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.

Marty Swant of Digiday has seen the Perplexity pitch deck for building an advertising business:

According to a copy of the pitch deck obtained by Digiday, the plan is to integrate ads within users’ queries and answers

When the idea of using an LLM as a search engine started floating around, this is where I expected we would end up. Not because I am some kind of expert, but if you can be sure on anything online, it’s that it eventually ends up with adverts.

Sure Perplexity may be the first one to make this move, but as Google replaces everything with Gemini — expect the same result. Further poisoning of results based on who pays the most money.

There are a few examples given in the pitch deck that feel like simple banner ads alongside results, but the below really hits home.

Another option is to have “branded explanatory text” that appears above sponsored and organic related questions.

When search results were a list of links with sponsored content, and some SEO slop, at least you felt part of the conversation. As much as the company pointed you to its favorite links, you could click a few and ‘test’ the results you were shown.

The whole concept of a search engine starts to break down when the only result from an LLM-based search engine is explainer text, provided by the brand that pays the most money. Please, could this AI bubble burst already before we break the web entirely.

Charlie Warzel writing about his toilet theory of the internet:

I have precious little time to hook a reader with whatever I’m trying to get them to read—but also that my imagined audience of undistracted, fully engaged readers is an idealized one.

It says a lot that someone as great at writing as Charlie makes statements like this. How on earth do people like myself, that suck at this, stand a chance?

The truth is, there’s not a lot we can do about it. There’s a tendency to point at others and say “they can’t concentrate anymore” when the epidemic is whining ourselves too.

I’ve had to work really hard to get my attention span back after years of letting it be stolen from me and I can’t be the only one. However, this gave me a new appreciation of where both my writing and my designs need to go.

When everyone out there is screaming for attention, it’s nearly impossible to be noticed, but there will be people out there paying attention. Keep on doing the things you enjoy.

Matt Birchler on the 99% of people lie:

People have a terrible habit of assuming “everyone” does something, when that’s simply not the case.

Everyone thinks that their perception of the world is correct. It’s only when you begin to realise that the way you look at things is nothing more than your perspective that it becomes infinitely more valuable.

The best thinkers can see things from other angles and come to open conclusions with the confidence to both defend their position and be open to new ideas.

Ben Werdmuller writing about Threads trading trust for growth:

If X has fake news, Threads is assumed to have fake views: engagement by any means necessary.

I did not know that Meta were incentivising engagement bait, but it now seems obvious. Despite my initial thoughts on liking Threads as a social network, I absolutely cannot stand to use it now. I had to write a post yesterday due to a few missed replies to my cross posted blog posts, stating as much.

Don’t get me wrong, the thirsty posts have always been there and from the very start people were insistent that you had to “train the algorithm”. Swipe away what you didn’t like and make sure you made a clear indication of what you didn’t like. Well, I am here to tell you, my friends, it makes absolutely no difference. Meta have turned the clout chasing idiots up to 422 instead of 10, and I can’t take it any more.

Turns out the constant stream of easily searchable questions, or incorrect hot takes in which the original poster never replies are funded by Meta themselves. That’s right, in an attempt to boost the platform, they are paying select accounts up to £5000 to post this crap.

Should users just choose to log out for a bit because of the constant barrage of open-ended questions with 500 replies, you can’t even get away from it on Instagram. I am inundated with “someone started a Thread” or I get red bubbles encouraging me to log in and read all the replies. Only to be treated by these useless things.

What am I supposed to do with that information exactly? Jump up and down with glee? Try harder for that hit of dopamine? No thanks, I am out.

Habib writing about their version of social media brain

Instead of scanning my surroundings for something relatable to turn into a social media post, I pay attention to blog posts and articles I read on the web. I’m constantly looking for anything of relevance that triggers and sparks my thinking into jotting down whatever thoughts I may have to add to the conversation.

I know exactly what Habib is writing about here. I no longer break my world down into 280 characters sized bites as I did when I used Twitter — but I do often squeeze it into blog posts.

