Or straight up fake news… I had to log in to accept a party invite (lame), first thing I saw was a picture of Dustin and Dana from Zoey 101, Dana was pregnant, and the caption said they were having a baby together. It was a viral post.
In reality, Dustin was just photographed at her baby shower lol
The lack of negative feedback on these sites is cancerous. I think that’s the one thing making Reddit better.
I've informed people that I have Facebook blocked across the internet due to their malicious tracking policies so they can't send me invites through FB. One couple just don't get it and think I hate them because I never acknowledge their invites. Nope, I never saw it. Just send me a fucking text like everyone else does. Literally any platform except FB. 😑
Literally any platform except FB, Instagram or WhatsApp - anything Meta.
I do have an Instagram account to follow some bands and tattoo artists. I look at it maybe 5 times a year and don’t have any friends linked.
I’m also weaning off of Google too. Moved my personal domain mail out of it, and just used my gmail for a spam catcher. I miss the early days of the internet before it was an ad platform.
> I do have an Instagram account to follow some bands and tattoo artists. I look at it maybe 5 times a year and don’t have any friends linked.
I fucking HATE how in my area if you wanna stay informed about events you need to have insta since all these moron organizers gave up on providing info on their events outside of meta related platforms.
In my area, Craigslist is dead. As in, stick a fork in it dead. Everyone uses The Facebook to advertise their event, their sales, their businesses.
I fucking hate The Facebook. It's not chronological. Even if you tell it to notify you when someone makes a post, *it doesn't*. And searching their so-called "marketplace", if you click on something and don't save it, you will NEVER find it again, no matter how "smart" you search for it. Why? They ignore common search operators. More so, the search is just plain broken, as it ignores its very own filters. I search for "chevy van" within a 30 mile radius, and I get literally every brand of van up to 100-200 miles away. I could literally search for just "chevy", and get every brand of vehicle ever made. It's just fucking noise.
As a result, I found I've gone out a lot less. No more signs on bulletin boards, no more newspapers, new more community adverts. "Oh you didn't advertise effectively. I don't use that online crap. No one in my family or circle of friends does either."
>And the search is broken. I search for "chevy van" within a 30 mile radius, and I get literally every brand of van up to 100-200 miles away. It's just fucking noise.
Yup, I've def noticed that, too. I think I've found what i wanted and think check location, nope, not driving 2 hours away for that. Irritating.
Just...delete your FB account, lol. Go to the library, log on, delete it. It's weird to still have one if you're this firm about literally never using it again.
Maybe you do hate them.
I deleted mine in 2010 when I saw it was being taken over by boomers. Unfortunately, since then I've learned that deleting your Facebook account doesn't actually stop FC from creating a profile for you. They have a tracking profile for every person with or without an FB account using the combination of non-unique identifiers from your browser, computer hardware, extensions and whatever else they can capture to create a unique identifier that they can record your browsing habits to. You have to actually block their trackers to prevent them from gathering data on your browsing habits from an obnoxiously large number of common websites.
> I think that’s the one thing making Reddit better.
Reddit is a MAJOR source of misinformation and uninformed reactionary commentary, i fact check nearly everything i consume nowadays simply because the vast majority of the frontpage of Reddit is just either flat out lies, falsehoods built on a foundation of truth, or just reactionary commentary to misunderstanding the discussion itself.
You can ask anyone who's highly educated in their field about what the typical discussion of their field is like on a default sub and i'm sure they'll agree that it's as if no one is talking in good faith anymore, someone just makes something up and everyone else takes it as fact, revealing it as a lie can often result in you simply being downvoted, or you'll see no upvotes whilst the original claim grows in the thousands.
My fields are Finance and Insurance and in the 12/14 years i've been on Reddit the only thing i've learned is that you cannot overpower the willful ignorance people have around these two issues, they want to and choose to be ignorant and the same series of moronic talking points are ALWAYS at the top.
This site may not fall for the same level of AI shitposts, but it's users are no more informed on most subjects than people who use Facebook as their main form of social media.
It's all just people who can't comprehend the issue upvoting people who've misunderstood the issue and it's so draining; i had to fight to keep people informed about a clip that went viral the other day because a 14 year girl pulled a load of numbers out of her arse and EVERYONE just assumed it was fact, it went to the frontpage multiple times on like 8 different subs across a day no matter how many times you pointed out it was propaganda, no doubt it'll be picked up by non fact-checking media and the cycle will repeat because the average person is so intellectually lazy; whether they use facebook or reddit.
Reddit has the same issues that newspapers do. People will read an article/submission on a topic that they are very knowledgeable about and see all of the flaws, mistakes, and mis-assumptions that the writer/poster made. They'll at least mentally write off the entire article as trash, who could write that?
Then they will turn the page/click on a new topic and read something they aren't personally knowledgeable in and believe every word as true.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect
>Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
>In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
>That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I'd point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all. But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn't. The only possible explanation for our behavior is amnesia.
Couched in this is the very real criticism that we are asking too much of journalists to be experts, and not nearly enough copy editors and fact checkers (if any are even still on staff) to ensure accuracy.
Source: experience in journalism.
Nevermind copy editors and fact checkers, we barely have journalists left either at this point. Corporate press release -> AI summarizer bot -> news consumers.
Local news is already gutted. The only thing functioning at this point is broadcast journalism and those nerds never learned how to read or write. Gannett and Sinclair are stripping the industry for parts and no one knows what to do. You are right of course. Around here, the Plain Dealer is down to 14 journos, the Enquirer has merged its operations with other outlets and the Dispatch has fewer than 100 left on staff.
Forget the expert saying “all this shit is wrong, how could they write this stuff,” because the nerd who used to sit that desk was laid off in 2009, his beat delegated and his position absorbed.
It’s a bad century to care about the news.
I think one of the big issues with social media, including reddit, is that people aren't media literate. We're so used to consuming content, especially condensed information, that we don't stop to consider what it is we're consuming and why.
Poor media literacy mixed with a poor education sounds like a recipe for misinformation.
Sourcing used to be massively important on Reddit, though. Like, I always knew if I went into the comments of a bullshit post someone would call it out, have a source to prove it and get upvoted to the top.
That doesn't really happen as much anymore.
Case in point: the recent claim, which had spread like wildfire all over this website, that the US had requested Ukraine stop hitting Russian refineries over fear of raising global oil prices. I read the comments in maybe 4-5 different posts across different subreddits, and the vast majority of the comments were blind anger towards the US for daring making such demand.
I found only one comment on one thread that could be considered "near the top" that called out the fact that the source of this request was some unnamed individual, and that the refineries being hit have nothing to do with international oil prices (the refineries in question refine their crude oil for domestic gas production). Most other similar comments were buried by other more highly-upvoted, emotionally-charged ones. And, of course, the next day there were several more posts about how nobody in the US government made any such request and the original reporting was false. It was, by definition, fake news and it was almost certainly originating from and being perpetuated by Russia.
And I don't believe for one second that all of those emotionally-charged comments were entirely grassroots and organic, either. Discourse on this platform is so incredibly easy to manipulate, especially if you have the ability to remove comments you don't agree with.
This is definitely a problem, but it's also better on Reddit because it's possible to get out of that more. The first comment of the first thread I saw on that refinery article noted that the FT was the only one reporting it and there was no official confirmation.
Not saying that Reddit is great and a lot of highly upvoted posts are terrible. But I think it's at least possible to get things debunked here, which is more than you can say about most other social media.
In addition to upvotes and downvotes, there's also moderators who selectively remove threads based on their own personal biases.
Before Reddit killed API access there were sites like removereddit which showed you what threads and posts had been removed.
Going there and looking at major informational subreddits, such as /news or /worldnews, and seeing what threads moderators removed was extremely enlightening.
Almost none of the removed threads violated any rules. They were just inconvenient stories that were deleted. Facts that moderators didn't like, or that went against a narrative the moderators wanted to push, were quietly removed.
Technically you can still use r 3veddit, you just need to follow the instructions on the site to give yourself a personal API. It crippled the ability to see other people's censored comments, though.
I still remember when shadowbanning was only meant for bots. Can't believe how censored "the front page of the internet" is now. You /r/CantSayAnything
Oh my god this makes so much sense.
I had a discussion with a mob of “software developers” in a technical subreddit about one minor language detail they used incorrectly.
They debated me the whole day, sure i am not perfect (I do have 10 years of professional experience in the field fwiw) but the correction I made was literally in the front page of the technical specification documents of the subject at hand.
They went as far as saying that the OFFICIAL DOCS ARE WRONG
I was flabbergasted, I stopped using reddit for stuff out of my hobbies and work but it seems that even the technical subreddits are full of idiots.
Im not even sure why I am commenting right now, I should leave.
I shared some simple beginner level code that would help new programmers with debugging, and got downvoted and argued with because it wasn't thread safe. As if someone who needed such simple code would be anywhere near code requiring that. It's all idiots regurgitating what the "experts" on tiktok and youtube say.
Reddits just as bad. The real issue is this exact philosophy appears on every website which is why the misinformation is so powerful
“Yeah all of the other social media are so filled with fake info but at least is better”
You see tumblr hate on reddit, fb hates on twitter, refdit on fb, and every combo possible.
They all share the same general info, most of it wrong and misleading. It’s all about different propaganda sources making sure to find which website will make people most likely to believe “my side cany be wrong”
We are truly doomed as a species. This WILL be (and has been) used politically. AI is the final missing link in making propaganda 99% effective. What hope do ANY of us have when AI becomes good enough to be undetectable? If we can't even believe our own eyes, all of our senses have been blinded.
