One day, you won't be able to delete your social network account anymore. There will be a delete button, but the account will stay, and it will keep posting after you're gone, it won't care whether you are doing something else entirely or whether you're dead, the show will go on.
The shareholders will be content, because they see value in that. The users might not, but not many of them are actual humans, nowadays they're mostly AI, who has time to read and/or post on social media? Just ask your favorite AI what's the hottest trends on social networks, it should suffice to scratch the itch.
I made a tiktok account to write a comment on a video I hated. Now when i sign in again I am presented with lots of awful videos from the guy I dislike. I cannot delete my viewing history using the website, and following other accounts doesn't remove the obsession tiktok has with always showing me his videos as the default.
I'm not installing the app, so the only way around this is to delete my account completely.
Just recently, Twitter started making the default view "For You" instead of "Following" with no way to switch back. Fortunately there's an extension that fixes that and lets you eliminate the For You view entirely.
LinkedIn blocked my account for security reasons and is apparently asking for more information, so I don't care. I simply quit LinkedIn.
And is it just me, or has LinkedIn Recruiter become all the more useless after the LLM age? At least we're not renewing that abomination next year, opting to use more flesh-and-blood headhunters.
> the only way around this is to delete my account completely
You can choose the option to tell TikTok you are 'not interested' in videos like these, or block the account entirely. There are legitimate criticisms about social media algorithms, but I don't understand why you jump to the conclusion that you have to delete your account.
I'm having trouble finding it now but I recall a mostly dead physics forum using LLMs to make new posts under the names of their once prolific users. So this has already happened at least on a small scale.
It seems nuts to me shareholders would be happy about a bunch of fake users, at least ones that don't have any money.
We crawled the Internet, identified stores, found item listings, extracted prices and product details, consolidated results for the same item together, and made the whole thing searchable.
And this was the pre-LLM days, so that was all a lot of work, and not "hey magic oracle, please use an amount of compute previously reserved for cancer research to find these fields in this HTML and put them in this JSON format".
We never really found a user base, and neither did most of our competitors (one or two of them lasted longer, but I'm not sure any survived to this day). Users basically always just went to Google or Amazon and searched there instead.
However, shortly after we ran out of money and laid off most of the company, one of our engineers mastered the basics of SEO, and we discovered that users would click through Google to our site to an item listing, then through to make a purchase at a merchant site, and we became profitable.
I suppose we were providing some value in the exchange, since the users were visiting our item listings which displayed the prices from all the various stores selling the item, and not just a naked redirect to Amazon or whatever, but we never turned any significant number of these click-throughs into actual users, and boy howdy was that demoralizing as the person working on the search functionality.
Our shareholders had mostly written us off by that point, since comparison shopping had proven itself to not be the explosive growth area they'd hoped it was when investing, but they did get their money back through a modest sale a few years later.
I think dang's intention here is to prohibit undisclosed comments posted by either bots or lazy humans, not topical, attributed comments that were generated by models and posted as part of a good-faith discussion by actual users.
Can't speak for dang, obviously, but that's the rule I'd make in his shoes.
dang has made it clear that all generated comments and articles are off topic. Hacker News is for human discussion, and AI generated content undermines that.
A blanket prohibition may be futile but it's anything but pointless.
Once Hacker News becomes nothing but bots posting stories written by bots for other bots to comment on - which is the inevitable end point of a permissive attitude towards this stuff - what even is the fucking point to any of this? SEO juice?
I don't even think it's a secret anymore, open or otherwise. As long as Vanity Metric Goes Up, it doesn't seem like anyone, anywhere, actually cares how much "economic activity" is fake.
Someone created a tiktok account using my email address. Tiktok won’t let me delete the account without first verifying it with my phone number. I refuse to give tiktok my phone number because I don’t want my phone tied to social media. I don’t have tiktok (or any other social media accounts) and don’t look at it. But I’m stuck getting several email notifications a day from them.
Not quite what you’re saying, but a couple of steps in that direction.
It might not even be an actual account. Tiktok does the LinkedIn and Facebook "growth hack" thing of pushing users to let it slurp their entire address book on their phones. One of the reasons that it "requires" a phone number is to do address book graphing. Tiktok will send the emails it collects "Hey, your friend X is on Tiktok" to try to drive more accounts. All it takes is one friend/acquaintance to click yes on "Allow Access to Contacts" and your email address is considered fair to spam "on behalf of" your friends.
