Comment by rpigab
2 days ago
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.
> 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.
Classic "any interaction is positive interaction". That's modern platforms to you.
Do not try LinkedIn. Not even once.
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.
Facebook is spooky that way.
They track and log every reel viewed.
I suppose everyone does it but actually seeing it is another level of creepy.
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.
So I worked on a comparison shopping website.
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.
PhysicsForums and the Dead Internet Theory -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42816284
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Remember Twitter a few years ago?
Users are $$$. Nobody wants to talk about which are human and which aren’t. It’s all a game of hot potato.
I don’t think advertisers want to spend money for bot clicks.
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They don’t know (and don’t ask questions enough to know!) about the fake users - it’s no one look down.
As long as no one figures out it’s all fake, the line can keep going up and to the right and everyone is happy.
Anyone who starts asking hard questions may be up first on the chopping block.
Unless the line breaks, then bam. Everyone rushes to be the first for the door as the bubble pops.
The future is Google People: https://qntm.org/perso
This is wild, never even heard of it but kind of tracks
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37723862
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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.
Social media was a mistake.
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?"
Until an insurance company or palantir treats that data as your own, and you reap the consequences. Hope the LULs were worth it, though ;)
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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.
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.
There's a short story with a similar plot from "Valuable Humans in Transit" by qntm.
It’s still up on his website as well: https://qntm.org/perso
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
even easier - say something bad against few countries you cannot ever say anything bad about, that will get you canceled in seconds.
At that point, deleting an account stops being an act of exit and starts looking like a philosophical disagreement the platform simply ignores
How is this going to work with real id to get on the internet everywhere? Wouldn't that mess with the fake bot problem?
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.
I almost no longer exist and it’s kinda nice.
Only PeopleFinder and such show otherwise.
Information storage is the same as fertility.
"If you want to have a baby, you won't be able to conceive. If you want to stay childfree, the condom will break."
If you want to find old logs of your IRC and AIM buddies from 20 years ago, they're gone. If you say something stupid once, it's kept forever.
Users will be content too, corporations will find a way to do that.
Via discounts, promo codes, gamification, whatever else they’re using today to get people to install their apps and sign over their privacy.
The first paragraph sounds very much like the plot of Cam (2018).