whofearsthenight

Facebook's algo is a deliberate choice. If the only problem was with what the humans who use the service did, why doesn't reddit, tumblr, instagram, or previous to Elon, twitter have the same level of drivel constantly circulating their top posts? On other corner of the internet, trolls like Dan Bongino don't get any real traction because they don't hold any views that most people actually have. On FB, at least around the last time I cared about looking, 5-8 of the top 10 posters on FB would be extremely niche on any other social media sites, and should be even more niche on facebook since they represent an extremely tiny piece of the real world and facebook has a far larger sample size than just about any other company.

Also, re: messenger encryption and not looking back with hindsight, another messaging app also came out in 2011 with E2E - iMessage. WhatsApp added support for E2E in August of 2012. Why did it take facebook so long?

On Facebook's nefarious practices creating your social graph - I deleted my facebook account in like 2016. During the pandemic I, admiittedly, compromised my moral position on facebook and created an account to use marketplace. How, without me telling Facebook just about any real info, do you surmise they were able to suggest to me people I know IRL that I didn't even know when I had a facebook account previously, while also using mostly fake info (slightly changed name, I think the only thing I used was my phone number and even that had changed since I'd previously used FB.)

Re: photos and "just don't use facebook." There is not really a way in modern society to really do that. I upload nothing to FB, but it's already extremely difficult to not get people you know not to include you in pictures uploaded to social media, and tbh I don't try because it's just the default for most people these days, much less people you don't know or don't know well.

I don't think discussion of Meta as a company can really go too far without turning into ragebait, and deservedly so. They're basically the Ma Bell of the modern age, we just don't have regulators with the stones to do anything about it these days.

Facebook’s biggest problem has always been the people that use their products spreading hate and misinformation

Facebook's algo drives this. It's a choice that they've amplified this content.

The article you replied to (not behind a paywall for me for some reason?) talks about how they open sourced their LLM AI for research purposes.

Can't comment much on this one, so I won't.

WhatsApp is still fully end to end encrypted

still because wasn't it like that when they bought it?

they’re pushing the same on messenger now

Now, as in, they didn't design it that way to begin with because it wasn't the profitable thing to do. They have to compete with iMessage, and further, they gain just by being able to tell every cop shop "sorry can't do it bro."

Their targeted advertising has rightfully gotten a lot of scrutiny, but there’s a lot of misinformation behind it, like “Facebook is listening to my calls” and “Facebook is reading my message data”, which they’ve denied and there’s no actual evidence of. I have family with small businesses that wouldn’t have made it through the pandemic without their advertising platform.

Glad your family made it. Unfortunately, though, this is the masses not understanding how technology these days really works. They don't have to read your messages or listen to your calls because they're doing that all over the web and through their own users. The truth is more nefarious because for most people "listening to my calls" is scrutable, while adding tracking cookies across the web or computing social graphs based on your contact info being shared without your consent by a few of your friends, or doing some ML on every photo shared is not.

I don’t think that they have any place in the fediverse, honestly I’d be surprised if they wanted in on it anyways

Agreed.

If I were to guess this meeting was probably a job offer if anything lol.

Disagree. Fediverse and it's growth as it stands now is not good for Facebook, so they're trying to head it off at the pass. I'd be willing to bet this meeting was a feeler for them and I hope Eugen and others are smart enough of to say basically nothing, and they're continuing the grand tradition of embrace, extend, extinguish.

Is Meta evil? No. They're probably not a standard deviation away from any other org in terms of how many are "evil" but their incentives today all align to a worse outcome for humanity. It's kinda worse - it's a collection of incredibly smart people compartmentalized enough from the "evil" the org does. Actually, don't know that I would say "evil" so much as "sociopathic."

Meta should get no passes, and be met with absolute scrutiny related to the fediverse.

Although I'm generally a fairly hardcore superhero movie fan and see them all, i thought I was stuck in the superhero fatigue because very few things have really hit for me the last few years. But then you get Across the Spider-Verse and realize the problem isn't the genre, the problem is that most of the stuff has just not been very good lately. Passable, sure, but not good, and extremely rare lately to feel like I'm watching anything special.

Can't speak much for Elemental other than from the little bit of marketing I have seen it didn't feel like anything particularly new, just a skin on previous Pixar sorts of stories. I saw Flash this weekend because I'm a big fan, and overall it was about what I expected. I don't trust any hype around DC these days, so I figured I'd get a decent popcorn flick with some solid fan service for old-heads like myself that love Keaton's Batman. And that's pretty much what it was.