Someone signed up for a Walmart account with my email address. Once every few weeks they order either sex toys, Dolly Parton paraphernalia, or beef jerky in incredible quantities, or some combination of the above, and I get the email receipt.
I am never, ever requesting that they delete the account.
I saw some of this stuff browsing other peoples' "Christmas wish lists", but I believe it's some kind of marketing attempt to probe your interests. "Hey, other people are buying this. Doesn't it look good/exiting/tasty?"
Poisoning data used by data brokers has been a tactic for at least a decade
If anyone using palantir wants to draw incorrect conclusions based on unverified data, the impact to them is certainly going to worse than it is to any of us normal citizens
If your credit is impacted because someone made a mistake, that still fucks you over. It doesn't matter if it's real or not because the entire point of centralized data collection and analytics is that you don't need to care, the people doing the collecting and analyzing do it for you. So you just trust them with whatever. It's on YOU, the consumer, to catch these mistakes and spend a painstaking amount of time trying to fix them, and ultimately the consumer is the only one who will face any consequences. And when it comes to credit, these consequences are very material. It means maybe you can't get a car, or a home, or even a job these days. I know my job ran a credit check.
If we imbue these new-age data collection and analysis companies like Palantir and Flock in our systems, a lot of people will suffer, and I don't think anyone cares.
A lot of this stuff happens at a level above the legal system - no amount of juries will save you. Thats one of the troubles with putting off essential shit to the private sector. The private sector is almost the wild west. We have EULAs and terms of service, so basically nothing.
My credit example is actually giving the opponents too much credit here. The bureaus are kinda government. Even that is better!
It's also not just about the juries. I recall when the "stingray" fake cell tower thing was first spreading across police departments there were articles about how some decided not to prosecute because the defendant had good lawyers that would require the whole setup being exposed. Now there is a lockdown mode on apple that disables 2G. (maybe also, but not sure about, android)
But I’m stuck getting several email notifications a day from them.
I have a cellular hotspot with a phone number apparently recycled from someone who still has it tied to a fintech account (Venmo, or something similar). Every time this person makes a purchase, my hotspot screen lights up with an inbound text message notification.
This person makes dozens of purchases each day, but unlike my previous hotspots, this one does not have a web interface that allows me to log in and see the purchase confirmations. All I get to see is "Purchase made for $xx.xx at" on the tiny screen several dozen times a day.
Report the emails as spam, report the sender address to spamhaus. When enough people do this and tiktok's emails stop getting delivered, a one-click unsubscribe button in the email body that actually works will very quickly be born.
It seems like it is fiction, from what I could find. I was doubting it at times but it feels like for how old it was some of the tech wasn’t quite there then.
It's fiction, there's breadcrumbs at the top that list it as in the "Fiction" category. qntm is good at plausible sci-fi, e.g. https://qntm.org/mmacevedo
I can cancel any account at anytime. If a delete button doesn’t work start posting the most vile pictures you can find and watch yourself get booted out in no time. the easiest thing will always and forever be to kill your social media account
I don't know, I've heard for years that everything your write will be forever on the internet, but from my experience, it's the opposite. I tried looking into my old blogger, photobucket or AIM conversations and they're nowhere to be found.
Sure maybe they exist in some corporate servers when the companies were sold for scraps. And I suppose if I became famous and someone wanted to write an expose about my youthful debauchery, but for all practical purposes all this stuff has disappeared. Or maybe not. How much do we know about the digital presence of someone like the guy who shot Trump or Las Vegas shooter. Or maybe it's known but hidden? I'm impressed that Amazon has my very first order from over 10 years ago, but that's just not par for the course.
Why would AI steal my identity and post as me? I'm not that interesting.
My data is just not the valuable and I imagine that within the next 5-10 years AI will be trained almost entirely on synthetic data.
About 20 years ago, my name showed up on a handful of websites that I could find. Was related to school activities I participated in. Used to surprise me then.
Even my damn personal website was in the top 5 Google results for my name, despite no attempt at SEO and no popularity.
Today those sites are all gone and it’s as if I no longer exist according to Google .
Instead a new breed of idiots with my name have their life chronicled. I even get a lot of their email because they can’t spell their name properly. One of them even claimed that they owned my domain name in a 3-way email squabble.
The shareholders will be content, because they see value in that. The users might not, but not many of them are actual humans, nowadays they're mostly AI, who has time to read and/or post on social media? Just ask your favorite AI what's the hottest trends on social networks, it should suffice to scratch the itch.