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rpigab · 2 days ago
One day, you won't be able to delete your social network account anymore. There will be a delete button, but the account will stay, and it will keep posting after you're gone, it won't care whether you are doing something else entirely or whether you're dead, the show will go on.

The shareholders will be content, because they see value in that. The users might not, but not many of them are actual humans, nowadays they're mostly AI, who has time to read and/or post on social media? Just ask your favorite AI what's the hottest trends on social networks, it should suffice to scratch the itch.

siliconpotato · 2 days ago
I made a tiktok account to write a comment on a video I hated. Now when i sign in again I am presented with lots of awful videos from the guy I dislike. I cannot delete my viewing history using the website, and following other accounts doesn't remove the obsession tiktok has with always showing me his videos as the default. I'm not installing the app, so the only way around this is to delete my account completely.
adzm · 2 days ago
> the only way around this is to delete my account completely

You can choose the option to tell TikTok you are 'not interested' in videos like these, or block the account entirely. There are legitimate criticisms about social media algorithms, but I don't understand why you jump to the conclusion that you have to delete your account.

rpigab · 2 days ago
Classic "any interaction is positive interaction". That's modern platforms to you.

Do not try LinkedIn. Not even once.

BobbyTables2 · 2 days ago
Facebook is spooky that way.

They track and log every reel viewed.

I suppose everyone does it but actually seeing it is another level of creepy.

deltoidmaximus · 2 days ago
I'm having trouble finding it now but I recall a mostly dead physics forum using LLMs to make new posts under the names of their once prolific users. So this has already happened at least on a small scale.

It seems nuts to me shareholders would be happy about a bunch of fake users, at least ones that don't have any money.

saalweachter · 2 days ago
So I worked on a comparison shopping website.

We crawled the Internet, identified stores, found item listings, extracted prices and product details, consolidated results for the same item together, and made the whole thing searchable.

And this was the pre-LLM days, so that was all a lot of work, and not "hey magic oracle, please use an amount of compute previously reserved for cancer research to find these fields in this HTML and put them in this JSON format".

We never really found a user base, and neither did most of our competitors (one or two of them lasted longer, but I'm not sure any survived to this day). Users basically always just went to Google or Amazon and searched there instead.

However, shortly after we ran out of money and laid off most of the company, one of our engineers mastered the basics of SEO, and we discovered that users would click through Google to our site to an item listing, then through to make a purchase at a merchant site, and we became profitable.

I suppose we were providing some value in the exchange, since the users were visiting our item listings which displayed the prices from all the various stores selling the item, and not just a naked redirect to Amazon or whatever, but we never turned any significant number of these click-throughs into actual users, and boy howdy was that demoralizing as the person working on the search functionality.

Our shareholders had mostly written us off by that point, since comparison shopping had proven itself to not be the explosive growth area they'd hoped it was when investing, but they did get their money back through a modest sale a few years later.

rssoconnor · 2 days ago
PhysicsForums and the Dead Internet Theory -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42816284
BobbyTables2 · 2 days ago
Remember Twitter a few years ago?

Users are $$$. Nobody wants to talk about which are human and which aren’t. It’s all a game of hot potato.

lazide · 20 hours ago
They don’t know (and don’t ask questions enough to know!) about the fake users - it’s no one look down.

As long as no one figures out it’s all fake, the line can keep going up and to the right and everyone is happy.

Anyone who starts asking hard questions may be up first on the chopping block.

Unless the line breaks, then bam. Everyone rushes to be the first for the door as the bubble pops.

gs17 · 19 hours ago
The future is Google People: https://qntm.org/perso
BloondAndDoom · 19 hours ago
This is wild, never even heard of it but kind of tracks
baubino · 2 days ago
Someone created a tiktok account using my email address. Tiktok won’t let me delete the account without first verifying it with my phone number. I refuse to give tiktok my phone number because I don’t want my phone tied to social media. I don’t have tiktok (or any other social media accounts) and don’t look at it. But I’m stuck getting several email notifications a day from them.

Not quite what you’re saying, but a couple of steps in that direction.