The great thing is, blog posts can be anything from a few words to thousands of them. Which gives me much of freedom to think about the things I want to say rather than attempting to paint a vivid picture of the complex work in a bite side chunk.

Thinking is one of my very favourite things to do, and if it is accompanied by a notebook or a blank Apple Note, then I enjoy it even more. What you see on my blog is the output of thinking and as Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living”. Having a blog and thinking about the world in which to publish to it is something everyone should have.

Manuel Moreale thinking about the differences between hobbies and side projects:

A hobby is something one does for themselves. This blog is a hobby. I write on it because I find it enjoyable and the primary user is myself. And since it’s a hobby, money is not taken into consideration because I’m expected to pay for my hobbies.

Agree with this completely, I don’t expect to get anything back from writing, and I do it for myself much more than I do it for other people. Sure, I love people reading and responding to the things I publish, but it’s my hobby, so I’m not focused on it. Like running or cycling is to some people, they may progress into races and competitions, it’s still something you enjoy doing for free.

Where most people start to worry is when it creeps towards the territory of marking money. They start to worry about losing that money, and the pressure of publishing starts to build. Been there, done that, and it almost ruined my hobby.

A side project is a bit different. The way I see it, the users of a side project don’t necessarily overlap with the creator. That’s for example the case of People and Blogs. P&B is not a hobby but a side project. The goal is to make something not for myself, but for others.

I tend to pick up and put down side projects, most of which revolve around my blog. Due to not achieving what I set my goals to be, and this is often the difference between the two things for me.

For instance, I view my podcast, YouTube, and the now folded newsletter very much as side projects. They didn’t achieve the traction I wanted, so I have no problem stopping doing them (although my podcast will return soon).

Matt Birchler is an expert on payments, so when he writes about them, you listen:

I can’t see the future, and I don’t work directly in card issuance, but this is my very strong instinct. They want to win the payment volume game, and you don’t do that by restricting where your card can be used, you win that by being able to tell your customers, “you can use our card ANYWHERE!”

I quoted Matt’s post last time he wrote about opening Apple Wallet up to other payment providers and I still stand by my comments. I think the frustration will be when every reward or membership offering wants you inside their app.

Matt’s comment also reminds me of the frustrations I have every time I try to use an Android phone. I bank with Barclays, and whilst they now support Apple Pay, their card is not available everywhere. To use my card on a Samsung phone I must change the default to Google Wallet, which is a frustrating mess that only half works. In fact, it took them an absolute age to even do that, instead choosing to develop their own app with a permanent notification on the Lock Screen!

I’m hoping the times are gone, but not all banks seem to be made the same in my experience of ones outside the US. I’m hoping that most are so used to using Wallet now they just stick with that, as Matt points out the fees are negligible.

Jared Henderson in a recent ParkNotes video on Commonplace Books (cleaned up by me):

I think that people found it refreshing to just be like oh I could just do this in a notebook and there’s not like a system .. basically just a repository where I just write things down and I think there’s something about the Simplicity of the idea and then the fact that it’s not digital not on your computer it’s not on a screen .. I think that people just got sick of doing stuff on screens all the time

I know in my head that taking note digitally makes the most sense if you want to maximise the return on investment. If you would like to put everything into a hyper — organised, detail — orientated database, that’s cool and everything, but the appeal of having a notebook is the opposite.

The messiness and disorganisation is the point for me. The simplicity of scribbling (seriously, my handwriting is terrible) into a book every so often is the best feature. It is the key to enjoying the things I do and removing as much of the extraneous things as possible.

Colin Friedersdorf writing in The Atlantic about why they Why I Hate Instagram Now

Meta, Instagram’s parent company, still says its mission is giving people “the power to build community and bring the world closer together.” As it thwarts my efforts to see all the photos posted by people I know and chose to follow, I call bullshit. Injecting Reels in my feed, then refusing to let me abolish those diversions, hasn’t just put my loved ones in competition with viral nonsense––it has repeatedly subverted my attempts to ensure that my loved ones win.