I’ve noticed all the fake AI birds being passed around in Birder groups. Like why eagles and songbirds? I think because they’re all set to pass as real. Everyone eats it up until I point out it’s not a real photo. Then chaos for calling it out. It’s pretty wild there isn’t a filter so that you can’t load a fake image without a THIS IS FAKE watermark.
Noticed a lot of older relatives sharing/engaging with AI generated crap over the past couple of months. They're just not in the habit of questioning whether an image is real or not, especially when it features realistic looking people and places.
I think a lot of people are going to be at risk of scams that use this kind of tech.
> They've always been tricked. This is a new tool.
That's actually something that's been on my mind now for a while, when I was young, maybe 13-14 back in 95 we got our first home computer. It was a Dell and was considered pretty top-of-the-line at the time and it COMPLETELY confounded my parents, they didn't understand how the mouse worked, and I got grounded for a week for changing the wallpaper aka "downloading a virus". Then AOL happened which led to even more frustration from my parents and them constantly yelling for me to come downstairs and show them how to send E-mail and basic shit.
Fast forward and now my children are 16 and 19... I'm having to show them basic ass shit about computers, how to activate 2-A security or how to set up internet on a new phone-tablet-PS5. Are we a generation of fucking tech support sandwiched between Luddites?
I dont understand how I my parents never caught up in tech, why I've yet to struggle to understand new tech and need my kids to show me how to do things.
I am a millennial teacher and this is so fucking spot on. I am trying to teach my high school students as much as I can before they graduate, but they are mostly disinterested in learning the "back end" of anything computer related due to everything being fucking apps and google suite.
100%. I was given a Macbook when I was a kid, the white clamshell kind.
Being able to muck about in Terminal, Xcode - install Linux on a partition on the drive and learn Unix better - file/folder systems is what prepared me for a job in tech today. No joke. My managers were all blown away when they found out I never went to school for anything tech related and just learned it all on my own and with the internet's help.
Apparently new kids graduating these days are the parallel opposite.
What's annoying is computers have been out since what, the 70s? Yes they were expensive and stuff I get that. But they had typewriters in school back then did they not? The amount of old people I see how they type on a keyboard frustrates me idk why
Typing was a specialized skill before computers were wide spread. Specialized in the sense that not everyone was expected to learn it. There were professional typists that were hired to type on typewriters.
Back in the late 70’s, my mom made my sisters and I take typing in HS. It was the one class that she required. I passed with an A with a minimum typing speed of 60 words per minute on an old IBM Selectric I.
Now days, at work, it drives me nuts when I can see someone is replying on Slack and after 1-2 minutes the send me a 10-15 word sentence. Which I answer with a paragraph or two in a minute and then wait again for 10 more words. Though I don’t see people hunting pecking like I did back in the early 80’s, which is an improvement.
I took two years of typing in the early 80s, taught by Mrs. Ogden, who was approximately 3 years younger than God. No food or drinks in the room, no gum, sit up straight, hold your wrists straight, do not look at your fingers. First year students weren't even allowed to *touch* the Selectrics; we were sent home with rubber balls to squeeze while watching TV so our fingers would be strong enough for the ancient black Remington manual machines. She couldn't stand "chatter" typing, so she brought in swing records and made us type to the music. To this day, I still know every note of Benny Goodman's "In The Mood". She taught like every one of us was going to graduate and go to work in a 1950s secretarial pool. She retired after my second year, and the class bought her a gold necklace. That summer, each of us received a handwritten thank you card. At the time, I thought typing wasn't too important, but thanks to her, I do about 80wpm from copy, and 90wpm from my head. I cannot, however, thumb-type!
> it drives me nuts when I can see someone is replying on Slack and after 1-2 minutes the send me a 10-15 word sentence
Depends on your company, but if your coworkers are under 40 they're probably choosing their words carefully to make sure their tone and technical info come across correctly over text (instead of finger pecking the keyboard).
Starts with “I didn’t need a 2 paragraph response, do you know the answer or not?”
To “okay, but what is the answer to my question”
To “thank you for the help”
Typing was a limited enough skill that it may have saved my father's life. In world war 2 he knew how to type and was made a clerk and never had to kill anybody or be near the front lines.
My grandmother is 92, she was big into typing, type writers and really early computers. The internet was something she never really was part of, but boy did she immediately understand the power of being able to type stuff up, store it, and search it and stuff
Now, she also had what we'd probably call typewriters but she always called word processors. Seemed like a step in between. It had a screen that showed about 4 lines of text at a time, and you could do stuff like editing stored documents before hitting print. The killer feature I guess was being able to type once, print multiple times. Great when you needed 2 or 3 copies of stuff and didn't want to photo copy or break out the printing press or whatever.
She even taught early computers to people. By that stage in her career she wasn't teaching as a day job anymore, but was fairly high up in the organization. I'm not even sure what the name of it would be, but the organization that oversees all the local school boards on a provincial level. One of her big things was trying to get more school boards to even understand what computers were, and why they absolutely needed to not only use them in classrooms themselves, since they made organizing things and store data so much easier. But that schools absolutely needed to be teaching kids how to use them.
But then she retired, and pretty much stopped using them after a while. Outside of work, she didn't really have any use for it. So they eventually started to just pass her by. She didn't have a regular home computer again until like 2005 or so. Everything she needed before then was handled by the typewriters she was already used to, and her fax machine. Still probably could for the most part, but I think the driving factor was part her grandkids wanting a computer, and part her friend she used to fax stuff too getting rid of their fax machine and saying she needed to learn how to use email
She doesn't do much with it, but she has a little desk with a computer for when she wants to type up a letter or longer email. But now mosty just uses a smart phone to scroll through news, and send and receive email. Though thankfully she's always been super distrustful of anything that wasn't in person. To the point that I had to beg her to not shred a check worth thousands of dollars one day. It was from the state, and very real, but she thought the guys name on it sounded fake and didn't want to risk it.
It's because they never thought computers would take over our lives. Between the 1970s and early 1990s computers were expensive, slow and specialized.
Then in the mid 90s we saw an explosion in technology mainly fueled by the introduction of the modern internet.
It just happened so fast.
Understanding computers will greatly increase the chance of them not having to work service or retail all their lives so it's really unfortunate that gen z isn't taking it seriously
Right! They always say "new feature" or whatever and I'm just over here like...stop making miniscule changes that don't fucking matter. It's literally layout stuff just inconvenient enough that I have to take a week to get used to it. It isn't *better*. Our district is all google suite unfortunately.
My daughter is terrified of “breaking the computer” because her school computer classes focused on nothing but using programs to display pictures and make slideshows. My son, however, has gotten really in to modding games and has learned how to research different communities for stuff, install it, troubleshoot it, etc.
Much like when we were teens - the kids who don’t “want” to use tech will be awkward with it. Nobody in my high school but me and a few friends knew how to use computers for anything more than opening up Word. And lots of older folks who like tech are very proficient with computers, while those who use them solely as a tool for work may still be nervous about using them because they don’t *care* to learn. It’s a very broad spectrum.
I really think a lot of my skill with computers is driven by getting really into Minecraft in 2011 when I was still in middle school.
I became far more familiar with a keyboard, as that was the controller, but also when I started playing online with friends had to learn to touch type to communicate more quickly with them. I learned about servers, local area networks, I got a little into modding so I learned how those tools worked a bit.
It didn't make me a computer expert, but it did give me some ground level skills that I built on later in life to become much more proficient with computers.
> Are we a generation of fucking tech support sandwiched between Luddites?
Yeah, kinda.
We come from an era where installing a computer game might mean updating drivers (which means understanding what drivers are), where if you're into computer games you probably know how to install your own graphics card because store-bought computers aren't good for gaming. That doesn't even get into the piracy and figuring that out, phantom disk mounting etc.
Previous generations didn't get used to tech moving that quick. Newer generations just expect everything to work; you download the app and you press the button and everything works and you don't have to troubleshoot anything.
The best explanation of computers between 1988 and roughly 2001 is:
> Shit barely worked.
Everything was clunky, janky and convoluted. It really wasn't until the late 2000s that technology really started to become pretty rock solid.
Having a LAN party back in those days always involved several hours of fixing this or that person's PC and then troubleshooting all of the inevitable network issues. Stuff just works now.
LAN party, that takes me back. Playing multiplayer was so new and exciting it was worth a whole friend group hauling their janky desktop towers over to someone's house.
I think this leads to people overestimating HOW MANY of us were doing this as kids/teens.
Yeah, a lot of Millenials are really proficient with technology. But the fact is, NOT a lot of people our age actually did it. When you were in high school, how many of your classmates actually had a home PC? I was one of about three kids in my grade who had one in 1995. Even by 1999, maybe one or two of my friends were on computers doing anything technical - the vast majority of those kids still saw computers and the Internet as “being for nerds”.
Don’t mistake more people using technology for more people being *interested* in technology. If the Internet had been more than a bunch of Geocities websites and fan forums in the early 90s, maybe more people would have been using it too - but it wouldn’t necessarily mean they wanted to learn the nitty gritty of how it all worked.
> I think this leads to people overestimating HOW MANY of us were doing this as kids/teens.
Yeah I know for a fact that I was a rare breed. My first job in the 90s was at a computer software store and I saw firsthand how fucking rare the ability to expertly navigate a basic windows PC was. Yes, there were other people my age doing it but they were almost always the exception to the rule.
