alpha1beta
@alpha1beta@piefed.social
- Comment on Instagram boss says users will be ‘overwhelmed’ with brand content in algorithm-free world 1 week ago:
Are you missing a chromosome?
What do you actually think would happen here? That a friend would text me within, idk, 1 to 4 hours of his mom dying? I think he’s got bigger problems - calling a funeral home, or just dealing with the grief.
Was he supposed to text me before the body was cold?
Or was I supposed to text him, either hourly or before I say anything else, “Hey, if your mom dead yet?”.
I didn’t go to Instagram LOOKING for this information. But it was there. As this was when the algorithm was new, I had a decade of experience with IG to expect that if there was anything recent, a quick scroll would surface it, but I was also doing the same thing I’d do a couple times a day.
But IG manipulated my feed, ruined the experience and caused an awkward moment.
- Comment on Instagram boss says users will be ‘overwhelmed’ with brand content in algorithm-free world 1 week ago:
He had a few more urgent things to handle. I’m sure I would’ve gotten a call or text hours or a day or so later. But the algorithm decided that it didn’t want to show me sad news and would rather send me engagement bait.
- Comment on Instagram boss says users will be ‘overwhelmed’ with brand content in algorithm-free world 1 week ago:
That’s the dumbest possible response. And FYI this was right as they swapped out the original the chrono feed. I was vaguely aware it was happening, I don’t know if I knew it had rolled out to me yet. I had only had a sneaking suspicion he’d post it there. And as I mentioned, I knew she had days to maybe a week. It would’ve been one of the top posts in a chrono feed.
Meta, decided, for their own gain, to change how their app worked, with essentially no warning, no choice and no transparency - wasn’t like there was a big notification saying Your Feed Changed. The only thing different visually was the order of the timestamps.
For anyone else, I’ll leave another example: https://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2014/12/24/inadvertent-algorithmic-cruelty/
- Comment on Instagram boss says users will be ‘overwhelmed’ with brand content in algorithm-free world 1 week ago:
I’ll share a short story of how the algorithm sucks. A friend’s mom was dying of cancer. I knew it would be within a few days or week. He was texting me a lot - but in random bursts - trying to distract himself from the inevitable. I scrolled through IG, thought I saw it all, and having not heard from him in a while, I texted him something somewhat goofy.
He texted me back, “My mom just died”. I had no idea. Sure enough, scroll another 5 minutes and buried at the end of my feed is his post from less than 2 hours ago.
Instagram made me look like a dick because they’d rather show me 26 hour old content, than 2 hour content.
- Comment on Instagram boss says users will be ‘overwhelmed’ with brand content in algorithm-free world 1 week ago:
What he really means is you’ll see more native posts from brands, and not see as many ads, because they hide posts from brands to force them to pay to reach their own followers.
Everyone at Meta can fuck themselves to death
- Comment on Reddit CEO Steve Huffman says that while there are legit types of AI content on the platform, the company is considering Face ID and other passkey verification methods to ensure there's human behind 5 months ago:
That’s gotta be a large part of it. 5 years ago, most bots used true user-agents to identity themselves. Today, on my work sites, about 98% of bot traffic (traffic coming from data centers) use slightly out of date Chrome user-agents. So we just block all data centers.