This is what drives me insane about modern social media because it’s not even just Instagram. In the constant search for engagement, they serve you entertainment before the things that you actually want to see. You know, posts from the people you follow.

Whenever pressed on this, Instagram gets all hand wavy, and they roll out their practiced spiel about video engagement being up blah blah blah. It clearly works for the things they wish to measure (presumably advert impressions and attention) but not for anyone I ever talk to about these issues. There still isn’t a place for us photographers to go, and that still makes me sad.

Kev Quirk writing in Three Years With My M1 MacBook Air

Question is, will I upgrade? Well, no. Not any time soon anyway. The M1 Air still does everything I need it to extremely well. So why upgrade? Why drop another £1,000 or so on the latest version of the Air? Because it looks a little nicer? Because it comes in blue? Because the chipset is 2 increments better? Nah, I’ll stick with this workhorse until it dies.

I’m not sure if it is them M1 chip, but around this time my motivation to upgrade so often seems to have disappeared. It was such a revolution in power and efficiency that the following iterations do not receive anywhere near the attention—which is great.

I’d love to see Apple do something more with their laptop and push the design forward. Perhaps a really thin and light device for ultra portability because to be honest, the battery life of MacBooks is a little insane now!

Zach Seward being clear that AI is not like you and me:

Aristotle, who had a few things to say about human nature, once declared, “The greatest thing by far is to have a command of metaphor,” but academics studying the personification of tech have long observed that metaphor can just as easily command us. Metaphors shape how we think about a new technology, how we feel about it, what we expect of it, and ultimately, how we use it.

I highlighted a lot of this article to save for leather musing, but it got me thinking about things immediately. I’d recommend reading the entire post if you are even remotely interested in AI as it’s pretty eye-opening, well written and diligently researched.

The decisions made by the creators of technology and particularly AI dictate a lot of the things we think about it. What’s more is most people will not even be aware of the effects of portraying your product as if it were a person. The fact is, we give AI much more slack than we would with other things because it is portrayed with a friendly, eager to help tone and that’s by design.

LLMS don’t just spurt back walls of text, they portray the answers in conversational styles, leading to increased levels of trust. Because you can’t be mad at something that apologises for being wrong so provocatively. Spurring in us a forgiving nature as if they were our friend. Artificial Intelligence doesn’t get things spectacularly wrong after all, they simply “hallucinate”.

As Zack puts it brilliantly, “AI isn’t doing shit. It is not thinking, let alone plotting. It has no aspirations. It isn’t even an it so much as a wide-ranging set of methods for pattern recognition”. Imagine if you looked up a topic in an encyclopaedia, only for it to be entirely wrong and reference things that don’t exist, you wouldn’t tolerate it. Yet Search GPT is already getting things wrong, and that’s OK because it is portrayed as being just like us. Well, it’s not.

Karissa Bell for Engadget:

Zuckerberg then launched into a lengthy rant about his frustrations with “closed” ecosystems like Apple’s App Store. None of that is particularly new, as the Meta founder has been feuding with Apple for years. But then Zuckerberg, who is usually quite controlled in his public appearances, revealed just how frustrated he is, telling Huang that his reaction to being told “no” is “fuck that.”

I’m conflicted when Zuckerberg says anything that I agree with. On the one hand, it is great news for the web. Zuckerberg hates closed platforms and is working to open up Threads to the open web, yet I can’t shake the thought that most of this is simple theatre.

Of course, Zuck hates Apple’s closed system…because he wants access to all the date from users. It’s not his good nature that leads him to open up Threads, it is the fact that it helps with all the things that Facebook is criticised for. He can simply point to the fact that users are free to move, and then continue to do what he wants on ‘his’ platform.

