Federico Viticci in his iPad Mini review where he talks about it being a ‘third place’:

I’ve been thinking about the idea of a third place lately as it relates to the tech products we use and the different roles they aim to serve… The iPad Mini is the ideal third place device for things I would rather not do on my iPhone or iPad Pro.

Having completely missed all the iPad Mini reviews, I saw one in-store at the weekend and remembered it existed.

I was a fan of the iPad Mini (6) when it was launched and used it for quite some time. However, once the novelty wore off, I quickly returned to using my Pro Max iPhone because it accomplished most of the tasks I used the iPad Mini for, eliminating the need for an additional device. If I could hazard a guess, I think that’s where the mini version falls for most people.

It gives you something bigger and lighter than a phone for media consumption, yet isn’t big enough to get bogged down in all the things you might expect a regular tablet to do for you. Stuck in a strange purgatory that is both useful and not quite useful enough at the same time. With the solution usually being “I’ll just use my phone”.

On picking up the display device from its stand, I immediately remembered why it holds this special place. A really nice device that offers a lot but fails to deliver a large enough use case, but — as Federico expertly put above — perhaps that’s the point?

Getting Away From It All

I am constantly fed up with my work life bleeding into everything else I do. I’ve written about it affecting my enjoyment of using my MacBook outside of work, and the same thing happens with my phone. It’s littered with Teams and email apps that allow me to do things on the go, but also act to pull me back in out of work hours.

Same too with my iPad Pro. It is predominantly a work device. One used to draw and design, so it’s out of the question to begin to read and write on it in my spare time. There’s just too many things to distract me away, and we all know I lack the self-control to avoid them!

Don’t get me wrong, it’s absolutely crazy for me to spend £500 on an iPad to use for such small tasks as would to create a ’third place’ but I entirely understand the logic. For many people, this place is gaming, but mine is my Boox Palma. A device I am often equally ridiculed for buying as I would be with an iPad Mini. However, it gives me a place to catch up with the waiting queue of RSS feeds and my favourite thing of all to do, read books.

Any third place you choose is one of happiness and contentment, no work allowed!

Since my early days of being online, I have been fairly easily influenced into making a tech purchase. It only required a few people talking about a new phone, or a picture of a Pepsi can from Kurt Colbeck, to make me go out and buy a new Android phone. This was the days when phones were fun after all, and there was always a new one to lust after.

It wasn’t just phones, I could decide to move my blog after one post by Matt Birchler and numerous other things. These feeling exist today, and I would expect them to exist in some form or another in all of us. It’s a ‘Keeping up with the Joneses’ psychological effect fueled by social comparison.

Even after that purchase, or often when I see a completing purchase online, I feel the need to justify it to myself and that often involves publishing something. A review of sorts. Or something titled “Why I did x”. Something along those lines made me feel better about what I did, and that’s more than a little sad.

These posts were not for anyone else, unless there are more people out there looking to justify their purchases, they were for me and my weird brain. Unfortunately, these feelings still exist today.

I have been moments away from typing out why I purchased AirPods Max over the weekend. Wanting to explain to people that I went to a shop and tried out loads of different options. Sony’s and Bose and even brands I had never heard of, yet chose the AirPods Max because they were the most comfortable and nicest looking. When, in fact, this post is pointless. It achieves nothing more than a long-winded way of shouting to the world “I’m smart, honest”.

Removing the fact that no-one cares about my peculiar purchasing decisions. I also do not need to justify these things to myself, nor anyone else. Sure, buying the AirPods Max in 2024 is a bit of a joke, so perhaps you get some enjoyment from me spending money on things you think are stupid. And in the end I got my post, trying to make myself feel better, so why even bother at all!

Chris Wilson writing about his happiness being an unprofessional blogger:

About 10 years ago, I wanted to be a professional blogger. Now I’m happy to be an unprofessional blogger. Well, most of the time at least.

I, too, tried this thing called making money on the internet. At the time it was usually referred to as becoming a writer because a ‘blogger’ was a somewhat pejorative term that writers looked down their nose at. Yet, in the circles I tried to push myself in to, we were all nothing more than bloggers.

This distain still exists in many corners of every day life. There are numerous books published each year by people that are ‘bloggers’ but by publishing a book they can now refer to themselves as a writer — but I digress.

Over the last 12 years of writing online, the most significant change has been the level of income being made. A couple of years in I could maintain a bang average blog, publish a few times a week and receive a couple of hundreds pounds in ad venue back again. More than enough to pay for hosting, invest in some tech to write a bout and have a little extra. If you had a good blog, or wrote for bigger websites, you could easily make a good wage.

As much as I hate online ads, they supported people to do the thing that they enjoyed as a profession — but that ability is now extremely rare. Bloggers are the ones that tell you this doesn’t matter. That they do it for themselves, not for the income. Writers, on the other hand, won’t bother if the juice isn’t worth the squeeze. Being a blogger means that writing online, even when your posts are scruffy and error-prone, is something you do for the enjoyment of it, and that’s the best place to be.

