I haven't been happier online in the last 10 years than after I stopped checking social media. And in that miserable time it wasn't even a naked beg for training data like this.
But I really don't see why anyone would even use an open ai "social network" in the first place.
It does allow one thing for open ai. Other than training data which admittedly will probably be pretty low quality. It is a natural venue for ad sales.
Social media is a plague, including LinkedIn. Anything that lets you follow others and/or erodes your anonymity is just different degrees of cancer waiting to happen.
The best I ever enjoyed the internet was the sweet spot between dial up and DSL where I was gaming in text based/turn based games, talking on forums, and chatting using IRC.
Agreed. I wasn't particularly hooked, didn't use it very much already. As an architect, designer, and professor I had ig, and for the last five years basically only for work. But the feeling of freedom in its absence these past few months has been palpable.
Early fb reconnecting with people I hadn't seen since high school was okay. The blog / Google Reader era happening at the same time was the real golden age for me. And it's been all downhill since.
Agreed. This is where HN and reddit still smells a little bit like the good old times ;)
I use both, and even Reddit has issues. Likewise, HN is topically more like a single, insufficiently modded, subreddit. Still enjoyable, but easily brigades on certain topics. This is most readily seen for anything political.
Strongly agree. It's fascinating to me how faster broadband and selfie cameras led to more slop content.
Reducing the effort to produce content enabled a larger audience to contribute. This degrades average content.
The term "eternal september" dates back to the 90s, referring to the phenomenon where new undergraduates would arrive and suddenly have access to USENET to make bad posts.
We can think of fast internet and phones as like supercharging progress. Except, in this case, it just accelerated how quickly humans ruin it.
> I haven't been happier online in the last 10 years than after I stopped checking social media. And in that miserable time it wasn't even a naked beg for training data like this.
Meta/Twitter/etc. are drug dealers.
> But I really don't see why anyone would even use an open ai "social network" in the first place.
I really don't see why anyone would even use Heroin yet they do.
I bet we could draw several parallels.
“It feels good.”
“I can quit whenever I want.”
“I was on it the whole night instead of sleeping. I felt awful in the morning.”
“I can’t stop. All my friends are on it and I don’t want to be alone.”
Oh I get one thing - other than ads. So the idea of an LLM filter to algorithmically tailor your own consumption has some utility.
The logical application would be an existing social network -using- chat gpt to do this.
But all the existing ones have their own models, so if they can't plug in to an existing one like goooooogle did to yahoo in the olden days, they have to start their own.
That makes a certain amount of (backward) sense for them. I don't think it'll work. But there's some logic if you're looking from -their- worldview.
Isn't the selling point behind Blue sky is that you can customize your feed your way? I don't know the tech behind that but the feed is "open" isn't it? Can they plug into that?
The selling point of Bluesky is that you don't get bombarded with a mob of blue checks every time you post something political
Stepping away from social media can feel like getting your brain back
Social media is this generation's cigarettes. It feels good to use it for a bit, and there's an enormous amount of advertising for it and social pressure to use it, but it's extremely addictive and the long-term personal and public health consequences are absolutely crushing.
I hope one day we can strictly regulate social media & make pariahs of the people who built it, as we did with tobacco. Instead, we just did the equivalent of handing the entire federal government into Phillip Morris's control, so my hopes are not high.
We should start a campaign, and everybody who hates sm can use the campaign's logo as their profile photo. Maybe it will catch on.
Profile photo for what? Social media? Then you need to be there, which is self-defeating. If you leave your account dormant, no one will find it anyway but the owners of the platforms will still use you to count the number of users.
I mean 90% of users want to quit, but can't. I'm just proposing a way to fight back.
The more people change their profile photos into the campaign logo, the less attractive sm becomes. Maybe at some point even the very addicted users will quit.
> I mean 90% of users want to quit
90% is implausibly high. If that many people wanted to quit social media, social media would no longer exist.
> I'm just proposing a way to fight back.
I propose an alternative is to just quit yourself and get on with your life. As the people around you understand you are happy without social media, they too can become interested and quit. Social media only works while there are people on it. The fewer of us there are, the less interesting it is.
How many times have there been campaigns to delete social media accounts? They never last, and often even the organisers come back. I don’t see a reason why this time it would work.
All that said, far from me to discourage you. If you feel it’s a worthy goal, I encourage you to do it. I genuinely hope I’m wrong and that you’ll succeed where others have failed.
> 90% is implausibly high. If that many people wanted to quit social media, social media would no longer exist.
This is how addiction works. Most smokers want to quit, but can't, etc., etc. Cigarettes still exist.
LOL, you're on a social network right now. HN is one. Yeah, it's semi-anonymous, but there are many users with known names here.
HN skips many of the dark patterns that other social medias have:
- no infinite scroll (you have to click on "More") - no personal recommendation - no feedback loop between your upvotes and the feed - no messaging or following between users
HN looks a lot more like news groups from back in the days.
The comment threads are basically "infinite scroll". They're paginated once they hit 500 or something. Scanning a SM post takes 2 seconds, HN comments much longer.
Its not the pagination that matters, it is the lack of a feed that you can keep scrolling. The front page is paginated at 30.
Longer comments are a good thing.
But I can’t follow them. I don’t get notifications when they post new links or comments, I can’t send them specifically my links and comments. I have no groups or circles.
HN is more of a discussion forum and not for connecting with others.
Nobody is "connecting" on social media anymore, they are just liking and commenting on whatever random thing the algo throws at them.
You and I are the doing same thing, commenting on posts made by strangers.
Wrong, social network is centered around the concept of "you" and your "friends", where the content itself is not as important.
There is no concept of "friends" on a forum like HN, since people purely gather to discuss topics of interest here.
> Wrong, social network is centered around the concept of "you" and your "friends", where the content itself is not as important.
This post was brought to you by the year 2012.