacting with my social network.
You are so right - early social media was kind of magical. Your friends posted when they went to a cool new restaurant or did cook something awesome. I discovered so many new restaurants and food styles because of that. Your friends are all going to that new syrian restaurant near the lake and like it? Let’s try it ourselves! They are also your friends, so you can talk about that. They are posting pictures of some cool thing they cooked? You can ask for the receipe! You might even be invited for dinner the next time they are cooking that!
And then Facebook killed it. They started to hide the posts of your friends. They showed you some shit from some “page” or shoveled rage-baiting news in your face. They pushed Farmville everywhere. But that short little moment in time? That was awesome
Because no one fing cares about your hourly updates and you’re just advertising your insecurities.
Social media is 75% ads, 15% shared content (more ads), and 10% people you know creating actual posts. You’re a gluten for punishment if you hang out there.
“gluten for punishment”, thanks autocorrect for another genius coinage
Darn it! I’m not changing it. I shall live with my shame of not proof reading
looks with novautocrrect look of superiority
For some, gluten could indeed be punishment.
the article actually says the opposite - that it’s the random nature of pushing internet algorithm-chasing influencers that pushes people away instead of it being a way to keep in touch with people you know and love.
Yea, it was actually pretty great when there wasn’t an algorithm forcing-feeding us bullshit. It was just us and our friends keeping in touch with each other. It was a boon for many introverts.
Now though? Why post when we know the algorithm won’t show our posts to our friends unless they dig through mountains of grift, brain rot, and propaganda.
I stopped using sites like Facebook years ago when I noticed I was seeing posts from random meme pages I didn’t even follow that were days old yet I hadn’t seen any posts from my actual friends in days. So, went check their pages to see they had been posting daily and the algorithm just never showed them to me.
that’s the case for me and it seems like most of the people in my circle
yeah none of us care about the hourly updates. but our circle doesn’t do that, we generally would only share things other people actually want to see. but it’s been a long time since anyone did that. now the only sharing that happens is just Strava and in group chats
That’s how I felt when I tried bluesky. I missed the boat on Twitter and it’d already gone down the shitter so I never tried it. Figured bsky would be an opportunity to try the whole tweeting thing for myself.
And even still, it was just nothing but political bitching, navel gazing, and glorified (or actual) advertising. Like… what’s the point of it all? Deleted my account within the month.
Lemmy has its share of faults but at least people are willing to have actual discussions and conversations here. On bsky it felt like talking to a bot. People talking past each other instead of actually communicating.
Doesn’t it depend on who you follow? The only things I see on bsky are those I follow.
I don’t think I’ve every given a status update. Unless telling people I’m playing a game with that I gotta go piss is a status update.
So maintaining social media is like doing dailys in a bad mmo.
Social media has also done its hardest to try and push people away from using it. Between the culture being awful, and there being an increasing number of roadblocks to using it, that ironically ruins discoverability for anyone who might want to use social media.
For example, if you want to use Reddit, and see a link, there’s a lot of posts that you can’t see without having an account and logging in. That’s a big ask for something that you’re not even sure that you want to sign up for, which would only be worse since you couldn’t sidestep that using the old reddit interface.
Meanwhile, Twitter not only makes it so that you can’t see much of anything without being logged in, but they’re trying some new scheme where if you have an account, you need to download the app and give them your biometrics to confirm that you’re human before you can use your account.
If you’ve scarcely used either site, why would you start now? Everything wants you to jump through more and more hoops to verify that you’re actually a human, and if you don’t have an account, the content that you can see doesn’t seem to much of anything interesting. When not logged in, some subreddit and posts are completely inaccessible, and on Twitter, you can only see the tweet, but not the replies, or recent user posts.
Both of those were the main draws for each site. Why would any new user want to use them now? The only thing that they have is their reputation, and that will slowly go away with time.