WorldMaker · 19 hours ago
It might not even be an actual account. Tiktok does the LinkedIn and Facebook "growth hack" thing of pushing users to let it slurp their entire address book on their phones. One of the reasons that it "requires" a phone number is to do address book graphing. Tiktok will send the emails it collects "Hey, your friend X is on Tiktok" to try to drive more accounts. All it takes is one friend/acquaintance to click yes on "Allow Access to Contacts" and your email address is considered fair to spam "on behalf of" your friends.

Social media was a mistake.

madaxe_again · 2 days ago
Someone signed up for a Walmart account with my email address. Once every few weeks they order either sex toys, Dolly Parton paraphernalia, or beef jerky in incredible quantities, or some combination of the above, and I get the email receipt.

I am never, ever requesting that they delete the account.

anonym29 · 2 days ago
Report the emails as spam, report the sender address to spamhaus. When enough people do this and tiktok's emails stop getting delivered, a one-click unsubscribe button in the email body that actually works will very quickly be born.
reaperducer · a day ago
But I’m stuck getting several email notifications a day from them.

I have a cellular hotspot with a phone number apparently recycled from someone who still has it tied to a fintech account (Venmo, or something similar). Every time this person makes a purchase, my hotspot screen lights up with an inbound text message notification.

This person makes dozens of purchases each day, but unlike my previous hotspots, this one does not have a web interface that allows me to log in and see the purchase confirmations. All I get to see is "Purchase made for $xx.xx at" on the tiny screen several dozen times a day.

bdangubic · 10 hours ago
I can cancel any account at anytime. If a delete button doesn’t work start posting the most vile pictures you can find and watch yourself get booted out in no time. the easiest thing will always and forever be to kill your social media account
bdangubic · 10 hours ago
even easier - say something bad against few countries you cannot ever say anything bad about, that will get you canceled in seconds.
washadjeffmad · 2 days ago
There's a short story with a similar plot from "Valuable Humans in Transit" by qntm.
Fwirt · 2 days ago
It’s still up on his website as well: https://qntm.org/perso
istillcantcode · 9 hours ago
How is this going to work with real id to get on the internet everywhere? Wouldn't that mess with the fake bot problem?
KurSix · 21 hours ago
At that point, deleting an account stops being an act of exit and starts looking like a philosophical disagreement the platform simply ignores
bko · 2 days ago
I don't know, I've heard for years that everything your write will be forever on the internet, but from my experience, it's the opposite. I tried looking into my old blogger, photobucket or AIM conversations and they're nowhere to be found.

Sure maybe they exist in some corporate servers when the companies were sold for scraps. And I suppose if I became famous and someone wanted to write an expose about my youthful debauchery, but for all practical purposes all this stuff has disappeared. Or maybe not. How much do we know about the digital presence of someone like the guy who shot Trump or Las Vegas shooter. Or maybe it's known but hidden? I'm impressed that Amazon has my very first order from over 10 years ago, but that's just not par for the course.

Why would AI steal my identity and post as me? I'm not that interesting.

My data is just not the valuable and I imagine that within the next 5-10 years AI will be trained almost entirely on synthetic data.

BobbyTables2 · 2 days ago
About 20 years ago, my name showed up on a handful of websites that I could find. Was related to school activities I participated in. Used to surprise me then.

Even my damn personal website was in the top 5 Google results for my name, despite no attempt at SEO and no popularity.

Today those sites are all gone and it’s as if I no longer exist according to Google .

Instead a new breed of idiots with my name have their life chronicled. I even get a lot of their email because they can’t spell their name properly. One of them even claimed that they owned my domain name in a 3-way email squabble.

I almost no longer exist and it’s kinda nice.

Only PeopleFinder and such show otherwise.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF · 12 hours ago
Information storage is the same as fertility.

"If you want to have a baby, you won't be able to conceive. If you want to stay childfree, the condom will break."

If you want to find old logs of your IRC and AIM buddies from 20 years ago, they're gone. If you say something stupid once, it's kept forever.

elvcastelo · 19 hours ago
The first paragraph sounds very much like the plot of Cam (2018).
thih9 · 2 days ago
Users will be content too, corporations will find a way to do that.

Via discounts, promo codes, gamification, whatever else they’re using today to get people to install their apps and sign over their privacy.

nuancebydefault · 13 hours ago
There seem to be quite some negative comments to this post.

