This is absolutely going to crash and burn for Meta. When companies look at the metrics for their posts on these platforms, they’re going to see massive amounts of engagement, none of which converts into sales; and they’re going to stop buying ads on those platforms thinking that their market isn’t there.
Another example of AI being deployed in a place where AI is not useful; though in this case it’s actually harmful to the goal of the company deploying it.
Didn’t facebook fake numbers before for video views which caused e.g. collegehumor to fold because they thought they could rely on facebook for views?
Absolutely. And Vice and Gawker, and to some extent even The Onion. Some survived, some did not. Dropout in particular is one of the few semi-success stories of it. It was called the “pivot to video,” and it’s almost a joke in online content communities now; especially since everyone on these platforms was saying, “we don’t want this!” even as Facebook was saying, “everyone wants this!”
Whenever I think it can’t get worse
Dead internet theory was inevitable, but who thought Facebook themselves would bring it about?
I mean, who else was gonna do it?
if anybody can make a profit from enbottification, facebook wants to be the one to make that profit.
I want my laundry machine to figure out the best way to wash whatever I toss in automatically without an Internet connection. I guess I’m asking for too much :(
Great just like games like Fortnite and Call of Dity Mobile have bots with real usernames and profiles to fill lobbies, now literally everyone online could be a bot with a fake profile.
I’m prepared to just be gaslit for the rest of my life from now on
When I played Fortnite the first time(not for long though), I was winning pretty easily in the first 5 matches or so. They put bots into it to fill the lobby and maybe because it hooks you more or something. But they don’t tell you. That was a weird experience figuring that out.
People who use it for business need to start think twice, imagine you saw your stats numbers and think you reach (example) 10000 people and 90% of them are bots but you paid for that 10000, worst is that you may think that your product is bullshit because of the success sales convertion its very low but bots dont buy products so either you have the info of how many bots have seen the add or you need to leave social media because its impossible to read that data to make decisions
I’m going out on a limb here and assume these bots don’t count as an impression, but they will market it as an opportunity to show your ad to the followers of the bot account.
The advertising companies would riot if they did count as impressions, so Facebook would either not count them as such, or hold off on them for that reason.
The executive team at my company was in shambles because no one was using the company intranet. So, they demanded that the company intranet be launched when a computer turns on. They were ecstatic that the numbers reached almost 100% in a day, even after being fully explained, and understanding, that the new traffic was, of course, not a real figure. All of the new numbers never went past the home page. Still, they patted themselves on the back, and partied.
So I guess what I’m getting to say is more people either wouldn’t care, or would even celebrate the fake data than one would think.
The intranet at my work is a near-useless dumpster fire. Everything is disorganized, all the important documents and instructions are hidden behind completely chaotic branches and layers of creatively named folders.
I have used the wretched thing only once. I instantly downloaded everything I thought I would ever need to an encrypted USB stick, so I would never have to use it again. This was 7-8 years ago. Everything important is always delivered by email and apparently stored to the intranet afterwards. The intranet has been hacked at least twice, but the real number is most likely much higher. For “reasons”, all the personnel info has also been kept stored on the intranet, despite the successful hacks.
Isn’t that essentially how that whole scam called advertising works in general?
While there is scamming happening in ads biz, we have to face the reality that ad spend will drive revenue growth for many brands because pedons have no self control.
For every guy who screaches aDs DonT wOrK on Me Rheee
There is a dozen idiots who ate buying that plastic trash with some idiotic payment plan that they will deff make 4 timely payments on.
The thing about advertising is that pretty much every bit of data that could tell us if it works or not is produced entirely by the same industry that has an overwhelming incentive to tell us that it does work.
I am not even saying that it never works, more that advertising’s primary purpose is to sell advertising to companies and if that advertising works or not is a distant secondary goal at best as long as those companies have no way to prove it doesn’t.
It very likely works on some types of products while being completely useless on others. And even where it works it very likely has a distribution from extremely bad ads for a given product or service to very effective ones for the same product.
It’s basically video all over again.
“We have 12 billion new sign ups this quarter alone! Now make our shares go up, please”
The only valid CAPTCHA test when you log in to that uncanny valley/horror: Is Kim Jong Un an idiot? Y/N
The only valid CAPTCHA test when you log in to that uncanny valley/horror: Is Kim Jong Un an idiot? Y/N
Ugh. So glad I don’t use FB. It’s already so enshittified and only getting worse.
Friends don’t let friends use Facebook.
Facebook was a wonderful tool for me for quite a while. It let me build a digital list of my irl “friends” and then I got watch over the years as they posted their most vile and ill-conceived innermost thoughts.