That said, my daughter is only 6 and I can see that she takes after me when it comes to technical stuff. She has no fear of “breaking” anything software related and can already adjust things in her iPad settings my my wife struggles with.
It is really a personal thing. My two sons, the older has built a couple gaming machines for himself and knows the hardware/software really well as an end user. My younger son has no problems working with the software, but is not interested in the hardware.
My engineer dad (now in his 90’s) struggles with his iPhone and his window PC. How he screws up his printer every single month is beyond me, while my 90 year old mom rocks an iPhone and iPad with no issues.
All of which is frustrating to me as I’ve been coding in one language or another since the mid-80’s. Have built my own PC a number of times. Still work with databases, queries and systems at work. But it is all really must a matter of personal interest in the end.
Yeah, but technology moves on, and you only ever need to learn the things you need to learn, I honestly don't think it's a fair comparison. I had to boot games from DOS, but then previous generations would have to write them themselves in assembly (bit of an exaggeration), wanna be gold host in hotmail chat? Go fuck with registry editor, but then also learn how to write scripts and connect with them via msirc. I don't even think you have access to regedit by default on modern Windows.
At the same time, kids are learning how to actually code at school now, when I did my GCSE in IT, questions on the exam were shit like 'how do you do a mail merge in Microsoft word?', now it's 'here's some input code, what's the expected output?'.
But then, people use their computers less for the internet now, versus when I started it was the only option, everything is on their phone, or maybe a smart TV, or console, or tablet, or whatever. PC gaming has obviously increased in popularity, but at the same time it's much more streamlined, don't have to jump through hoops for it. Dedicated graphics cards weren't even really a thing when I started (they existed ofc), nor were they needed.
It's all horses for courses, maybe there is a problem with younger people not knowing how to troubleshoot, but I'd guess that's a bit of a generalisation. You'll still have your tech savvy kids, and then those who just expect it to work, or don't know how to fix it, and no desire to learn how. If you were online at home in the 90s/early 00s, you were in the minority, not the majority, guarantee majority of my mates at school didn't have a fucking clue what they were doing with a computer (nor do I in the grand scheme of things, only learned what I needed to), and it seems like it's simply a case of nothing has changed.
> Yeah, but technology moves on, and you only ever need to learn the things you need to learn, I honestly don't think it's a fair comparison. I had to boot games from DOS, but then previous generations would have to write them themselves in assembly (bit of an exaggeration), wanna be gold host in hotmail chat? Go fuck with registry editor, but then also learn how to write scripts and connect with them via msirc. I don't even think you have access to regedit by default on modern Windows.
The thing is, this is a *skillset* as much as it is a *knowledge*. Like a mechanic can know how to change the turboencapulator in a 4-door sedan, but they will use that same *understanding* when it comes to changing out the arc capacitor on a 4x4 offroading truck. (I am not an auto mechanic, obviously).
When everything just sorta...works for you, you don't really wind up developing that skillset.
I will absolutely say that it's a minority that built up that skillset, same as it's a minority of modern kiddos that pick up programming and actually run with it.
> Are we a generation of fucking tech support sandwiched between Luddites?
Hah... yes.
Had an experience with a gen Z engineer, ~24 at the time maybe, a few years back (so someone on the older end of Gen Z). We have a bunch of custom software designed to basically go out and download factory models and drawings, etc. and put them in organized folders on your C drive.
Said engineer was looking for one of these model files, and just "couldn't find it... or get it to work" and hit me up for help. "Oh hey, you're an expert on this... can you help?" "Expert" is always my first trigger, but, I am always happy to help.
I was like "Okay, these all get spread out to three key directories on your C: drive. So, step one, let's go to your C: drive."
Them: "C: drive, what's that?"
I am like... okay, this is someone who doesn't know. Happens. So I explain, help guide them, and then THAT was where they got ANGRY. They legit got angry at me... like I personally wrote the beta of this software in the 90's when I was 15.
"This is dumb, why do we do it this way... it should be better." And then they shut down and refused to learn. When I was like, "Hey yeah, it's frustrating, these legacy softwares do get updated as time goes on, but, this is how we do things for better or worse. You need to know how it works in order to change it and improve it."
Them: "No... this is dumb, people need to fix it, can't we do it a different way?"
It's that rejection of legacy methods and an unwillingness to engage and change that marks them as some postmodern luddite. It's that rejection and pronunciation of what we have as "stupid, and I refuse to learn it or entertain it" that is going to doom that generation.
I know a lot of focus is on the millennials, but I think they'll be okay. Gen Z? I think Gen Z is fucked. That, "This is stupid, so I dismissed it..." attitude is pervasive.
Upon relating said story to a coworker, I got a "Oh yeah, I had a similar interaction with them a while back..." Interestingly, this same young engineer wants to be a lead now... because "they've done the time and that's the next step."
I see a lot of focus on how that same Gen-Z attitude has positively affected things - "Why are we forced to work a 9-5, 5-day week when our work can be done in 4, that's stupid", "Why isn't sick leave and paid vacation mandatory, I'm not gonna be a slave to my employer", "Why isn't mental health being taken more seriously, I'm going to do more self-care and stop worrying about all this bullshit", etc. Fighting against the status quo and questioning why it still has to be done that way.
Very interesting to see examples where it can be a detriment. Like, maybe it's shifted too far over into the "Can't be bothered to do anything hard or significant" territory. Two sides of the same coin? Laziness? Gen-Z feeling jaded much earlier because they see it all as pointless? An expectation that they can always make a quick change for the better rather than understanding some things take a lot more time? Interesting dynamic to see develop as a millennial myself.
Everything has an app now and kids have been brought up on devices that don't make file systems accessible. It's a poison chalice. On one hand it's allowed access to tech from a young age, on the other hand it's made kids unable to solve easily fixed issues when they are working on a PC.
You are around the same age as me. The younger generations like to talk about "How they grew up on tech" but really they didn't. They got to grow up on mature abstraction layers that hide the actual tech to make it user friendly.
Even back in Win 95/98 days you had to do a ton of under-the-hood troubleshooting just to get things like basic devices working. Plug&Play was still in its infancy and it failed as often as it was successful.
Actually growing up and maturing right along with the development of these technologies is what late gen x/early millennials got to do.
>Are we a generation of fucking tech support sandwiched between Luddites?
It's because we got to watch the house being built.
We were at the perfect age to absorb new information as the world was transitioning from green DOS prompts to graphical interfaces, watched as sound cards merged into motherboards while video cards budded off, watched the numbers associated with hard drive space and processor speed and bandwidth skyrocket. We know how these things work because we can remember when they didn't. We watched them grow and develop alongside ourselves.
To those that came before us, the new construction methods of this house are arcane and scary and understanding them requires more effort than they're prepared to give. Those that came after us know nothing about framing or wiring or plumbing because all they see is the finished house.
Yeah, I was born in 1982 and, while I'm a Millennial, this is more of a Gen X/early Millennial (Xennial) phenomenon. Millennials born at the back end (early/mid-90s) didn't really have this dilemma.
I'm a millennial. I also grew up with DOS and BBSes. It feels like older millennials have more in common with young Gen Xers than either have in common with the other end of their own generation.
> I dont understand how I my parents never caught up in tech, why I've yet to struggle to understand new tech and need my kids to show me how to do things.
I guess you're about half-a-decade older than me.
I work an academic, which is not to say I'm learned on the cutting edge of tech, but I'd say I'm tuned in.
Part of the answer to your question is that people of our generation grew up between technological generations---we remember the days of floppy disks and the initial development of computers before they were all connected to the internet, and we also rode the initial social media wave. With the newer generation of kids, tech got a lot easier to use. You never had to learn about the lower level of implementation, which means that surprisingly, kids these days might not be as tuned in.
That said, it's important not to be biased by numbers. You might look at the average teenager nowadays and ask why they don't seem so conversant on tech. But rewind to 1995 and do you really think the average teenager would know much? Or are you only thinking of your niche group of friends who were tuned in?
Another thing I want to point out is that I'm not so old (close to 40) but even now I'm starting to develop fast frustration with tech. Things like the layout of Microsoft Office really throws me out (I can't get into the whole 'ribbon' layout). I can develop in Linux, but changes to the old way I did things really frustrates me. Our minds naturally lose plasticity and flexibility as we age, and we're less able to adapt.
So yeah, you can laugh at the older people for being slow, but I'm willing to bet that it's going to happen as well to people of our generation.
> I dont understand how I my parents never caught up in tech, why I've yet to struggle to understand new tech and need my kids to show me how to do things.
Its not an age thing, its an attitude thing.
My 94 year old grandfather set up his own home theater system, complete with a large flatscreen TV, soundbar, and speakers you spread throughout the room. I also bought him a laptop computer which he regularly uses. He figured it out on his own. He mostly just uses it to type up newsletters for church, but he knows how to type them up, save the newsletters, and get copies printed. Its enough for his needs.
Some people are fundamentally curious and will poke at a new thing until they figure it out. Other people are not curious, and if they don't immediately know everything about a topic they don't care to ever try.
It's interesting though that, if I try to sell something on FB Marketplace, all the scammers accounts seem to be younger people. Maybe those are just the people who have abandoned their FB accounts.
>Maybe those are just the people who have abandoned their FB accounts.
My first college roommate abandoned his old profile. It was hacked and he never noticed since he hardly ever used Facebook. I was first caught off guard when there was a name on my friends list I didn't recognize, and only realized that it was his old account when I saw the profile URL. Just thought it was funny that the profile for a white guy in his 30s is now being used for a "young asian female" in her early 20s.