Regardless of the title and the full story, I mostly feel empathy for the writer of the article.

Half a year ago a colleague of mine told me, in tears, that her spouse suddenly left her after living together for 7 years. I felt her pain and cried with her, i tried to comfort her with kind words. I had a nightmare that night. She's truly a very good person and I still feel very sad for her. She told me later that his personality suddenly seemed to have changed, he was not the man she used to know.

The bottom line of what I want to say: please have empathy with people going through a break of relationships, even if such things happen every day. Be thankful if you are in a good relationship.

EdwardDiego · 2 days ago
> I already felt immense pain and anger by the decision of my husband to suddenly end our marriage. And now I feel a double sense of violation that the men who design and maintain and profit from the internet have literally impersonated my voice behind the closed doors of hidden metadata to tell a more palatable version of the story they think will sell.

That's a bit dismissive of women, does she think that women aren't capable of designing and maintaining software too?

huhkerrf · 2 days ago
It's easier to swallow when you can blame a group of people for things that are bad. You can other them and not sit with the possibility that people who look like you (maybe even are you) can also do things that harm others. I couldn't do something bad, I'm not one of _them_.

You see this later as well when she slyly glides over women who do what her husband did. When her husband decided to end their marriage, it was representative of men. When women do it, it's their choice to make.

directevolve · 16 hours ago
That’s an understandable misreading of what she said. I appreciate that the rhetorical effect could feel like a sly way to slip in asymmetric gender standards about how to interpret divorce.

But I am a pedantic person who prefers to focus on the literal statements in text rather than the perceived underlying emotional current. So I’ll pedantically plod through what she actually said.

She’s dealing with two dimensions of divorce: who initiated it (husband, wife, or collaborative), and whether it was surprising or unsurprising.

That gives several possibilities, but she lists three. What unifies them is that they are all written from the perspective of the abstract woman undergoing the experience.

1. Woman initiated, surprise unspecified.

2. Collaborative, so assume unsurprising.

3. Man initiated, surprising (her situation).

She doesn’t claim this covers all possibilities. The point of that bit is just to emphasize that divorces are different, and to object to treating them as a genre for wellness AI slop.

Here is the original text containing that part so others can easily form their own opinion.

“I also object to the flattening of the contours of my particular divorce. There are really important distinctions between the experiences of women who initiate their own divorces versus women who come to a mutual agreement with their spouses to end the marriage versus women, like me, who are completely blindsided by their husbands’ decisions to suddenly end the marriage. All divorces do involve self-discovery and rebuilding your life, but the ways in which you begin down that path often involve dramatically different circumstances.”

HiPhish · 2 days ago
It makes perfect sense if you include the two sentence before your quote:

> We already know that in a patriarchal society, women’s pain is dismissed, belittled, and ignored. This kind of AI-generated language also depoliticizes patriarchal power dynamics.

Man does something bad, it's the fault of patriarchy. Woman do something bad, it's also men's fault because patriarchy made her do it. Either way you cannot win with a person like that. I think I understand why the husband wanted a divorce.

baubino · 2 days ago
I disagree with her argument as well but it’s a huge leap from that to “I understand why the husband wanted a divorce.” That’s a pretty shitty thing to say (especially given the trauma of the divorce she writes about) and has nothing at all to do with what she’s saying.
wtcactus · 21 hours ago
I can see why her husband divorced her. Best of luck to that guy from now on.
robocat · 16 hours ago
Marriage is surely the #1 patriarchy control scheme?

I feel terrible asking whether her accusation against Instagram is true... The comments below https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46354298 discuss how she might be mistaken. I can't read the link she referred to 404media but that appears to be about retitling headlines, and not about rewriting content.

If Meta were generating text, how would Meta avoid trouble with the Section 230 carveout?

A more cynical me would think they were just trying to juice links for their SEO.

I probably shouldn't be commenting on human slop - that doesn't help either.

pmarreck · 2 days ago
It's the bigotry of low expectations that the right often accuses the left of (arguably justifiably). Each side has their shibboleths and hypocrisies, and this is a very "left" one. Everything is the fault of the "other", in this case "all men", apparently.