If you saw the trailer and have a few brain cells that knock into each other, you probably had the movie pegged going in. If you've already read or watched previous incarnations of Flashpoint, you pretty much know the story. The things that would be novel/interesting about this movie re: multiverse and using characters from other continuities and such feel entirely derivative coming in after No Way Home, Everything Everywhere All At Once (which is a superhero movie, fight me) and really, really suffers coming out a week after Across the Spider-Verse which has some similar story beats, but just does it waaaaayyyyyy better. I've already re-watched AtSV, and it is just jam-packed with what I can only describe as "good-taste." ItSV was groundbreaking for a lot of reasons, and to your point, it looks anything but bland. Even with that as the measure going in, I didn't expect AtSV to still be so visually it's own movie and still groundbreaking in it's own right.

When you add in the meta for this movie and knowing that it's unlikely to go anywhere relevant to the new DCEU or even casual fans just hearing about all of the Ezra bullshit (plus tbh I really, really don't think he's appealing as Barry or in general for this role) I think they were lucky to end up at 55mil. Really, the marketing team for this movie deserves a raise based on that alone as they managed to get most of the stink off of this and make it feel like an event movie.

This. I have been slowly building my smart home for the last 4-5 years, and I've yet to have a dead piece of equipment outside of a failed plug-in outlet. Since i do run everything through home assistant, there isn't really any worry on my end up about longer term support, and if something does break in 10 years then whatever, I got 10 years of automation and a fun hobby and I'll just replace it with the switches and shit that I took out to begin with. But because my house is now built around zigbee and home assistant, the only thing I actually have to worry about is HASS going away.

I mean, sure, I'll probably upgrade to other things over time anyway, but that is the nature of technology. I mean, I'm sure these articles have been written but this thread is the equivalent of "laptops - computers are already fine, isn't it just going to be a headache to carry one with you?" Ditto for modern mobile phones.

Chefs knife. It’s virtually the only knife I use outside of a bread knife.

I mean, he doesn't have to light the match, the bridge is already aflame. He's just pointing out he's not holding the match.

This is pretty much what I was going to say. I don't think that people understand quite how the pseudo libertarian tech bro mentality still permeates this space, and in particular with reddit. The site has always been this way, so if you've been around for a while, you've been around to this play out many times. Free speech is some absolutely inviolate principle that requires reddit to platform pedophiles (jailbait) and pics of dead kids, until it's not because it gets bad press and starts to affect financials and some overlord steps in, and then, just like in the real world, when my libertarian ideal starts to negatively impact me, it goes out the window. Repeat ad nauseum.

These people also tend to think that every bit of success they have is only because of them, even though in the case of reddit, most of the success that it's had has happened in spite of them. One of Reddit's defining aspects used to be ama's. Reddit fired the person responsible for making them great. Reddit completely missed mobile even more than Twitter did, and then when they finally got there they did it poorly and can still attribute most of the success to third party developers. Nothing really since the core product stabilized in like 2008 has been meaningful, it's been about the community the entire time.

I would still be willing to bet that spez and reddit think that their rugged individualist genius is the reason that reddit is as big when that's all largely happened in spite of them. None of them will admit the truth - they had a good basic idea at the right time, and they've succeeded since based on the backs of a bunch of people they'll never give credit to, and as soon as they stop listening to those people they fade from relevance. And even though they have plenty examples to look to (the juxtaposition of this compared to twitter is really something) they don't learn from it.

Could they have something to do with it? Yes, for sure. But the thing is that they didn't have to do any of this the way they did. They could have made an API plan that allowed third party apps to still exist/thrive, and also charge big companies that just want to use reddit to train LLM's. Change the pricing/terms based around this idea. They deliberately went after third party apps, and then double and tripled down on it in the face of massive backlash. If spez was competent, he would have been able to better pivot this conversation and make it about training LLM's for megacorps, but he didn't and even then it would have still been bullshit that is easily seen past.

I agree with this but I'll add in one more - it would have to come with spez resigning/being fired. Killing the apps was always the goal, and there is no way I would trust literally anything that is coming from reddit with him at the head. I don't think it's even a little hyperbolic to say flatly that he is a liar. Even if they reversed course 100%, I don't see how it fixes anything because I don't see how Christian or any of the other makers of those third party apps decide to continue working with this company.

And even then I don't think I'd trust reddit to do the right thing at all. Every change made to reddit basically since 2010 or later has either been bad, or their hands have been forced to do the obvious right thing by negative press. They've not proactively done basically anything positive for users in a decade, and this is more or less the story of what I'd call social media 1.0 (twitter, facebook, reddit, youtube, etc.) Especially with my experience moving from Twitter to Mastodon, I'm far more likely regardless of what reddit does to replace it with a federated option because the end goal of publicly traded social media companies just do not align with my values, and even more practically, do not align with an experience I want to have.