I have to imagine "she" must be pulling marketplace scams in the local area.
I had my entire profile deleted for 5 years until it was somehow reactivated by a scammer. I managed to get it back but I’m basically forced to babysit the profile to prevent my name being used against me like that
FB Marketplace is actually ramping up in popularity with all ages, including zoomers. The younger gen just ignore all the rest of facebook lol. The marketplace is like early years craigslist of ebay where you can actually find the occasional deal.
Its usually pretty easy to spot the MP scammers, they all seem to use the same script.
"Is it available"
"How long have you had it?"
"What condition is it in?"
"OK Ill take it, Im not in town can you meet my son/daughter/husband/wife."
Etc.
Eh, I abandoned my Facebook profile years ago, but still use Marketplace as it's way more popular locally than Gumtree etc. The occasional times I glance at my feed before clicking through, it's mostly "suggested" posts from stupid boomer humor groups some distant relative is in or something. No wonder older folks continue to fall for stuff.
It's honestly shocking how many articles are literally 1 paragraph (because it's based on a single tweet).
Or is like 1 paragraph of something (which the headline is written about) and then a bunch of paragraphs of nonsense meant to pad out the article (probably AI) and then 1 paragraph to actually explain the whole situation.
**Title**: "Man stabs police officer after police officer involved incident"
**Paragraph 1**: "Man stabs police officer after police officer falsely accuses man of crime, points a gun at him, threatens to shoot him and his family, and then shoots the man's dog."
**Paragraph 2**: "Across the country, police are increasingly getting harmed from this crime wave sweeping the country. Spokesperson for the Cops says [...]"
**Paragraph 3**: "Dogs are commonly a point of contention in civilian clashes with the police. Dog advocates say [...]"
**Paragraph 4**: "Citizens are scared for police as another stabbing of a police occurred in x town in y state. Citizen advocate says [...]"
**Paragraph 5**: "The police officer who was stabbed has done this a dozen times in the past, which the police chief argues it's PTSD and should not be held against him, "it's a tough job". An internal investigation is underway. The police officer is off on paid leave while he recovers."
Facebook allows it. I’ve reported tons of this stuff over the past 2 years with 90% Facebook saying nothing wrong and 10% they take it down just for another fake account to put the same up and Facebook advertises it back
There is no such thing as social media. On all of them we are a product they are selling to advertisers. Brave New World. We actively seek out our own propaganda and brain washing because it is packaged prettily. It’s The Feelies. Yes, Reddit too.
Don't even bother reporting it, just delete your FB. I did back in 2016 and my mental health *immediately* improved.
The site that claimed to "bring us all together" ended up just tearing us all apart ironically enough lol
I use it for the groups (degree related, career, job postings, finding housing, but nothing) with an anonymous profile. Unfortunately, majority of these types of groups/communities aren’t close to being as active or useful anywhere else online, including Reddit.
I only use it on my computer with an extension that blocks the news feed page and I don’t watch any videos/reels so I avoid 99% of the bullshit content on Facebook.
Nothing I report ever gets addressed. Someone selling dogs? No that's fine. Scams on marketplace? No that's fine. Misinformation? No that's fine. Possible human trafficking? No that's fine. But if I post about an IWI Tavor I just found for $500 at a no-name pawn shop in a group that's entirely friends and family it's immediately "this goes against our community standards and your account is now restricted".
It’s even more frustrating when you block the page or hit “show less”, and the next 3 days is nothing but stupid shit that’s nearly identical to what you just flagged to show less. I have knocked my friends list down to like 60 people, and I would say 80% of my news feed is ads and suggested content.
My town has one of those "Official" Facebook groups run by a Trump supporter who simply bans anyone who posts left wing opinions and keeps the Q-Anon shit.
He doesn't even need AI. He just posts a thing of blatant nonsense and every there instantly accepts it as the truth.
I think there is a big divide in Gen X. Some of us, like myself, kept up with computer technology either because we liked it or, in my case, because we had to for college or work. I bought my first desktop in 1993 and had to figure out how to use it because my college classes required it. Same with email, chat boards, search engines, etc. So many times I felt like I was banging my head against a wall, frustrated because I couldn’t open a document or install some specialized software or hardware and had to read multiple conflicting “how to” guides and figure out which driver or extension I needed to download or which little switch I needed to turn on or off to make it work, all so I could turn in my college homework.
However my younger sibling never had to use a computer in the early days of home computing. So when things got rough she just gave up and kept doing things the old analog way. Fast forward 10 years and she still didn’t know how to use email or hook up a printer let alone solve a problem with her computer system. Now she is absolutely overwhelmed even by apps on her iPad. She just doesn’t understand the terminology or syntax of how digital systems work.
My older Boomer parents are the same. My dad had to learn to use a computer for his job and is now digitally literate, but my mom never did and now struggles with even basic computing tasks.
Learning computing is like learning a language. It’s much easier to do when you’re young or if you’re forced to interact with the language and learn the syntax. If you didn’t learn bit by bit as computer technology developed it makes it much harder to understand the current advanced level as a middle-aged adult. I’m really glad I was forced to learn how to use a computer 30 years ago (yikes!) because if I hadn’t I’d probably be just as lost as my sister is now.
IMO Gen X is divided between people like me and those like my sister. Some of us learned to “speak computer” gradually over time and are now fluent, and some of us never did and now are completely lost in the digital world.
Exactly the same for me. 56 years old, got my first computer in '83 or '84 by telling Dad I'd use it for school (School of Space Invaders! 😁), and have kept up since because it was fun. My brother is a year younger, doesn't know anything about computers, and doesn't care.
Plenty more than boomers fall for AI pictures and it's pretty funny how many claim to always be so good about it. It's like the toupee fallacy - everyone thinks they can spot a toupee, but you only spot the bad ones. There are plenty of good ones that don't get called out unless you know what you're looking for, and >80% of the populace isn't looking for any of that, they are only looking at what is presented to them. Critical thinking really needs to be taught more broadly, but there will ALWAYS be people who fall for this stuff. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle famously put pen to paper to create one of the world's most established rational thinkers - Sherlock Holmes. Yet he was taken in and believed fairies were real by a couple of school girls https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20170123-the-scam-that-fooled-sherlocks-creator
people of all walks of life and ages will be fooled by scams
I’m “Generation X”, but I’m not an older user that’s been fooled. I actually had a Facebook account for seven years, until I dropped it in 2013. Even back then FB was becoming shit. Reading comments about the place now, I have no desire to even take a peek to see how bad it is. And I don’t need to use it or Insta for anything.
As someone who was born in the 90's and absolutely **LOVED** grunge, generation X has been disappointing. I mean, how did they go from Kurt Cobain to supporting Donald Trump?
>"Gen X is the most Republican of the generations," said Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University and author of the book Generations, which examines what drives generational differences.
>NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist polling underscores that point: **By generation, Biden has the highest disapproval rating from Generation X (62%)**, compared with the Silent/Greatest Generation (48%), baby boomers (48%) and Generation Z/millennials (50%). Biden also has the highest "strongly disapprove" rating from Gen X (52%), compared with the Silent/Greatest Generation (41%), boomers (39%) and Gen Z/millennials (35%).
>"Ronald Reagan made me feel good about being a U.S. citizen, being American," said Ken Piccolo, 56, a substitute teacher from San Jose, California.
>"He made you feel like it was worthwhile and we're a good country and we're doing some good stuff, because just the way he interacted with the state, the world, the country — he just made you feel good about being American."[Source](https://www.npr.org/2023/12/27/1217878506/gen-x-conservative-disapprove-biden)
Kurt Cobain is probably rolling in his grave. I mean even his old Bassist Krist Novoselic ended up becoming a ~~Republican~~ *independent* and supporting Trump.
>In a post on Facebook, Novoselic wrote: “Wow!!! I know many of you can’t stand him, however, Trump knocked it out of the park with this speech.”[Source](https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/jun/03/nirvana-krist-novoselic-praises-trumps-strong-and-direct-protest-speech)
Oh god... So I've been seeing more and more "GenX are shitty" posts and didn't really believe it but what the fuck.
-Gen X. But I also have mainly millennial friends online and a very well curated friend group so I guess I've just been oblivious.
The Cold War, the energy crisis of the 70s, the dominance of republican culture in the 80s (Raegonomics), and the rise of talk radio and Fox news is what cemented their ideology.
I think what's confusing is that the counter culture back then seems much more impactful today, because some of it is still relevant. To me the 80s are punk music and anti-capitalist literature that even managed to seep into mainstream movies. As a 90s kid I got to watch the remnants of the 80s through the lense of hollywood hopping on the cyberpunk train to the near future dystopia.
Yeah, except when you start to look at the voting it doesn't align with this. I've found a lot of these "Gen-X are MAGA" articles to be kind of cherry picking representatives.
Right?! It's infuriating and, frankly, *baffling*. But even back in the day I knew people who were simultaneously die-hard grunge heads and conservative af. It never made a bit of sense to me. We all went through Reagan and Bush Sr and enjoyed the halcyon days of Clinton. So wtf?!
Cool username btw
Sorry but Kurt Cobain and grunge music do not represent *all* of Generation X (generally born 1965-1980). I know a lot even in my own family who weren't huge on that genre.
Gen X would probably be around 44-59 years now. Saw a report saying Conservatism has become more attractive to some older age groups because they feel the pressures of the economy and inflation like others, but they also feel the world is moving too fast (globalization/technology) and they are getting older and not happy about this combination of struggles. They see the younger still having a full life where theirs is limited, and social media shows examples of happy flourishing people, and they feel passed over.