Alex Heath from The Verge spoke to Mark Zuckerberg after Meta connect and there are numerous takeaways from it. I recommend you to give it a listen if you are at all interested in technology, or even if you just use Meta platforms. The episode is pretty concise to a few key areas, and posting to Facebook and Instagram is a large part of it.

Below, I pulled out a few telling quotes on what Zuck plans for the future of his services. The ones I found most interesting are the ones talking about Meta AI use on Facebook and Instagram and their aims to show slop in your feed—which I wrote about recently.

I think that they’re [AI] going to have their own profiles. They’re going to be creating content. People will be able to follow them if they want. You’ll be able to comment on their stuff. They may be able to comment on your stuff if you’re connected with them.

Essentially, what Mark is describing is a bunch of bots designed to keep you on their platform. Much more than simply creating slop for your feed, Meta AI will create fake ‘people’ that leave you comments and try to keep you engaged. It’s clear from responses that Meta are invested in showing you “content that’s generated by an AI system that might be something that you’re interested in”. But they will be identifiable as AI, so there’s that.

When pressed on why users would want this, Zuck gave nothing answers that brushed the question aside.

The sociology that I’ve seen on this is that most people have way fewer friends physically than they would like to have. People cherish the human connections that they have, and the more we can do to make that feel more real and give you more reasons to connect

On training their AI on users' posts to Meta services, Zuck outlined that he does not value anything posted online. Despite users providing the company with their whole revenue stream, from advert views and the actual content that keeps people engaged, he thinks it’s all fair game.

When you put something out in the world, to what degree do you still get to control it and own it and license it?

I am no copywriter expert, and I am sure that their terms and conditions allow them to train their AI on anything on their platforms. I try to keep my bias against Meta to a minimum, although that’s sometimes impossible, so I am generally harsh on a company pretending to be helpful. However, I do agree with him here with posting things online, especially to things posted to their networks.

I think individual creators or publishers tend to overestimate the value of their specific content in the grand scheme of this.

With that said, I did expect at least a bit of gratitude here. There’s a admittedly minimal movement, trying to ensure the users who are populating networks with their data and content are paid for doing so. Clearly Meta are not one of them, despite launching creator programs, they do not value the things you post very highly.

We pay for content when it’s valuable to people. We’re just not going to pay for content when it’s not valuable to people.

This interview only helped fuel by belief that despite the new image of Zuck, and the hope that by Threads being a bit more open than Facebook or Instagram it signaled a new direction for Meta — the company is still just out for itself. I guess you can’t bemoan a multi-billion dollar company from being focused on making money, we live in a capitalist society based on growth after all, but in the grand scheme of things it’s disappointing.

On one level I understand it. There are only so many people you can get onto Meta platforms. Billions of users are logging on every day, and they are clearly at or very near saturation point. Younger users are shying away from traditional social media, and Facebook in particular, so taking more of existing users time is the only option. The launch of Threads, an app that Zuck sees as being a billion user app, will help in the short term to boost ad impressions, but only whilst the move to AI slop in your feed is ramped up.

I can’t see this going any other way but very wrong for users.

Casey Newton in Platformer at Meta Connect:

⁠⁠It went all but unmentioned on stage, but Meta says it is beginning to test content “imagined for you” by Meta AI on Facebook and Instagram. Meta will use your likeness and interests to generate photos and videos with AI, and you’ll be able to swipe to generate additional related posts.

This information has gone largely unreported, or at least kept under the radar, as most publications rave over a product that doesn’t and will never be launched—Orion.

In their never-ending pursuit of more engagement, Meta will begin showing AI slop in your Facebook and Instagram feed. That’s right, instead of actually showing you the reason you use social media — the people you follow — Meta have run out of engagement bait posts from strangers and are now going to just make everything up.

The truth that Meta now realise is that no-one wants to post anymore. The family and friends you once logged into Meta products to see what they are up to are not interested. The people you may have met on those platforms and began following because their post were good, have also been driven away by Meta. The only people left are posting simply to farm your attention for their gain. Be it dopamine hits or downright grifts.

Even though we’ve long suspected otherwise, Meta still claim that their mission is to “give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together” but now they are stating loud and clear they are only interested in users attention.

If they truly wanted to connect people, they would build a social platform that encourages sharing. That promotes posts from the people you follow into your timeline and fosters communication. Meta would be focused on ensuring the things you post get to the people you want them to and foster a safe space for users to flourish. Instead, it does the opposite.

They promote garbage and harmful content to all users. Hiding posts from the people you choose to follow in exchange for those from ‘creators’ made to farm attention. Building algorithms that showcase the worst the platform has to offer in the desperate attempt to show more ads next to them.

Sure, Meta’s chief product officer claims that “AI-generated art in certain verticals is really compelling” but the reality is found in their words. They stated that generative AI ads have an 11 percent higher click-through rate and 7.6 percent higher conversion rate — and this dear reader is the reason the company can never be trusted to do right by its users.

As Marks shirt from Connect proudly claimed it’s Zuck or nothing. He can try to hide the reality in ancient Latin, or meaningless company statements about connecting people. The reality is they only care about advertising revenue, and it has always been about the company before anything else.