🔗 Please publish and share more - Jeff Triplett’s Micro.blog
Our posts are done when you say they are. You do not have to fret about sticking to landing and having a perfect conclusion. Your posts, like this post, are done after we stop writing.
🔗 Please publish and share more - Jeff Triplett’s Micro.blog
Our posts are done when you say they are. You do not have to fret about sticking to landing and having a perfect conclusion. Your posts, like this post, are done after we stop writing.
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I think were going to add a whole new category of content which is AI generated or AI summarized content, or existing content pulled together by AI in some way
And that was the end of social media dear friends…
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Meta’s X rival Threads is rolling out a new “activity status” feature that will let you see when someone on the social network is online.
What users want: less engagement bait
What they got: a way for people to be creepy
I don’t think Threads have any intention of building a nice place to be.
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Both of us together have followed Silicon Valley’s innovation engine for more than 50 years. We’ve seen a lot. But one observation stands out: The best ideas — the ones that launch meaningful companies - need to seem crazy and stupid at first.
As Arthur C. Clarke once said “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. We need more bonkers tech that brings back that feeling of awe.
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159 people took the offer, 8.4% of the company
That doesn’t read like a good thing…
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.
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Actually, there is no such thing as a real picture. As soon as you have sensors to capture something, you reproduce [what you’re seeing], and it doesn’t mean anything. There is no real picture. You can try to define a real picture by saying, ‘I took that picture’, but if you used AI to optimize the zoom, the autofocus, the scene — is it real? Or is it all filters? There is no real picture, full stop.
I’m sorry. What gibberish is this?
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took the new iPhone 16 Pro on safari (not the browser)
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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.