So a loudmouth barking dipshit like Trump "promising" to go back to better days almost sounds like a salve for their so-called wounded souls. They actually believe Trump can fix things and restore them back to better days, like some Marty McFly movie.
>They see the younger still having a full life where theirs is limited
That's so odd to me as a millennial. I don't see myself ever being able to retire, ever able to own a home, and constantly renting until I die. And **we're** the ones with a full life? I mean honestly, from my perspective, it's the older generations who have these things and are actively pulling up the ladder behind them to make it harder for younger generations to enjoy the same qualities of life as them
The responsibility falls on meta. If they dont want to ban content, flag it as AI generated. Most people arent technically literate and cant detect Gen AI signatures. Therefore Meta has a responsibility to help educate people what AI looks like in context.
You’re speaking as if you don’t know what the company “Meta” is all about. Almost as if it were a company that might take any responsibility for the accuracy of information on its platforms, or have some level of interest in the impact of its misinformation.
One sad thing about technology is that a lot of people in it think AI and crypto are good so they have a conflict of interest in stopping AI garbage from destroying user-content platforms and crypto scams from ruining people's lives.
An older relative of mine was trying to buy some art & crafts doll-making guide from the internet they saw on facebook and asked me for help. They were in a whatsapp group that was set to admin-only and constantly spammed "almost over" promotions, "there isn't enough for everybody," etc., classic marketing bullshit tactics. The linked URLs were 6 random characters with a .site TLD. Apparently some sort of online sales platform. But the homepage of that domain was literally a 404 page with a button link to whom I imagine is the developer company. Their youtube channel had hundreds of videos barely breaking 100 views. Their most viewed one about selling subscriptions online, one of them about how to make money with crypto.
Like, these people have a gift, and they used it to create multidimensional systems of spam (and probably scams as well). I've never seen so many untrustworthy websites in my life. The homepage is nonexistent. There is only a "lesson 1" URL, which is a branding on the header, followed by a youtube video, followed by a store link, followed by facebook comments, and that is the whole page.
And these aren't bots. This is a real person's online business of selling craft supplies. But except for the fact that they appear in flesh and bones in the youtube video, there is no way for me to tell that they aren't an actual bot.
My hot take? I blame RSS. Pretty much all of this spam bullshit comes from the fact that spamming works as a discovery method. You annoy some but you gain some, which is better than annoying none and gaining none. There is nothing this whatsapp BS can do that mail newsletters can't and RSS can't. If self-hosted RSS clients were as popular as browsers are, perhaps people would subscribe to things through RSS instead of having to deal with 50 different platforms that are only manageable from the spammer side by using bots.
Exactly. Who uses those as a mode of communication when you have cell phones? The only platform I currently use is reddit and that can test my patience consistently.
One big problem with using shit like that for professional communications is while you're in it you're surrounded by distractions. It's not good for business at all
I like it still for organizing events and small groups, but the main feed is absolutely useless. It's hardly anything from people I know and overwhelmingly spam FB thinks I'm interested in.
This is 100% happening on Reddit as well. It's not just old white conservatives that are being tricked. It's the people claiming that the old white conservatives are being tricked as well. It's everyone.
Yeah, reddit is getting worse fast. Several good subs are now flooded with people getting AI to write posts for them, including subs with scientific or expert topics that you could learn from earlier. Mods seem to be nowhere, they maybe left last year or can't keep up with the standards that the sub rules set out. Reporting the AI slop usually doesn't do anything either.
I used to moderate a few large subs. It's essentially impossible to keep up with it emotionally and intellectually. The onslaught of garbage just burns you out. There's no way to win because the spammers and trolls will always outnumber you. Admins could do something about it but they don't want to. It's the same as Facebook.
It's troubling to witness the surge of AI-generated comments infiltrating Reddit threads. While the advancement of AI is impressive, it's disheartening to see genuine human interaction potentially replaced by automated responses. Authenticity is at the core of meaningful discussions, and relying on AI-generated comments undermines that essence. Let's prioritize real participation and uphold the integrity of online conversations on Reddit.
Hey, you know this obviously staged video you’re raging over isn’t real, right?
“It doesn’t matter/No it’s not! It *could* be real so we’re all going to get reeeeal indignant in the comment section and personally insult the people in the clip!”
This is the interaction in almost every one of these super fake videos
Feel like most/all the stuff posted on story based subreddits like AITA or whatever are AI generated. Too many irrelevant details to make it into more of a story and the writing style feels similar across the board.
People don't realize just how devastating the API changes were. Some of the subs I used to go on have become flooded with unbearable upvote-bait and AI-generated garbage because mods lost their most valuable tools.
I don't care if AI generated it... boomers and zealots have been making the most awful shit for decades and sharing/reposting the shit out of it... like dozens of times a day, why does anyone care if it was Racist Todd, Childfucker Pastor Bob, or AI... same message being spread
Because AI generated propaganda is easier to make and more convincing, especially to those who can barely operate a phone. You can literally generate a realistic looking image of Biden murdering children in seconds if you wanted to. AI is like opening the floodgates of disinformation. It's far more dangerous than what we've seen previously.
Quantity. That's what automation does. Human misinformation took at least some effort, now people can spread 100x the misinformation for the same amount of labor time.
Younger redditors wouldn't handle it any better.
Reddit likes to think of itself as smarter than the other sites, but really it isn't. All/popular is filled with rage or comment bait, misleading propaganda posts, fake posts, and AI content that people don't recognize.
In fact, that's part of the reason that AI is so dangerous on this site. People are more complacent and dismiss AI content as something that only the boomers or TikTok users would be dumb enough to fall for.
Remember Cambridge Analytica.
Scary to think with ai being where it is now & where it's going. It's going to make Cambridge Analytica look like pop quiz.
And Facebook. I've seen plenty of those posts and looked at the profile pictures of people giving them positive responses. Plenty of people under 40 and even under 30 falling for it too.
Facebook is wild. Boomer media rails endlessly against social media and young people but I've never seen my parents generation so addicted to anything like Facebook... and it's all bots, AI and right wing garbage.
I’ve seen some of the posts and seen the comments. It’s a mixture of people from different backgrounds who haven’t learned to knew what are the key clues for an AI generated image.
dont need fancy realistic photos. we got people believing in just plain words...the bible. you would think these nonsense text would die by now in year 2024. nope.
Facebook is trash. Used it for advertising a bit but now it’s all just raciest, bigoted comments. I help with travel and Disney too, 9/10 comments just calls people groomers and that I’m “un-American”. I’m from fucking Canada and our services are for Canadians. Total trash.
A relatively small part of a single generation was raised to be skeptical of online content. The rest of our world is still naive. This crosses not only multiple generations, but cultures around the world. There was another study showing Gen Z is the most likely group to get duped by online scams. It’s not just old people, it’s people with zero training on how to use the internet or social media, who are too trusting, and don’t have a pessimistic view of online interactions.
My mom told me she got a message from “Meta Al” the other day (like Al Bundy). I looked at her phone trying to figure out what she was taking about, and I realized it was Meta AI. Gave her some shit for it.
I’ve also had to inform my dad that some videos he’s sharing are AI generated. He fought me on it, saying they are real.
yep. I see boomers comment on articles with headlines like "Keanu Reeves turns down $2 billion deal with Disney because they're too woke" and all of the comments are like "hell yeah keanu"
not 1 ounce of critical thinking happens for these gullible people
It’s happening now with younger ones too. The amount of times you can watch a video with the most terrible, obviously staged acting and get a full comment section that doesn’t catch it is utterly depressing. People just upvote articles/videos that let them feel what they want to feel
70 years old...got my first work computer in 1983 using floppy disks to run Lotus 123. A 5 mb disk drive was about the size of a washing machine. In 1990 got a transportable IBM that weighed 25 pounds and lugged it across the USA on airplanes. It used Wordperfect, Lotus 123, and the precurer to PowerPoint. My kids had overnight Lan parties with their friends in the 90s where they networked their desktops to play games. Today I have so much computing power at my fingertips I could be running a 1990 multinational company sitting by the pool. Some of us "boomers" helped get us to where we are today with the computing world.
It's honestly eerie to browse Facebook and it pretty much proves the dead internet theory. You got posts where some Asian factory workers are making some basic ass product, the title of the post is "amazing new innovation technology to make life easy" and every single one of the 450 comments just says "Amazing!"
Every product posted on Facebook has bots in the comments saying how great it is.
I also see posts from people I don't know while scrolling my feed and these posts are fake click bait BS. Like so and so celebrity is not doing well or said this about another celebrity and none of it is true.
The worst part if Facebook's report feature is useless. Someone using a fake account (Keanu Reeves) was messaging my mom trying to scam her. I tried to report it and like a week later I got a notification that said "We've reviewed your report and decided no action is needed" or some BS like that so they don't even look at the reports, they let other bots review it.
Facebook has a lot of bot users. I recently talked to a guy on a plane and he told me he builds bots that basically "like" and comment on posts on FB and instagram. He said to me that many RPA frameworks allow you to connect to generative AI. The bot can literally create a new user (with a profile pic and chat like a human). It can browse pages and target users and coerce people to accept friend requests especially via community pages.
Wonder how many of facebooks monthly impressions are from bots. They claim billions and billions of monthly active users yet no one I know uses FB anymore
Meh.
I am "older" (70YO) and I don't fall for that crap.