As someone else said, the red flags of insufferability abound here, first and foremost with announcing something like this which is as personal and momentous as it is, on public social media.

iAMkenough · 12 hours ago
Meta owner: Man

X owner: Man

Soon-to-be TikTok US owner: Man

EdwardDiego · 27 minutes ago
People who work there - mixture of all genders. Which is worthy of celebration at least, that everyone has the equal opportunity to build the Torment Nexus.
christkv · 2 days ago
She sounds insufferable
rakoo · a day ago
The internet and the web were, and still are, made by and for white rich men. It's not about who can be a prick, everyone can. It's about what the ecosystem pushes towards, and it's not the safety and general good life of women, black people, handicapped people, etc...
jwr · 2 days ago
If we write content for closed platforms known to do terrible things, I guess we should not be surprised when said platforms do terrible things.

I keep trying to convince people not to use Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter/X, but I'm not getting anywhere.

Write your own content and post it on your own terms using services that you either own or that can't be overtaken by corporate greed (like Mastodon).

keiferski · 2 days ago
Individual actions like this will never do anything, because the average person is not going to spend hours upon hours investigating platforms. They just want an easy way to connect with their friends and family, follow artists, etc.

Which is why I think the only solution has to come at the governmental regulatory level. In “freedom” terms it could be framed as freedom from, as in freedom from exploitation, unlawful use of data, etc. but unfortunately freedom to seems to be the most corporate friendly interpretation of freedom.

ryandrake · 2 days ago
This is correct. Which is why "vote with your wallet" is also a flawed strategy. At the scale these companies are operating, individual action does not move the needle, and it is impossible to coordinate enough collective action to move the needle.

There is no feasible way for a normie like me to convince enough people to take any kind of action collectively that will be noticed by FAANG.

I think we like to pretend otherwise, like oh if enough people stop using Instagram, they will fail. This is only true in the most literal sense, because "enough" is an enormous number, totally unachievable by advocacy.

anonym29 · 2 days ago
>They just want an easy way to connect with their friends and family

You'd be surprised how many people in your life can be introduced to secure messaging apps like Signal (which is still centralized, so not perfect, but a big step in the right direction compared to Whatsapp, Facebook, etc) by YOU refusing to use any other communication apps, and helping them learn how to install and use Signal.

pmlnr · 2 days ago
So many thoughts on this...

The platforms and their convenience that one "only" has to write the post yet the internet needs so much metadata, so it tried to autogenerate it, instead of asking for it. People are put off by need to write a bloody subject for an email already, imagine if they were shown what's actually the "content" is.

About convincing: get the few that matters on deltachat, so they don't need anything new or extra - it's just email on steroids.

As for Mastodon: it's still someone else's system, there's nothing stopping them from adding AI metadata either on those nodes.

kuschku · 2 days ago
How is mastodon someone else's system? You can host your mastodon server just like you can host your email server or matrix server.

And other mastodon servers, just like other email servers, can of course still modify the data they receive how they'd like.

vachina · 2 days ago
Use them as the public toilet they are. Never put in any effort in anything you upload.
saubeidl · 2 days ago
Why deltachat, an app I've never heard of before instead of Signal, which is also open source and at least has a bit of traction?
KurSix · 21 hours ago
Owning your own site and using federated spaces like Mastodon is absolutely a healthier model, and I wish it were more viable for more people. But until discovery, reach, and social norms shift in a big way, a lot of folks are going to be stuck straddling both worlds
raincole · 2 days ago
Most people write to be read. Surely I can write on my own blog, but no one would read them (not that my social media is much more worth reading though.)

Plus, what about videos? How is a non-tech savvy creator going to host their content if it's best in video format?

chistev · 2 days ago
> I keep trying to convince people not to use Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter/X,

I'm with you, but WhatsApp is tough. How do you keep in touch?

the_other · 2 days ago
I left Insta the day FB bought it; closed my FB, twitter, and Google accounts a couple of years later; WA was the hardest to leave, I'll grant. Since I left, I've used: phone; email; Signal; Telegram; letters; post cards; meeting up in person; sms; Mastodon; tried a couple of crypto chats. There are so many options it's not worth worrying about.

