Yes, I have been seeing so much AI slop that people reshare not realizing it’s AI generated that I have gone from spending too much time a day on Facebook to not even opening the app every day anymore. It’s better for my mental health - but I do wish there was a way to keep the connections with people far away that I don’t necessarily want to give my cell number to.
I think AI will destroy social media though. Or at least as it used to be. But maybe that’s good. We need more face to face interaction and a rebuilding of our communities.
Could the platforms be programmed in such a fashion that you must agree to accept AI generated content? I, for one, would decline, at least then knowing that what I was receiving was human generated content.
There are some AI detector tools. They're imperfect - missing a small percent with false positives being a larger concern. (Especially if someone has used a tool like grammarly to help with their grammar and proofreading - it becomes more likely to be flagged as AI generated falsely.)
The bigger thing is it's not just bots who post it, but genuine people who create an AI prompt and then post something for clicks/likes/etc. I think it's so ubiquitous at this point that it would be hard to stop. I do like this idea - I'm just not sure what implementation would look like. Maybe it starts with removing the bots from facebook?
I have always thought that claiming social media is the 'new public square' was incorrect. The internet itself is the modern public square. Anyone can create a website, blog etc. to broadcast their opinions (informed or otherwise uninformed) just like the oddball that used to stand on the street corner handing out flyers of a weird ideology. Social media is simply using someone else's soapbox in the public square.
Individual human beings could do a lot to improve the situation if we have the will and capacity. Personal posts about our lives or our small businesses only--rather than re-posting without verifying from g-d-knows-what-source. Refuse the 'pay-to-play' and learn organic content growth strategies for small businesses. Spend less time online and go see your friends IRL, start entertaining at home again. And set boundaries online. If you see people re-posting crap: don't argue in the Comments (that supports the algorithms). Instead, silence those folks for 30 days, or unfriend if their posts are consistently egregious. If you still love them, call them on an actual phone to check in, instead. Part of the enshittification of social media is that it preys on the worst social habits folks have always had (yelling over top of each other, spouting political opinions with no receipts, hogging all the attention, re-telling stupid trivia because we're bored and trying to make conversation, being cruel to people you disagree with, etc). If we cleaned up our interpersonal dynamics IRL, we'd likely do a lot of mop-up on social media as well. Probably not going to happen though.
I've tried a life without any social media, starting 4-5 years ago. No facething, no twitting, no insta, never touched tic-toc.
Life got better, especially my relationship with life, and people, and I have a large family, and lots of friends all over the world. I've experienced 0 downsides. I love my family but I don't miss seeing them "living the life", or being "blessed", in staged locations, lol. The "look-at-me!" of facething always seemed like more work than it was worth, a bit squirmy.
I sleep MUCH better; I'm less frustrated; I spend WAY more time in real time/the real world; I solve problems more effectively; my collaboration skills are better; I'm a better listener; my focus has improved by an order of magnitude. The use-case is BS... for me. In hindsight, it was snakeoil. Never, ever going back.
p.s. I became a much better stockbroker/portfolio manager when I stopped passively consuming news in 2002, and by better I mean 2 things:
1) my focus remained on the right things, and
2) I was less stressed and a better leader for my clients.
My suggestion: step 1 is to rescind the law that exempts SM companies from the responsibilities of a publisher. That they got away with this in the first place is a travesty; it unleashed harm for money, which a mature society should not accept.
I sound holier than thou above, and I don't want to; it's wrong. I have MANY friends and relatives struggling with addiction to the electronic stimulus. For many people it's as hard as crack cocaine... because it was intended to be so. SM companies used A-B testing, our well-researched weaknesses and biases to devastating effect.
I'm reading Mary Shelley's Frankenstein for the first time and, wow it's a page-turner! The symbolism of a crowd of pitchfork carrying citizens burning an empty SM office to the foundations is satisfying catharsis for me.
O, bless you. I was fortunate enough to retire from medical practice before I needed a smart phone and subsequently never bought one. Social media has, therefore, never existed for me. I use the internet as a research tool and communicate by email when I need to, but that's it. Everything I've ever heard or read has bemoaned humanity's addiction to SM, which I can understand, but for me it's strictly theoretical in the same way that cocaine use is a problem for some people. It's like Mars: I know it's there but it has zero impact on my life. Again, I recognize that this is pure luck. I applaud you for being able to make the choice to step back.