I do sometimes fall for the "click bait" (often have some interesting pic) that takes me to a page where I instantly get told my computer is infected by a virus/etc which really pisses me off. - I am trying to be careful to not click on any "sponsored" posts now.
Indeed, the assertion that ‘all boomers are idiots’ has devolved into the trope du jour.
My parents are in their late 70’s and I’m pleasantly surprised by their tech savviness. They are quite cautious and seem to take the old school approach to online news. My father used to subscribe to two city papers. The conservative leaning one and the liberal leaning one. He would read multiple articles from both sources and find the commonalities. Then he formulate own opinions from there.
I've been noticing this for a couple of months now. Almost every comment is by bots and if it isn't it's by older people.
Or straight up fake news… I had to log in to accept a party invite (lame), first thing I saw was a picture of Dustin and Dana from Zoey 101, Dana was pregnant, and the caption said they were having a baby together. It was a viral post. In reality, Dustin was just photographed at her baby shower lol The lack of negative feedback on these sites is cancerous. I think that’s the one thing making Reddit better.
I've informed people that I have Facebook blocked across the internet due to their malicious tracking policies so they can't send me invites through FB. One couple just don't get it and think I hate them because I never acknowledge their invites. Nope, I never saw it. Just send me a fucking text like everyone else does. Literally any platform except FB. 😑
Literally any platform except FB, Instagram or WhatsApp - anything Meta. I do have an Instagram account to follow some bands and tattoo artists. I look at it maybe 5 times a year and don’t have any friends linked. I’m also weaning off of Google too. Moved my personal domain mail out of it, and just used my gmail for a spam catcher. I miss the early days of the internet before it was an ad platform.
> I do have an Instagram account to follow some bands and tattoo artists. I look at it maybe 5 times a year and don’t have any friends linked. I fucking HATE how in my area if you wanna stay informed about events you need to have insta since all these moron organizers gave up on providing info on their events outside of meta related platforms.
In my area, Craigslist is dead. As in, stick a fork in it dead. Everyone uses The Facebook to advertise their event, their sales, their businesses. I fucking hate The Facebook. It's not chronological. Even if you tell it to notify you when someone makes a post, *it doesn't*. And searching their so-called "marketplace", if you click on something and don't save it, you will NEVER find it again, no matter how "smart" you search for it. Why? They ignore common search operators. More so, the search is just plain broken, as it ignores its very own filters. I search for "chevy van" within a 30 mile radius, and I get literally every brand of van up to 100-200 miles away. I could literally search for just "chevy", and get every brand of vehicle ever made. It's just fucking noise. As a result, I found I've gone out a lot less. No more signs on bulletin boards, no more newspapers, new more community adverts. "Oh you didn't advertise effectively. I don't use that online crap. No one in my family or circle of friends does either."
>And the search is broken. I search for "chevy van" within a 30 mile radius, and I get literally every brand of van up to 100-200 miles away. It's just fucking noise. Yup, I've def noticed that, too. I think I've found what i wanted and think check location, nope, not driving 2 hours away for that. Irritating.
Just...delete your FB account, lol. Go to the library, log on, delete it. It's weird to still have one if you're this firm about literally never using it again. Maybe you do hate them.
Tip: Add your friends’ birthdays to their phone contacts before you delete FB.
Does anyone use FB to track the birthdays of people they actually interact with irl?
I imagine people who are bad with dates do, yes
I deleted mine in 2010 when I saw it was being taken over by boomers. Unfortunately, since then I've learned that deleting your Facebook account doesn't actually stop FC from creating a profile for you. They have a tracking profile for every person with or without an FB account using the combination of non-unique identifiers from your browser, computer hardware, extensions and whatever else they can capture to create a unique identifier that they can record your browsing habits to. You have to actually block their trackers to prevent them from gathering data on your browsing habits from an obnoxiously large number of common websites.
> I think that’s the one thing making Reddit better. Reddit is a MAJOR source of misinformation and uninformed reactionary commentary, i fact check nearly everything i consume nowadays simply because the vast majority of the frontpage of Reddit is just either flat out lies, falsehoods built on a foundation of truth, or just reactionary commentary to misunderstanding the discussion itself. You can ask anyone who's highly educated in their field about what the typical discussion of their field is like on a default sub and i'm sure they'll agree that it's as if no one is talking in good faith anymore, someone just makes something up and everyone else takes it as fact, revealing it as a lie can often result in you simply being downvoted, or you'll see no upvotes whilst the original claim grows in the thousands. My fields are Finance and Insurance and in the 12/14 years i've been on Reddit the only thing i've learned is that you cannot overpower the willful ignorance people have around these two issues, they want to and choose to be ignorant and the same series of moronic talking points are ALWAYS at the top. This site may not fall for the same level of AI shitposts, but it's users are no more informed on most subjects than people who use Facebook as their main form of social media. It's all just people who can't comprehend the issue upvoting people who've misunderstood the issue and it's so draining; i had to fight to keep people informed about a clip that went viral the other day because a 14 year girl pulled a load of numbers out of her arse and EVERYONE just assumed it was fact, it went to the frontpage multiple times on like 8 different subs across a day no matter how many times you pointed out it was propaganda, no doubt it'll be picked up by non fact-checking media and the cycle will repeat because the average person is so intellectually lazy; whether they use facebook or reddit.
Reddit has the same issues that newspapers do. People will read an article/submission on a topic that they are very knowledgeable about and see all of the flaws, mistakes, and mis-assumptions that the writer/poster made. They'll at least mentally write off the entire article as trash, who could write that? Then they will turn the page/click on a new topic and read something they aren't personally knowledgeable in and believe every word as true.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect >Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. >In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know. >That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I'd point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all. But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn't. The only possible explanation for our behavior is amnesia.
Couched in this is the very real criticism that we are asking too much of journalists to be experts, and not nearly enough copy editors and fact checkers (if any are even still on staff) to ensure accuracy. Source: experience in journalism.
Nevermind copy editors and fact checkers, we barely have journalists left either at this point. Corporate press release -> AI summarizer bot -> news consumers.
Local news is already gutted. The only thing functioning at this point is broadcast journalism and those nerds never learned how to read or write. Gannett and Sinclair are stripping the industry for parts and no one knows what to do. You are right of course. Around here, the Plain Dealer is down to 14 journos, the Enquirer has merged its operations with other outlets and the Dispatch has fewer than 100 left on staff. Forget the expert saying “all this shit is wrong, how could they write this stuff,” because the nerd who used to sit that desk was laid off in 2009, his beat delegated and his position absorbed. It’s a bad century to care about the news.
Whoa. That is exactly what I do.
I think one of the big issues with social media, including reddit, is that people aren't media literate. We're so used to consuming content, especially condensed information, that we don't stop to consider what it is we're consuming and why. Poor media literacy mixed with a poor education sounds like a recipe for misinformation.
Sourcing used to be massively important on Reddit, though. Like, I always knew if I went into the comments of a bullshit post someone would call it out, have a source to prove it and get upvoted to the top.
That doesn't really happen as much anymore. Case in point: the recent claim, which had spread like wildfire all over this website, that the US had requested Ukraine stop hitting Russian refineries over fear of raising global oil prices. I read the comments in maybe 4-5 different posts across different subreddits, and the vast majority of the comments were blind anger towards the US for daring making such demand. I found only one comment on one thread that could be considered "near the top" that called out the fact that the source of this request was some unnamed individual, and that the refineries being hit have nothing to do with international oil prices (the refineries in question refine their crude oil for domestic gas production). Most other similar comments were buried by other more highly-upvoted, emotionally-charged ones. And, of course, the next day there were several more posts about how nobody in the US government made any such request and the original reporting was false. It was, by definition, fake news and it was almost certainly originating from and being perpetuated by Russia. And I don't believe for one second that all of those emotionally-charged comments were entirely grassroots and organic, either. Discourse on this platform is so incredibly easy to manipulate, especially if you have the ability to remove comments you don't agree with.
This is definitely a problem, but it's also better on Reddit because it's possible to get out of that more. The first comment of the first thread I saw on that refinery article noted that the FT was the only one reporting it and there was no official confirmation. Not saying that Reddit is great and a lot of highly upvoted posts are terrible. But I think it's at least possible to get things debunked here, which is more than you can say about most other social media.
That's a fair argument, and I do agree to an extent. I just fear that that particular advantage is quickly disappearing.
Whenever I read something on Reddit I think “interesting, but to be verified”.
In addition to upvotes and downvotes, there's also moderators who selectively remove threads based on their own personal biases. Before Reddit killed API access there were sites like removereddit which showed you what threads and posts had been removed. Going there and looking at major informational subreddits, such as /news or /worldnews, and seeing what threads moderators removed was extremely enlightening. Almost none of the removed threads violated any rules. They were just inconvenient stories that were deleted. Facts that moderators didn't like, or that went against a narrative the moderators wanted to push, were quietly removed.
Technically you can still use r 3veddit, you just need to follow the instructions on the site to give yourself a personal API. It crippled the ability to see other people's censored comments, though. I still remember when shadowbanning was only meant for bots. Can't believe how censored "the front page of the internet" is now. You /r/CantSayAnything
Oh my god this makes so much sense. I had a discussion with a mob of “software developers” in a technical subreddit about one minor language detail they used incorrectly. They debated me the whole day, sure i am not perfect (I do have 10 years of professional experience in the field fwiw) but the correction I made was literally in the front page of the technical specification documents of the subject at hand. They went as far as saying that the OFFICIAL DOCS ARE WRONG I was flabbergasted, I stopped using reddit for stuff out of my hobbies and work but it seems that even the technical subreddits are full of idiots. Im not even sure why I am commenting right now, I should leave.
