4579
4580
4581

Oh they’re fine with censorship as long as it’s speech they don’t like. I have a feeling they’ll be just fine with right-wing hate speech.

4582

FB having a pretty rough after-hours following posting earnings.

4583

It’s almost like people don’t like an openly evil company that just throws ads at you constantly.

It’s always fun to hop onto Facebook ever so often and hit the feed to see 1 post from someone I’m friends with or follow for every 8 sponsored posts.

4584

Paging Microsoft! One social media company available for purchase, 20% off!

4585

Indeed. It was a frog-in-the-pot experiment except Facebook made the mistake of assuming we couldn’t leave the pot to sample the air temp.

On a similar note: I’m a Youtube Premium subscriber because I really watch a lot of Youtube and having it be ad-free makes it actually tolerable. Premium is not a service you can share with other people, so when my kids watch videos on it, they have to use my login, which means my viewing history got cluttered with approximately one million Minecraft Let’s Plays which would swamp my video recommends. Google provides no way to batch edit your viewing history or blacklist certain channels or whatever and trying to delete those one by one is very tedious, so I just turned off the viewing history. Up until this week my homepage would consist of a bunch of recommended videos based on channels I’m subscribed to, current news, recent Google searches, etc. Which was fine. But starting this week, it’s just been blank with a note indicating that I have to turn on search history to get recommends. And now I’ve discovered I can click the “Subscriptions” button on the left, which takes me to a page that displays the newest videos in all of my subscribed channels ordered by date, which is all I want anyway. So, thanks Google for forcing me to figure that out?

4586

I feel like this is my Twitter experience now. I mostly just use Twitter as a RSS feed for games and game developers I’m interested in, so I’m maybe following 10 accounts and never tweet myself. I don’t know if that’s part of the problem, but Twitter has decided to throw everything and the kitchen sink at me to liven up my timeline. I probably have hundreds of “not interested” topics flagged at this point, but it doesn’t stop them from trying. The algorithm is also convinced that I desperately want to know whenever Patton Oswalt farts, despite me never liking, retweeting, or even really reading any of his tweets.

And then of course, I get the paid ads too. I’ve basically stopped using it because they turned it into an unreadable mess for my particular use case.

4587

Yeah, I got a one user it throws at me constantly, they don’t even have a blue checkmark!

4588

Jeez, that’s bad. Are they even a real person without that blue checkmark?! :)

4589

All these companies really have to do is show us just the people we’re following, in reverse time order. If they need to have ads, just add them interstitially. The first social media company to do this will take all the market share. The experiment in targeted feeds has failed. It’s not what we want.

4590

But Twitter does still have the option to show you only the tweets of those you’ve followed, in time order. (Click on the stars-like icon and choose “Latest Tweets”.) That + an ad blocker makes the site worthwhile (well, “worthwhile”) to me.

Edit: there was a period of several months to a year when it would periodically auto-revert me to “Home” mode, but thankfully that seems to have ended.

4591

Or y’know, you could just log out and let them suffer the slings and ad units like the rest of us lowly hoi polloi.

4592

What a lovely and amazing day

4593

I love to see it but in a lot of these cases they’ve made up the lost ground within a month. There are going to be people just waiting for this to hit a support so they can jump in and buy up shares at a discount.

4594
4595

I’m hesitant to sign Facebook’s death warrant, but really of all the big tech companies, Facebook seems to be in the worst position. They don’t have any service or hosting offerings like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon do. They don’t make anything like Netflix, Apple, or Microsoft. Their biggest positive contribution to the tech world is probably React, which is free.

The Facebook brand is associated with boomers and fringe politics. No one trusts them. People use the platform because they feel trapped, not because they actually like it.

This whole Meta thing is bullshit. Roblox is a better metaverse than the concept videos Facebook showed, and it exists right now with like 100 million users that are mostly kids. What they say they’re going to build is insanely expensive, in hardware, energy, and developer time. And once they roll it out, if they ever do, if they stick with their hands off moderation approach it will just fill up with Nazis, Furries, and Nazi Furries.

I really want FB to die, but I expect it’s going to bounce back in a week because the market is completely irrational and based on nothing now.

4596

Try Tweak New Twitter on firefox to get rid of the ads. It works great.

I only follow 102 accounts on twitter, only one could be called a political account (barely at this point, and I followed her because I was her first supporter for her Congressional bid), and that’s the only blue checkmark I follow.

Most of mine are personal friends, one advocacy site for internet consumer rights, and vtuber friends.

Twitter is a lot better when half your posts come from bees, catgirls, and witches who love fighting games and raising war criminals in Fire Emblem. ^_^

I hope I didn’t scare anyone with that I haven’t scared already. ^_^

4597

I don’t know the situation with WhatsApp, but everywhere I’ve been outside the United States in the last few years, it’s been the ubiquitous messaging platform that everyone uses. And Instagram seems to be pretty popular among the young folks still. Seems like there’s some robustness there.

EDIT: Yeah, Wikipedia says apparently WhatsApp has been the world’s most popular messaging app since 2015, with over 2 billion users currently. I’m not exactly sure how Facebook/Meta monetizes WhatsApp though.

4598

Pretty much everyone here uses WhatsApp. But it’s free, and ad-free, so I really don’t know how they make any money either.