Maybe I am being pedantic, Matt - but you just wrote an entire article about social media and smartphones, but somehow headlined it as being an article "about" the Internet.
The Internet isn't actually doing ANY of these things. It is a globe spanning network of networks, and it does not have an opinion on what traffic is traversing it. The Internet is literally a collection of routers and fiber optics, and nothing more.
The equivalent would be to write an entire article about how many people are killed by cars every year, but writing the article from the perspective that the material we build our highways out of is the problem. Or complaining about prank calls from the perspective that the phone company should "do something" about it.
The Internet is a VERY neutral medium. Yes, having the ability to communicate instantly around the globe provides a new facet to what humans can do - and like any technological innovation, it has the potential to do good, or evil.
But it isn't the miracle of the Internet dividing us, it is social media, and WHAT we access using the Internet.
What gets me is the torrent of 'offers' that come from companies to 'help you out'. Free for now or for a period of time but then the email comes with the info that they are updating or 'modernizing' the ap and now it will cost you. Bugs me no end.
Great column on evergreen topics (enshittification - feels like two t's is not right, but it is), social media shitt show (yes, I know, there's not supposed to be two t's, but I'm forming a pattern here), and making the internet in general less shitty.
Things I've noted that are increasingly becoming enshittified in my own life:
Politicians At All Levels (self-evident)
My Google Nest Mini (used to love it, now nearly unusable)
AI replacing regular Google Search (please make it stop)
Air Travel (let us count the ways)
Social Media (as you've outlined)
Newer Vehicles (the newest vehicles our family owns are 2008 Toyotas, which are still performing admirably past 300K, but I read so many horror stories of friends with unreliable newer autos)
Smartphone Battery Life (why I have little hope of the long-term reliability of plug-in electric cars)
Microsoft Windows (should have stopped at Windows 10)
Major Appliances (dreading replacing our 10 year old dishwasher, 20 year old gas range, 20 year old fridge-freezer, 30 year old Maytag washer-dryer, and 50+ year old furnace)
Late Night 'Comedy' Shows (please end these soon)
24 Hr News Networks From Anywhere In The World (unreliable, mostly entertainment)
The free market is arguably beginning to solve this problem on its own. Old-school moderated forums are returning with a vengeance in the form of subject-specific Discord servers, this time with the added benefit for participants (and drawback for the rest of us) that it's all mostly unsearchable on Google and unreachable without an invitation.
Anonymized, actively-moderated communities of interest on Reddit are still broadly popular, although I've noticed that the real action increasingly takes place in associated Discord servers.
WhatsApp-style group chats between real-life friends and family are probably here to stay.
What I think has failed/is failing is business models involving minimal moderation, and business models involving the intersection of personal lives and a giant audience.
I do a lot of hobby information sharing on FB, but it's still a cesspool of garbage. I left all the others. Until some method of weeding out lies and misinformation is accomplished, it will remain effectively garbage. AI will likely make it worse as deepfakes get better. Social media is cancer.
In some ways the best version of the internet was about 1990. Personal computers had limited connectivity and the internet fit a world where mainframes and mini computers where administered by system administrators. With micro computers and cheap internet access Pandora's box was opened. The Internet was built with limited security and virus checking, etc. was added by companies to make a profit off of the lack of inherent security of the network itself.
This is the problem with evolutionary software and systems. It is much harder to repair than it is to build stuff on top of it. Government isn't much help either. People who are sys admins, DBAs or system architects seldom rise to a high enough level to influence government policy.
Looking at the system from a legal context, every internet transaction is between 2 legal entities but often whose entities are bogus. People can do broad scale internet crime in seconds or minutes that a court will take years to resolve.
Social media is the cancer of modern society. It’s never ending push to further polarization and rage is why we act like we do. It’s why Trump is president.
I’ll miss parts of it but I’m going to delete FB and instagram. Never got into the others.
Less in the way of "Podcasts" Please. Many people do not remember things in Verbal form, but do much better when reading the written word. Is the "Gutenberg text" not the proof? Your asking for my written comment is an additional example before your eyes, not your "ears". PMR
Having to use real names would probably be a good start towards accountability.
Agree.
Yes, I have been seeing so much AI slop that people reshare not realizing it’s AI generated that I have gone from spending too much time a day on Facebook to not even opening the app every day anymore. It’s better for my mental health - but I do wish there was a way to keep the connections with people far away that I don’t necessarily want to give my cell number to.