In the cases of special interest groups (think school/club/street/building groups), I just miss out, or ask for updates when I meet people. I am a bit out of the loop sometimes. No-one's died as a result of my leaving. When someone did actually die that I needed to know about, I got a phone call.

Honestly... just leave. Just leave. It's not worth your time worrying about these kind of "what ifs".

darkwater · 2 days ago
The OP is also on Mastodon already, but social networks are ruled by their gravity well, unfortunately.

Deleted Comment

mnls · 2 days ago
It's unacceptable that Meta did something like this.

But this doesn’t change the fact that she shouldn’t share anything personal on social media. Consider social media the new "streets". A street with dim lights or an alley that you go at 3am and shout something or showing your images/videos to strangers there. This is exactly what you should keep in mind before you share anything personal on social media.

And either way, who wants to be an unpaid Meta employee that provides any kind of content for free?

tzs · 2 days ago
Even if you don't care much about your own privacy, sharing too much or too widely can lead to a loss of privacy for everyone.

Much of privacy law is based on a "reasonable" expectation of privacy. What counts as "reasonable" can change depending on what people in general believe it to be.

Here's an essay [1] by an appeals court judge from 2012 for some more on this.

[1] https://www.stanfordlawreview.org/online/privacy-paradox-the...

ChrisMarshallNY · 2 days ago
I'll lay odds that the Meta employee that made the decision to do this, has an HN account. I notice how quickly this story is descending through the pages. It's already off the front page.
gruez · 2 days ago
>I notice how quickly this story is descending through the pages. It's already off the front page.

HN doesn't even have a downvote button.

jmye · 2 days ago
Agree with both - it's a shitty thing for the company to do.

But I do not understand why someone who's so passionate about the issues raised in the post would do something as silly as post this on a Meta-owned property at all. The end result is blindingly obvious, and anyone who doesn't expect exactly this is living in a bizarre fantasy-world, where social media (and moreso Meta-owned social media) isn't inherently evil and run/maintained by evil people (and yes, I understand the irony).

everdrive · 2 days ago
I'm a little bit confused about what's going on here. Is this nothing more than an LLM-generated summary of her post? She shows the metadata but also shows it coming up in the post. I don't use any of these apps so I'm not really sure what a normal user would have seen. ie, would that text have been appended visibly to her post, making users think she wrote that, but also have been in tags which would have optimized for search engines?

Either way, I don't know what to tell people. Social media exists to take advantage of you. If you use it, your choices are "takes more advantage" vs. "takes less advantage," but that's as good as gets.

EgregiousCube · 2 days ago
It looks like it's a third-party UI, her Mastodon client, using the description metadata in a way that kind of makes it look like that metadata is part of the post.

Auto-generating said description tag in the first person is a bit of a weird product decision - probably a bad one that upsets users more than it's useful - but the presentation layer isn't owned by Meta here.

everdrive · 2 days ago
Thanks for the explanation, that makes a lot of sense. I'll bet that when it's not a sensitive topic, this totally goes unnoticed by a lot of users. Frustratingly, I would imagine that the response from most people would just be that the LLM summarizations / metadata tagging should be censored in "sensitive cases," but will otherwise be accepted by the user base.
geor9e · 2 days ago
Author posted to Instagram > Author shared the Instagram link on Mastodon > Mastodon mobile app unfurled the link into a preview > app concatenated mystery text from a hidden metadata field in the Instagram page > turns out Meta's LLM wrote first-person inspiration slop in the "I" voice for SEO > Author feels impersonated
bmacho · 19 hours ago
BTW HN also mangles with your submissions/posts in your name. They change the date, and the submission text, while keeping your name.

While I don't think it has a high risk of causing anyone any harm, I kinda hate it, like I DID NOT POST A SUBMISSION WITH THAT TITLE and I MADE THAT COMMENT AT A DIFFERENT TIME. I'd prefer if texts that are altered got a [last edited at [date] by moderator] stamp.

bmacho · 19 hours ago
I guess I feel safer when a program returns true data, and timestamp mangling and moderator mangled posts scare me.
m-hodges · 2 days ago
Can someone smarter than me explain if/how Section 230 is relevant to this type of content that the platforms are, in fact, authoring and publishing?