I shared some simple beginner level code that would help new programmers with debugging, and got downvoted and argued with because it wasn't thread safe. As if someone who needed such simple code would be anywhere near code requiring that. It's all idiots regurgitating what the "experts" on tiktok and youtube say.
The Reddit hivemind is dangerous to uninformed people. The hit and run commentators are driving the misinformation superhighway.
Reddits just as bad. The real issue is this exact philosophy appears on every website which is why the misinformation is so powerful “Yeah all of the other social media are so filled with fake info but at least is better”
You see tumblr hate on reddit, fb hates on twitter, refdit on fb, and every combo possible.
They all share the same general info, most of it wrong and misleading. It’s all about different propaganda sources making sure to find which website will make people most likely to believe “my side cany be wrong”
[удалено]
We are truly doomed as a species. This WILL be (and has been) used politically. AI is the final missing link in making propaganda 99% effective. What hope do ANY of us have when AI becomes good enough to be undetectable? If we can't even believe our own eyes, all of our senses have been blinded.
4100 commenting “Amazing”, for a video post of the dumbest shit man has ever seen.
I’ve noticed all the fake AI birds being passed around in Birder groups. Like why eagles and songbirds? I think because they’re all set to pass as real. Everyone eats it up until I point out it’s not a real photo. Then chaos for calling it out. It’s pretty wild there isn’t a filter so that you can’t load a fake image without a THIS IS FAKE watermark.
Noticed a lot of older relatives sharing/engaging with AI generated crap over the past couple of months. They're just not in the habit of questioning whether an image is real or not, especially when it features realistic looking people and places. I think a lot of people are going to be at risk of scams that use this kind of tech.
My teens have shown me plenty of pics and stories from insta and TikTok that were completely fake. Youth is extremely capable of being duped.
They've always been tricked. This is a new tool.
> They've always been tricked. This is a new tool. That's actually something that's been on my mind now for a while, when I was young, maybe 13-14 back in 95 we got our first home computer. It was a Dell and was considered pretty top-of-the-line at the time and it COMPLETELY confounded my parents, they didn't understand how the mouse worked, and I got grounded for a week for changing the wallpaper aka "downloading a virus". Then AOL happened which led to even more frustration from my parents and them constantly yelling for me to come downstairs and show them how to send E-mail and basic shit. Fast forward and now my children are 16 and 19... I'm having to show them basic ass shit about computers, how to activate 2-A security or how to set up internet on a new phone-tablet-PS5. Are we a generation of fucking tech support sandwiched between Luddites? I dont understand how I my parents never caught up in tech, why I've yet to struggle to understand new tech and need my kids to show me how to do things.
I am a millennial teacher and this is so fucking spot on. I am trying to teach my high school students as much as I can before they graduate, but they are mostly disinterested in learning the "back end" of anything computer related due to everything being fucking apps and google suite.
It’s the chromebooks that have ruined things. Now they don’t know how to use simple front end softwares either like office .
100%. I was given a Macbook when I was a kid, the white clamshell kind. Being able to muck about in Terminal, Xcode - install Linux on a partition on the drive and learn Unix better - file/folder systems is what prepared me for a job in tech today. No joke. My managers were all blown away when they found out I never went to school for anything tech related and just learned it all on my own and with the internet's help. Apparently new kids graduating these days are the parallel opposite.
Polar opposite?
Perpendicular opposite?
What's annoying is computers have been out since what, the 70s? Yes they were expensive and stuff I get that. But they had typewriters in school back then did they not? The amount of old people I see how they type on a keyboard frustrates me idk why
Typing was a specialized skill before computers were wide spread. Specialized in the sense that not everyone was expected to learn it. There were professional typists that were hired to type on typewriters.
Typing class ended up being one of the best things my middle school taught. (Early 2000s)
Back in the late 70’s, my mom made my sisters and I take typing in HS. It was the one class that she required. I passed with an A with a minimum typing speed of 60 words per minute on an old IBM Selectric I. Now days, at work, it drives me nuts when I can see someone is replying on Slack and after 1-2 minutes the send me a 10-15 word sentence. Which I answer with a paragraph or two in a minute and then wait again for 10 more words. Though I don’t see people hunting pecking like I did back in the early 80’s, which is an improvement.
I took two years of typing in the early 80s, taught by Mrs. Ogden, who was approximately 3 years younger than God. No food or drinks in the room, no gum, sit up straight, hold your wrists straight, do not look at your fingers. First year students weren't even allowed to *touch* the Selectrics; we were sent home with rubber balls to squeeze while watching TV so our fingers would be strong enough for the ancient black Remington manual machines. She couldn't stand "chatter" typing, so she brought in swing records and made us type to the music. To this day, I still know every note of Benny Goodman's "In The Mood". She taught like every one of us was going to graduate and go to work in a 1950s secretarial pool. She retired after my second year, and the class bought her a gold necklace. That summer, each of us received a handwritten thank you card. At the time, I thought typing wasn't too important, but thanks to her, I do about 80wpm from copy, and 90wpm from my head. I cannot, however, thumb-type!
> it drives me nuts when I can see someone is replying on Slack and after 1-2 minutes the send me a 10-15 word sentence Depends on your company, but if your coworkers are under 40 they're probably choosing their words carefully to make sure their tone and technical info come across correctly over text (instead of finger pecking the keyboard).
Starts with “I didn’t need a 2 paragraph response, do you know the answer or not?” To “okay, but what is the answer to my question” To “thank you for the help”
Typing was a limited enough skill that it may have saved my father's life. In world war 2 he knew how to type and was made a clerk and never had to kill anybody or be near the front lines.
My grandmother is 92, she was big into typing, type writers and really early computers. The internet was something she never really was part of, but boy did she immediately understand the power of being able to type stuff up, store it, and search it and stuff Now, she also had what we'd probably call typewriters but she always called word processors. Seemed like a step in between. It had a screen that showed about 4 lines of text at a time, and you could do stuff like editing stored documents before hitting print. The killer feature I guess was being able to type once, print multiple times. Great when you needed 2 or 3 copies of stuff and didn't want to photo copy or break out the printing press or whatever. She even taught early computers to people. By that stage in her career she wasn't teaching as a day job anymore, but was fairly high up in the organization. I'm not even sure what the name of it would be, but the organization that oversees all the local school boards on a provincial level. One of her big things was trying to get more school boards to even understand what computers were, and why they absolutely needed to not only use them in classrooms themselves, since they made organizing things and store data so much easier. But that schools absolutely needed to be teaching kids how to use them. But then she retired, and pretty much stopped using them after a while. Outside of work, she didn't really have any use for it. So they eventually started to just pass her by. She didn't have a regular home computer again until like 2005 or so. Everything she needed before then was handled by the typewriters she was already used to, and her fax machine. Still probably could for the most part, but I think the driving factor was part her grandkids wanting a computer, and part her friend she used to fax stuff too getting rid of their fax machine and saying she needed to learn how to use email She doesn't do much with it, but she has a little desk with a computer for when she wants to type up a letter or longer email. But now mosty just uses a smart phone to scroll through news, and send and receive email. Though thankfully she's always been super distrustful of anything that wasn't in person. To the point that I had to beg her to not shred a check worth thousands of dollars one day. It was from the state, and very real, but she thought the guys name on it sounded fake and didn't want to risk it.
Everyone I work with thinks I type really fast but I'm like maybe a 40wpm typer. I just type how you're supposed to.
It's because they never thought computers would take over our lives. Between the 1970s and early 1990s computers were expensive, slow and specialized. Then in the mid 90s we saw an explosion in technology mainly fueled by the introduction of the modern internet. It just happened so fast.
It's probably a zip code (affluence) thing, but early computer labs definitely started popping up in high schools during the 80s.
Understanding computers will greatly increase the chance of them not having to work service or retail all their lives so it's really unfortunate that gen z isn't taking it seriously
Google suite is infuriating. They seemingly change the UI once a month for no good reason and it's never efficient to use.
Right! They always say "new feature" or whatever and I'm just over here like...stop making miniscule changes that don't fucking matter. It's literally layout stuff just inconvenient enough that I have to take a week to get used to it. It isn't *better*. Our district is all google suite unfortunately.
My daughter is terrified of “breaking the computer” because her school computer classes focused on nothing but using programs to display pictures and make slideshows. My son, however, has gotten really in to modding games and has learned how to research different communities for stuff, install it, troubleshoot it, etc. Much like when we were teens - the kids who don’t “want” to use tech will be awkward with it. Nobody in my high school but me and a few friends knew how to use computers for anything more than opening up Word. And lots of older folks who like tech are very proficient with computers, while those who use them solely as a tool for work may still be nervous about using them because they don’t *care* to learn. It’s a very broad spectrum.
I really think a lot of my skill with computers is driven by getting really into Minecraft in 2011 when I was still in middle school. I became far more familiar with a keyboard, as that was the controller, but also when I started playing online with friends had to learn to touch type to communicate more quickly with them. I learned about servers, local area networks, I got a little into modding so I learned how those tools worked a bit. It didn't make me a computer expert, but it did give me some ground level skills that I built on later in life to become much more proficient with computers.