I think AI will destroy social media though. Or at least as it used to be. But maybe that’s good. We need more face to face interaction and a rebuilding of our communities.
Could the platforms be programmed in such a fashion that you must agree to accept AI generated content? I, for one, would decline, at least then knowing that what I was receiving was human generated content.
There are some AI detector tools. They're imperfect - missing a small percent with false positives being a larger concern. (Especially if someone has used a tool like grammarly to help with their grammar and proofreading - it becomes more likely to be flagged as AI generated falsely.)
The bigger thing is it's not just bots who post it, but genuine people who create an AI prompt and then post something for clicks/likes/etc. I think it's so ubiquitous at this point that it would be hard to stop. I do like this idea - I'm just not sure what implementation would look like. Maybe it starts with removing the bots from facebook?
I have always thought that claiming social media is the 'new public square' was incorrect. The internet itself is the modern public square. Anyone can create a website, blog etc. to broadcast their opinions (informed or otherwise uninformed) just like the oddball that used to stand on the street corner handing out flyers of a weird ideology. Social media is simply using someone else's soapbox in the public square.
Individual human beings could do a lot to improve the situation if we have the will and capacity. Personal posts about our lives or our small businesses only--rather than re-posting without verifying from g-d-knows-what-source. Refuse the 'pay-to-play' and learn organic content growth strategies for small businesses. Spend less time online and go see your friends IRL, start entertaining at home again. And set boundaries online. If you see people re-posting crap: don't argue in the Comments (that supports the algorithms). Instead, silence those folks for 30 days, or unfriend if their posts are consistently egregious. If you still love them, call them on an actual phone to check in, instead. Part of the enshittification of social media is that it preys on the worst social habits folks have always had (yelling over top of each other, spouting political opinions with no receipts, hogging all the attention, re-telling stupid trivia because we're bored and trying to make conversation, being cruel to people you disagree with, etc). If we cleaned up our interpersonal dynamics IRL, we'd likely do a lot of mop-up on social media as well. Probably not going to happen though.
I've tried a life without any social media, starting 4-5 years ago. No facething, no twitting, no insta, never touched tic-toc.
Life got better, especially my relationship with life, and people, and I have a large family, and lots of friends all over the world. I've experienced 0 downsides. I love my family but I don't miss seeing them "living the life", or being "blessed", in staged locations, lol. The "look-at-me!" of facething always seemed like more work than it was worth, a bit squirmy.
I sleep MUCH better; I'm less frustrated; I spend WAY more time in real time/the real world; I solve problems more effectively; my collaboration skills are better; I'm a better listener; my focus has improved by an order of magnitude. The use-case is BS... for me. In hindsight, it was snakeoil. Never, ever going back.
p.s. I became a much better stockbroker/portfolio manager when I stopped passively consuming news in 2002, and by better I mean 2 things:
1) my focus remained on the right things, and
2) I was less stressed and a better leader for my clients.
My suggestion: step 1 is to rescind the law that exempts SM companies from the responsibilities of a publisher. That they got away with this in the first place is a travesty; it unleashed harm for money, which a mature society should not accept.
I sound holier than thou above, and I don't want to; it's wrong. I have MANY friends and relatives struggling with addiction to the electronic stimulus. For many people it's as hard as crack cocaine... because it was intended to be so. SM companies used A-B testing, our well-researched weaknesses and biases to devastating effect.
I'm reading Mary Shelley's Frankenstein for the first time and, wow it's a page-turner! The symbolism of a crowd of pitchfork carrying citizens burning an empty SM office to the foundations is satisfying catharsis for me.
O, bless you. I was fortunate enough to retire from medical practice before I needed a smart phone and subsequently never bought one. Social media has, therefore, never existed for me. I use the internet as a research tool and communicate by email when I need to, but that's it. Everything I've ever heard or read has bemoaned humanity's addiction to SM, which I can understand, but for me it's strictly theoretical in the same way that cocaine use is a problem for some people. It's like Mars: I know it's there but it has zero impact on my life. Again, I recognize that this is pure luck. I applaud you for being able to make the choice to step back.
I totally agree with your STEP 1 - if Meta was legally responsible for what is happening to its users, I think the world would be a better place,
Maybe I am being pedantic, Matt - but you just wrote an entire article about social media and smartphones, but somehow headlined it as being an article "about" the Internet.
The Internet isn't actually doing ANY of these things. It is a globe spanning network of networks, and it does not have an opinion on what traffic is traversing it. The Internet is literally a collection of routers and fiber optics, and nothing more.