An excellent tool for seeing what people really think and feel when they’re not “performing” in social settings. Curiously people don’t understand that public posts to a public SM site aren’t anonymous but there’s enough separation from the “real world” that lots of people forget that.
Just sitting back and watching gave me a lot of insight as to how awful people really are when they “feel like” they aren’t being watched.
Facebook is near unusable now, the feed is 99% fake politically charged shit. I report it all as spam, promoting hate/violence/terrorism, and block the users, but a bunch more just show up the next day.
tbf, most posts on lemmy seem to be political as well.
We’d need to regulate the share of posts of
- politics
- technology
- entertainment
to be further on the side of entertainment and less on the side of politics.
I use clean my feeds grease monkey script to hide it and only show my friends and groups I subscribed to and it makes it so easy to see how much of things that it shows is just their stuff and how dead the Facebook really is.
You’ve described my limited FB experience. After refusing to join FB since the 00s, I joined FB a few years ago to get better access to the Marketplace. (Craigslist has gone to shit).
I joined a few groups that interested me and then the constant political bombardment started in the more mainstream groups.
Small niche FB groups are a night and day difference compared to some of the more contemporary groups I’ve seen.
Bot algorithms definitely target large groups with lots of activity. The resulting increased activity due to algorithms just amplify it further.
I just try to stick to my smaller groups to avoid all the mess.
This is me too. I’m still on Facebook for some family contacts and a couple of useful groups. Years ago I could spend hours a day there. Now I spend maybe 15-30 minutes each morning scrolling for friend/family updates and group content - and hitting “Hide all from …” on every single bit of unsolicited content. I was reporting and blocking them, but I’ve decided it probably doesn’t achieve anything and it was too many taps/clicks.
Instagram is similar - I used to spend hours there too but now I only go to check if there’s progress on one car build I’m following and scroll for maybe 5-10 minutes and I’m out for the day.
https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/431970-fb-clean-my-feeds-5-02 makes you realize how empty the Facebook actually is.
The amount of irrelevant content that FB sticks in the default feed is just ridiculous. I’ll get a couple posts from friends near the top, but as i scroll the ratio changes until nearly nothing is from friends or FoF. And it’s all this garbage content that FB thinks I want to see, like I watch one cake decorating video and then more of them show up and keep showing up, and im not sure how to get rid of them.
What you have to do is create feeds of your friends (and GD FB limits the number of friends you can put in a feed) and browse that instead.
And holy shit does their algorithm latch onto any minor interest in their content.
Accidentally tapped on a floor tiling video the other day, three days of tiling and handyman videos jammed into my feed and me pressing the “not interested” button on every single one.
Facebook, I am there for the rare post from my 150 or so friends and family. That’s it. Nothing else.
The reason we don’t use it anymore is because actual posts from real humans we know are buried under a torrent of shit. Sometimes their posts take days to surface leading to all sorts of chain-mail posts on how to “get your feed back”. None of which work because the whole business model is about jamming sponsored shit down your throat.
Keep doing it! My feed is almost entirely people I know or groups I’ve chosen. I’ve blocked probably hundreds of advertisers. Now it’s like quarterly or so when they refresh their advertising scheme that I have to block maybe a handful more.
Just stop using bro
“Spotify managers defended PFC to staff by claiming that the tracks were being used only for background music, so listeners wouldn’t know the difference […]”
https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machine-liz-pelly-spotify-musicians/
(PFC = “Perfect Fit Content”, i. e. Fake Artists)
I have a feeling this quote exemplifies the attitude the management of these platforms have towards their end users, though it’s seldom this explicitly formulated.
Hot take: if they can get it to work, good! I welcome AI users who are smarter, better informed, and have better taste than the rest of us mouth breathing meatbags.
You have to have a sense of taste in the first place to have better taste.
AI users implies they are deployed and managed by the a company and can be configured to push ideas and agendas.
This is quite a big problem imo…
I admire your optimism
More like stupidity
10 billion downloads on the Play Store.
deleted by creator
Number of downloads ≠ number of users. People with multiple devices, people who replace devices, and people who have to wipe and reprovision borked devices all inflate the number. I’d guess that, over the period that total has been running, we’re looking at 4-5 downloads per user, if not more. Still a ridiculous number, but not that ridiculous.
You don’t think there’s more Google accounts + phones + tablets + people changing phones, than population on Earth?
There are,
but i cant picture 1 person with the same account over multiple devicesI can… It makes sense… Mystery solved