But there’s this little part of me that wants to believe. That after years of “oh we didn’t mean to do that” when they break things, Meta is becoming a good-natured company.

John Gruber joining two unconnected things together and predictably developing from it a pro apple stance (via Birchtree):

But the argument against RCS is strong and simple: it doesn’t support end-to-end encryption. The only new messaging platforms that should gain any traction are those that not only support E2EE, but that require it. Messaging and audio/video calls should only work through E2EE. That’s true for iMessage and FaceTime.

I try not to read, nor comment on, Daring Fireball things any more because the take from them is so clouded in pro-Apple rhetoric that it’s often difficult to see the wood for the trees. However, after Matts post about the article, I decided to read it for myself and boy what a weird take.

RCS is merely a step forward for SMS and MMS, it never promised encryption, and I have my doubts that any carrier would support it even if it did. Apple presently sticks to routing RCS through carrier defaults. Google offers encryption over RCS by turning them into Google Messages, meaning “your chat conversations automatically upgrade to end-to-end encryption”. I am sure that Apple could offer something similar, but considering their RCS implementation is essentially an FU to the EU, they chose not to.

However, we are going off-topic a little. Whilst I agree with John’s opinion that any new implementation of messaging should be e2e encrypted, he completely skirts around the fact that Apple could offer this because it doesn’t fit into his narrative. Instead, he suggests sending all of your messaging through a third-party close system — mentioning WhatsApp specifically. Taking such a positive stance on privacy and then suggesting the use of Meta products is more than a little strange.

Christopher Lawley got to talk to Jenny Chen and Ty Jordan about iPad note-taking and specifically math notes.

Whilst it is predictably a very reserved, PR focused chat, Chris always manages to demonstrate his excitement for iPad features and does an excellent job of walking through the features with them. The video is worth watching if you’re interested in the iPad or Apple at all, it almost gets me interested in the iPad again… almost.

Jason Kratz replying to my earlier post on Instagram and photography:

The implication is that somehow it was wrong for them to transition from snapshots of family events, etc. to being more artful in taking photographs to put online. Let’s be clear: there is nothing wrong with this!

Absolutely, there is nothing wrong with this. Perhaps my point came across wrong.

I am a street photographer first and foremost and my camera roll is filled with all sorts of random photos. My point was more that people worry to much about getting the right shot than enjoying and capturing the moment. Over posing and worrying about getting the perfect shot to share on Instagram, rather than snapping moments.

Reysu in the video How to absorb books like a sponge and read 2x faster:

One of the most valuable things you can do with your free time is reading books. They not only contain a huge depth of information, but just a single idea in a book has the possibility of changing your life entirely.

I recently found Reysu on YouTube and have enjoyed a lot of the videos on their channel. It is a good mix of technology topics and various bits of life advice—particularly the ones on Notebooks, but that’s for another day. I hate the title of this one and wrote about why reading doesn’t need to be hacked, but this statement in the first part of the video stood out to me.

Reading is one of my favorite things to do. I don’t know why, I have a million other things to entertain me, but reading takes me to a different place that nothing else can. There’s fiction to distract me but not leave me hollow like passive media does. There’s non-fiction for me to learn new ideas and improve my life. Whatever it is that I am reading, it contains loads of little bits that all leave their mark and improve me as a person.

Also a special shout out to this genius thumbnail that first got me to watch Reysu’s videos.

Cory Dransfeldt writing about Data ownership and agency:

I control that data, it sits on infrastructure I manage, it’s in a format I understand and I get the responsibility (or fun — let’s go with that) of presenting it. I get agency and that agency is accompanied by the burden of maintenance, presentation and action. Convenience in exchange for control.

As usual, Cory’s take is measured, accurate, and raises some interesting points on the ownership of your data online. Many people have begun to think about these things now that the USA is finally preparing legislation on privacy and personal data. Of course, that isn’t a worry for me, but this short statement prodded at something I was thinking about when moving my blog around in the last few weeks.