The equivalent would be to write an entire article about how many people are killed by cars every year, but writing the article from the perspective that the material we build our highways out of is the problem. Or complaining about prank calls from the perspective that the phone company should "do something" about it.
The Internet is a VERY neutral medium. Yes, having the ability to communicate instantly around the globe provides a new facet to what humans can do - and like any technological innovation, it has the potential to do good, or evil.
But it isn't the miracle of the Internet dividing us, it is social media, and WHAT we access using the Internet.
I would suggest this is pedantic, yes.
LOL
Fair.
The problem isn't the internet or even the social media platforms, the problem is us.
This is the internet we have shown with our actions we wanted and it is the one we deserve.
There is no regulation that will change the internet, the culture must change from within.
What gets me is the torrent of 'offers' that come from companies to 'help you out'. Free for now or for a period of time but then the email comes with the info that they are updating or 'modernizing' the ap and now it will cost you. Bugs me no end.
Great column on evergreen topics (enshittification - feels like two t's is not right, but it is), social media shitt show (yes, I know, there's not supposed to be two t's, but I'm forming a pattern here), and making the internet in general less shitty.
Things I've noted that are increasingly becoming enshittified in my own life:
Politicians At All Levels (self-evident)
My Google Nest Mini (used to love it, now nearly unusable)
AI replacing regular Google Search (please make it stop)
Air Travel (let us count the ways)
Social Media (as you've outlined)
Newer Vehicles (the newest vehicles our family owns are 2008 Toyotas, which are still performing admirably past 300K, but I read so many horror stories of friends with unreliable newer autos)
Smartphone Battery Life (why I have little hope of the long-term reliability of plug-in electric cars)
Microsoft Windows (should have stopped at Windows 10)
Major Appliances (dreading replacing our 10 year old dishwasher, 20 year old gas range, 20 year old fridge-freezer, 30 year old Maytag washer-dryer, and 50+ year old furnace)
Late Night 'Comedy' Shows (please end these soon)
24 Hr News Networks From Anywhere In The World (unreliable, mostly entertainment)
Netflix-DisneyPlus-Amazon-Etc Streaming (maybe .01% watchable shows)
Hollywood (eventually, something else will eclipse it, we can only hope)
I could go on - please add your own!
Thanks, Matt for a fun column!
The free market is arguably beginning to solve this problem on its own. Old-school moderated forums are returning with a vengeance in the form of subject-specific Discord servers, this time with the added benefit for participants (and drawback for the rest of us) that it's all mostly unsearchable on Google and unreachable without an invitation.
Anonymized, actively-moderated communities of interest on Reddit are still broadly popular, although I've noticed that the real action increasingly takes place in associated Discord servers.
WhatsApp-style group chats between real-life friends and family are probably here to stay.
What I think has failed/is failing is business models involving minimal moderation, and business models involving the intersection of personal lives and a giant audience.
I do a lot of hobby information sharing on FB, but it's still a cesspool of garbage. I left all the others. Until some method of weeding out lies and misinformation is accomplished, it will remain effectively garbage. AI will likely make it worse as deepfakes get better. Social media is cancer.
In some ways the best version of the internet was about 1990. Personal computers had limited connectivity and the internet fit a world where mainframes and mini computers where administered by system administrators. With micro computers and cheap internet access Pandora's box was opened. The Internet was built with limited security and virus checking, etc. was added by companies to make a profit off of the lack of inherent security of the network itself.
This is the problem with evolutionary software and systems. It is much harder to repair than it is to build stuff on top of it. Government isn't much help either. People who are sys admins, DBAs or system architects seldom rise to a high enough level to influence government policy.
Looking at the system from a legal context, every internet transaction is between 2 legal entities but often whose entities are bogus. People can do broad scale internet crime in seconds or minutes that a court will take years to resolve.
Written for me please -Peter at ve7pmr@gmail.com
Well written and thoughtful.
Social media is the cancer of modern society. It’s never ending push to further polarization and rage is why we act like we do. It’s why Trump is president.
I’ll miss parts of it but I’m going to delete FB and instagram. Never got into the others.
Less in the way of "Podcasts" Please. Many people do not remember things in Verbal form, but do much better when reading the written word. Is the "Gutenberg text" not the proof? Your asking for my written comment is an additional example before your eyes, not your "ears". PMR
How about written articles for people who like those and podcasts for those who like those?