Once upon a time, for example, Twitter was once the haven for beginner programmers, because they had a nice, free easy-to-use API that anyone could use to make bots and learn how to use APIs in general. Reddit was not far behind that. But that’s mostly gone now. Reddit no longer approves API keys for the most part, and is working to shut down the public APIs that it has left, and Twitter has locked theirs behind a paywall.
maybe we could help handing them nails to their coffin. Lets start demanding they add even more obnoxious things. Like for reddit, make even more posts no visible to those who are not logged in, have premium members be even more exclusive and away from the view. That should be a decent blow to any new people considering to join there since why would they want to do it if they cant even see what is there. And lets say they do it anyway and maybe even pay something, they will just get shit that isnt worth their money or they are kind of people that make it even worse place.
it could be sold to the crazier users as a way for them to be oh so exclusive and vip users so they would join in too. The executives would likely be extatic to see people demand same kind of shit they would want to put in anyway.
I dont know enough about facebook or shitter to have any ideas how to make them even worse, but for sure there is room there too.
Worse commercial social media becomes the better since it will push people away and eventually make it crumble.
Reddit is even worse on mobile. They’ve moved to putting up a banner that tells you to use the app. On iOS, it kills the scroll and swiping to go back doesn’t work. Go to the app? Fuck you, log in. Desktop mode is rough on mobile and they’re already talking about nuking old.reddit.com now.
Old reddit is the only way I interact with the site at all, and only for communities and stuff that for whatever reason haven’t moved on to greener pastures. Once old reddit’s gone I guess I’ll finally move that site into the graveyard.
It was a cool place while it lasted.
I came to Reddit right at the tail end of their do-gooder phase, and just got to watch it quickly collapse into a contest of who could make the same joke first, and then the pages and pages of attempts at one-upsmanship after that. You used to click on the comments to get more information, and as the years went by the lower that information sunk into a mud pit of poor puns.
No one ever answered why anyone ever started.
Basically blogging to your friends.
It was cool when it was all us chickens but now it’s like influencers telling your uncle you’re evil and stupid
It was a lot more fun before all of the advertising, really
No mention of centralised versus decentralised social media. The thing that makes the biggest difference. No ads. No algorithm. No lock in, swap networks keeping friends and followers. Tune your timeline to suit you. Calling everything social media is trash journalism when those issues are already solved. Clearly he has no clue about the topic.
What are the federated “replacements” available so far? Obviously Lemmy replaces Reddit, I think Mastodon is a Twitter replacement? Has anything tried to tackle the myspace/TB/LJ kinda thing?
And then you’ve got the “new old web” stuff like Neocities and CozyTalk I guess.
I don’t know what functionality those other ones have. People suggest Friendica.
I dropped off Twitter in 2020 and finally deleted instagram and Facebook by 2025.
I had friends on twitter and really enjoyed talking to people but after COVID hit there was something evil out of that site that hit me real bad and I started losing friends as I was concerned for loved ones health around me and everyone else wasn’t. So I left. There were other things I didn’t like on twitter but I figured it was just me. I guess it wasn’t. Instagram I never posted on but Facebook I was active until late 2020. Active arguments with people through 2020, trying to plead with friends and family to be cautious didn’t do much so I gave up talking and my Facebook on stayed active to talk to my father. Moved him to discord in 2025 and deleted Facebook then.
I’m sure looking back there were more platform specific things that I didn’t like but I know it’s only worse now. My best friend has stated multiple times that twitter doesn’t care about what’s posted anymore so you’ll see illegal videos of death all the time. Once you realize that social media (like that) breeds a kind of conflict with those around you, it’s much less fun.
These days I only have signal and this. Delete discord back in March lol
Discord was also grabbing your data. Matrix servers are supposed to be better.
Wasn’t there something about matrix being linked to Israel somehow?
It’s a protocol, so I suppose anyone can use it. I guess someone could maybe define a vulnerability stack and create a protocol around it to exploit later.
I also heard that at some point. I ended up moving a fan server to Stoat and it’s been okay but a lot of people didn’t wanna leave discord so it’s tough. It’s rough to even find populated chat servers to talk to anyone anymore either without having discord
They’re already trying to track everything I do. Why would I help them?
Because it’s stupid, you get nothing out of it and you lose time on top
I have 1200 “friends” on Facebook.
Less than a 10th of them “follow” me.
Therefore it is and was a literal waste of time to spend any time on their site.
On top of that if you open Facebook or Instagram, you won’t see a single one of your friend’s posts. You’ll see AI slop, random propaganda or “Influencera” and an ad every two posts.
You have to search for a friend if you want to find them.
Facts.