I really want to have an 11ty blog and keep all of my data to myself. I can then pull in whatever it is I want from around the web and display it in whichever way I choose. Thankfully, I am skilled enough to write a bit of code and get things going. It makes the most sense for me, but I just can’t be bothered. I want to be able to post easily, post all sorts of things, and not have to worry about a thing - in exchange for that, I give up control.

Don’t get me wrong, I trust Manton and micro.blog more than any other platform; this is more control of how I can do things and, in some cases, what I can do. In exchange for being able to post easily and not have to deal with rebuild times and server things - my host calls the shots now. This will range from pretty much unlimited ability on platforms like WordPress to locked-down services like Hey World. Whoever it is you choose, as Cory writes, you get “Convenience in exchange for control”.

Charlie Warzel with an interesting thread on Threads:

the bigger thing is it touches on a gut feeling we all have: so much has changed technologically in a short amt of time! We know this connectivity is working on us, but it’s challenging to pin down exactly how.

This thread was linked by this week’s Platformer that discusses the recent book by Jonathan Haidt on the links between anxiety and social media. Something I wrote about in passing a few days ago because it seems to be the talk of the media industry at the moment.

Casey Newton interviewed Haidt on Hardfork a few weeks ago and followed up with some rebuttals the following episode. I thought the interview came across very well, but it’s important to never take those spouting research on podcasts at face value. Science isn’t always as straightforward as it can be presented as, especially when so many are covered in such a little time.

Whoever you listen to regarding the research, Charlie rightly points that we all have this gut feeling that social media isn’t good for us. If you take a break from scrolling, even for a short period of time, you start to feel better. Our brains are simply not made for the sensory overload. It’s just a question of how much and what the effects actually are—something that may never be completely proven.

Matt Birchler in his semi response to the latest Vergecast on Apple:

What this means in practice is that the thing all card issuers want is transaction counts and volumes to be as high as possible. You don’t do that by locking your card to your own wallet, you do it by making it an easy choice for consumers to pick you.

Of course, Matt is correct. If anyone knows about payment matters, it’s Matt. However, I think this is only part of the story. My Apple Wallet contains more than payment cards, and I foresee this becoming an issue when (rather than if) the EU forces Apple to open things up.

Currently, my Apple Wallet holds a variety of items that I can access with a tap: a few loyalty cards, my Arsenal Football tickets (they are by far the greatest team the world has ever seen), and also train tickets for my upcoming trip to London. There’s no hassle with different apps, printing things out, or searching through emails to find what I need; it’s all there, ready for me. This utility, I envision, will be decimated the moment everyone can produce a ‘wallet’ for my iPhone.

Suddenly, I’ll need an LNER wallet to access my train tickets, a separate app for all my loyalty cards, and my Arsenal tickets will return to the app from which they came. The simple reason is that everyone wants you in their app. As Matt pointed out in his post, their ‘wallet’ becomes a ‘halo’ product. Not one that directly generates income, although it could, but one that markets to you every time you open the app to retrieve your tickets or cards. We know this because you only have to look at Android as an example.

Every time I want to test a new Samsung phone, I endure the same frustrating experience. My bank, Barclays, doesn’t support Samsung Pay. They were one of the last to add Apple Pay, and for a long time didn’t support anything else. They tried instead to push their own payment app on Android users with a terrible experience. The great thing about Android is that I can download Google Pay and use that instead, but it doesn’t work as seamlessly as the default app. Samsung also works very hard not to tell me I can use another payment app, and as a result, most users go without.

This is because Samsung doesn’t want to inform users they can switch. They want to be able to sell you things in the wallet app: a new phone, perhaps a card that will work with Samsung Pay, or some accessories. By getting users into your app, you can generate revenue, and that’s important to all parties involved in the process. I think it’s true that most retailers won’t care, but many service providers will; they will want to cut out the 0.15% that Apple receives, and also sell you all their other wares while they’re at it.