The effect of deactivating Facebook and Instagram on users' emotional state

With ai, i hope the feed is more useful to me.

On Facebook, I started seeing a lot of tiktok-type content and apparently you can turn that off in the settings. It works pretty well.

Sounds like a great way to totally kill Facebook

How could you _possibly_ believe a company like meta would use a new technology to act in your interests rather than theirs?

The same way people think a politician would?

The politicians in my state do a fairly good job, so that is easy to believe.

it's obvious meritocracy in institutions is dead. people with half baked ideas float to the top for no reason now

You can hope, but certainly you don’t expect it?

Remember when the feed was just a reverse chronological list of stuff you told Facebook you wanted to see? That was the peak. Once they started engagement farming using recommendation algorithms the site lost all of its appeal.

I mean more inteligent recommendation.

The ML model exists to benefit Facebook, not you. It maximizes for your engagement with the platform, not your happiness or usefulness.

That's why i hope.

Yes. No expectation.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^ this right here ^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Then it is misplaced.

Append ?sk=h_chr at the end of its URL to get that. Can also be found by dumpster diving in the UI somewhere I'm sure. Be aware that they're very intent on redirecting you to the regular feed though.

Thanks for the genuinely useful tip. I didn’t know that was a thing, but I can’t test it since I deleted my account almost a decade ago. I’m tired of adversarially wrestling usefulness out of a trillion dollar company.

> I’m tired of adversarially wrestling usefulness out of a trillion dollar company.

Very well put.

I think the downfall was earlier then that. When businesses got on their. The first few times it was maybe clever, the Deli shop is my friend or what ever but I think that was the turning point for it's just friends connecting and the start of becoming ads and engagement.

> I’m tired of adversarially wrestling usefulness out of a trillion dollar company.

Hopefully people will learn to get tired of this sort of thing a LOT quicker, and this will be one good thing about out our new improved and now extremely shortened attention spans. Impatience could actually have an upside if it prevents decades of escalating arms racing with enshittification vs new-current-work-around. It’s like with stages of grief, right? Denial / bargaining. Whatever is broken in a trillion dollar corporation is broken on purpose, and it's getting worse, not better.. waiting around and hoping for improvement is a fools errand.

Up until now, boiling the frog/consumer slowly has been one tactic. Or corporations can leverage their size and simply make things so bad for so long that a new generation arrives on the scene and has no idea how bad the stuff on offer actually is. Enough completely ubiquitous impatience in consumers really does undermine both of those strategies.. if there's actually meaningful competition that's still left around to choose from

It is not _completely_ naive to believe that in order for a service like Facebook to continue being successful, they must do _something_ that makes their users want to use it.

And therefore, it is not completely illogical to think that Meta’s interests and users’ interests must align.

(Not my opinion, just responding to your question)

I assume you mean they do a good job of not acting in their own interests...? Let me know what state I should move to.

This also happens in corporate culture, because of nepotism and grift. It happens much faster after a corporation captures the government / institutions that would normally check it. I believe in meritocracy, but once you have institutional capture, meritocracy is just a con to convince smart people to work for a fraction of what they could earn on the type of unregulated market that allowed their overlords to become wildly rich. For example: I'm probably the best designer/coder of casino games ever to walk this planet. I can't make a living doing what I love and I'm great at, because it's either $150k a year from a shady company in Cyprus [edit: which is shit money from people I'd never work for], or it's wholesale illegal to do it on my own. Elon Musk never wrote a line of code, but a good chunk of his PayPal money came from facilitating gambling transactions, essentially illegal at the time and certainly more so now.

Merit will get you a 401(k) and a job where you have a nice coffee station and some bean bags to sit on, and a ping pong table. Lord knows, the ping pong table proves you've got merit. But does your boss really have more merit than you? It seems to me that the higher up the corporate ladder you go, the less actual merit people exhibit, and the less they notice it among their underlings (as opposed to loyalty or ass-kissing), but the more they claim to believe in it.

I'm not arguing against merit. I'm a capitalist. I'm just pointing out that the people who so often tout merit are the same people who get most of their tax credits from backroom deals with politicians, and don't seem to earn their keep by the sweat of their own brow. Merit would imply the ability to do both equally well.

Could it be possible to counter it with another ML model that browses your feed?

For example, scraping your feed and presenting to you only the content that corresponds to some pre-defined labels (with a tiny bit of randomness to spice things up).

Although how could the automatic labeling work for videos from the user-end? Hashtags would be the simplest indicators, however also easily misleading.

No!

“they must do _something_ that makes their users want to use it.”

Is fentanyl acting in the interests of its addicts?

> I assume you mean they do a good job of not acting in their own interests...?

They do a good jobs of working in the interest of their constituents. Whether that also includes self interest, I don’t know. They are politicians, their job is to work for their constituents, if we’ve managed to align their self interest with doing their jobs well, that seems fine.

> Let me know what state I should move to.

State and local governments seem to be rated fairly well, just go to one that matches your ideology.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/04/11/americans...

Pew reports on a negative trend, but states have a huge head start on the federal government.