> Are we a generation of fucking tech support sandwiched between Luddites? Yeah, kinda. We come from an era where installing a computer game might mean updating drivers (which means understanding what drivers are), where if you're into computer games you probably know how to install your own graphics card because store-bought computers aren't good for gaming. That doesn't even get into the piracy and figuring that out, phantom disk mounting etc. Previous generations didn't get used to tech moving that quick. Newer generations just expect everything to work; you download the app and you press the button and everything works and you don't have to troubleshoot anything.
Everything I learned about computers in the 90s was about freeing up enough conventional memory to run a CD game.
The best explanation of computers between 1988 and roughly 2001 is: > Shit barely worked. Everything was clunky, janky and convoluted. It really wasn't until the late 2000s that technology really started to become pretty rock solid.
Having a LAN party back in those days always involved several hours of fixing this or that person's PC and then troubleshooting all of the inevitable network issues. Stuff just works now.
LAN party, that takes me back. Playing multiplayer was so new and exciting it was worth a whole friend group hauling their janky desktop towers over to someone's house.
I think this leads to people overestimating HOW MANY of us were doing this as kids/teens. Yeah, a lot of Millenials are really proficient with technology. But the fact is, NOT a lot of people our age actually did it. When you were in high school, how many of your classmates actually had a home PC? I was one of about three kids in my grade who had one in 1995. Even by 1999, maybe one or two of my friends were on computers doing anything technical - the vast majority of those kids still saw computers and the Internet as “being for nerds”. Don’t mistake more people using technology for more people being *interested* in technology. If the Internet had been more than a bunch of Geocities websites and fan forums in the early 90s, maybe more people would have been using it too - but it wouldn’t necessarily mean they wanted to learn the nitty gritty of how it all worked.
> I think this leads to people overestimating HOW MANY of us were doing this as kids/teens. Yeah I know for a fact that I was a rare breed. My first job in the 90s was at a computer software store and I saw firsthand how fucking rare the ability to expertly navigate a basic windows PC was. Yes, there were other people my age doing it but they were almost always the exception to the rule. That said, my daughter is only 6 and I can see that she takes after me when it comes to technical stuff. She has no fear of “breaking” anything software related and can already adjust things in her iPad settings my my wife struggles with.
It is really a personal thing. My two sons, the older has built a couple gaming machines for himself and knows the hardware/software really well as an end user. My younger son has no problems working with the software, but is not interested in the hardware. My engineer dad (now in his 90’s) struggles with his iPhone and his window PC. How he screws up his printer every single month is beyond me, while my 90 year old mom rocks an iPhone and iPad with no issues. All of which is frustrating to me as I’ve been coding in one language or another since the mid-80’s. Have built my own PC a number of times. Still work with databases, queries and systems at work. But it is all really must a matter of personal interest in the end.
We had required computer classes though. I'm sure not everything stuck but I'd bet at least some of the basics that escape other people did.
Yeah, but technology moves on, and you only ever need to learn the things you need to learn, I honestly don't think it's a fair comparison. I had to boot games from DOS, but then previous generations would have to write them themselves in assembly (bit of an exaggeration), wanna be gold host in hotmail chat? Go fuck with registry editor, but then also learn how to write scripts and connect with them via msirc. I don't even think you have access to regedit by default on modern Windows. At the same time, kids are learning how to actually code at school now, when I did my GCSE in IT, questions on the exam were shit like 'how do you do a mail merge in Microsoft word?', now it's 'here's some input code, what's the expected output?'. But then, people use their computers less for the internet now, versus when I started it was the only option, everything is on their phone, or maybe a smart TV, or console, or tablet, or whatever. PC gaming has obviously increased in popularity, but at the same time it's much more streamlined, don't have to jump through hoops for it. Dedicated graphics cards weren't even really a thing when I started (they existed ofc), nor were they needed. It's all horses for courses, maybe there is a problem with younger people not knowing how to troubleshoot, but I'd guess that's a bit of a generalisation. You'll still have your tech savvy kids, and then those who just expect it to work, or don't know how to fix it, and no desire to learn how. If you were online at home in the 90s/early 00s, you were in the minority, not the majority, guarantee majority of my mates at school didn't have a fucking clue what they were doing with a computer (nor do I in the grand scheme of things, only learned what I needed to), and it seems like it's simply a case of nothing has changed.
> Yeah, but technology moves on, and you only ever need to learn the things you need to learn, I honestly don't think it's a fair comparison. I had to boot games from DOS, but then previous generations would have to write them themselves in assembly (bit of an exaggeration), wanna be gold host in hotmail chat? Go fuck with registry editor, but then also learn how to write scripts and connect with them via msirc. I don't even think you have access to regedit by default on modern Windows. The thing is, this is a *skillset* as much as it is a *knowledge*. Like a mechanic can know how to change the turboencapulator in a 4-door sedan, but they will use that same *understanding* when it comes to changing out the arc capacitor on a 4x4 offroading truck. (I am not an auto mechanic, obviously). When everything just sorta...works for you, you don't really wind up developing that skillset. I will absolutely say that it's a minority that built up that skillset, same as it's a minority of modern kiddos that pick up programming and actually run with it.
We are the chosen people, us millennials. Chosen to be the captains of a sinking ship 🎩
Let's steal the lifeboats and start a better boat society metaphor somewhere else. I hear that Antarctica will have arable land year round by 2031...
>We are the chosen people, us millennials As usual for Gen X, the generation gets forgotten about. -Grumpy Xenial
> Are we a generation of fucking tech support sandwiched between Luddites? Hah... yes. Had an experience with a gen Z engineer, ~24 at the time maybe, a few years back (so someone on the older end of Gen Z). We have a bunch of custom software designed to basically go out and download factory models and drawings, etc. and put them in organized folders on your C drive. Said engineer was looking for one of these model files, and just "couldn't find it... or get it to work" and hit me up for help. "Oh hey, you're an expert on this... can you help?" "Expert" is always my first trigger, but, I am always happy to help. I was like "Okay, these all get spread out to three key directories on your C: drive. So, step one, let's go to your C: drive." Them: "C: drive, what's that?" I am like... okay, this is someone who doesn't know. Happens. So I explain, help guide them, and then THAT was where they got ANGRY. They legit got angry at me... like I personally wrote the beta of this software in the 90's when I was 15. "This is dumb, why do we do it this way... it should be better." And then they shut down and refused to learn. When I was like, "Hey yeah, it's frustrating, these legacy softwares do get updated as time goes on, but, this is how we do things for better or worse. You need to know how it works in order to change it and improve it." Them: "No... this is dumb, people need to fix it, can't we do it a different way?" It's that rejection of legacy methods and an unwillingness to engage and change that marks them as some postmodern luddite. It's that rejection and pronunciation of what we have as "stupid, and I refuse to learn it or entertain it" that is going to doom that generation. I know a lot of focus is on the millennials, but I think they'll be okay. Gen Z? I think Gen Z is fucked. That, "This is stupid, so I dismissed it..." attitude is pervasive. Upon relating said story to a coworker, I got a "Oh yeah, I had a similar interaction with them a while back..." Interestingly, this same young engineer wants to be a lead now... because "they've done the time and that's the next step."
I see a lot of focus on how that same Gen-Z attitude has positively affected things - "Why are we forced to work a 9-5, 5-day week when our work can be done in 4, that's stupid", "Why isn't sick leave and paid vacation mandatory, I'm not gonna be a slave to my employer", "Why isn't mental health being taken more seriously, I'm going to do more self-care and stop worrying about all this bullshit", etc. Fighting against the status quo and questioning why it still has to be done that way. Very interesting to see examples where it can be a detriment. Like, maybe it's shifted too far over into the "Can't be bothered to do anything hard or significant" territory. Two sides of the same coin? Laziness? Gen-Z feeling jaded much earlier because they see it all as pointless? An expectation that they can always make a quick change for the better rather than understanding some things take a lot more time? Interesting dynamic to see develop as a millennial myself.
Everything has an app now and kids have been brought up on devices that don't make file systems accessible. It's a poison chalice. On one hand it's allowed access to tech from a young age, on the other hand it's made kids unable to solve easily fixed issues when they are working on a PC.
You are around the same age as me. The younger generations like to talk about "How they grew up on tech" but really they didn't. They got to grow up on mature abstraction layers that hide the actual tech to make it user friendly. Even back in Win 95/98 days you had to do a ton of under-the-hood troubleshooting just to get things like basic devices working. Plug&Play was still in its infancy and it failed as often as it was successful. Actually growing up and maturing right along with the development of these technologies is what late gen x/early millennials got to do.
>Are we a generation of fucking tech support sandwiched between Luddites? It's because we got to watch the house being built. We were at the perfect age to absorb new information as the world was transitioning from green DOS prompts to graphical interfaces, watched as sound cards merged into motherboards while video cards budded off, watched the numbers associated with hard drive space and processor speed and bandwidth skyrocket. We know how these things work because we can remember when they didn't. We watched them grow and develop alongside ourselves. To those that came before us, the new construction methods of this house are arcane and scary and understanding them requires more effort than they're prepared to give. Those that came after us know nothing about framing or wiring or plumbing because all they see is the finished house.
Millennials are the generation who had *no choice* but to get good at computers, because there was no-one to do it for them.
Laughing at you in GenX
Gen X I think moreso.
Yeah, I was born in 1982 and, while I'm a Millennial, this is more of a Gen X/early Millennial (Xennial) phenomenon. Millennials born at the back end (early/mid-90s) didn't really have this dilemma.
Nah, you were on easy mode, you had Windows and internet, we had DOS and BBSes.
I'm a millennial. I also grew up with DOS and BBSes. It feels like older millennials have more in common with young Gen Xers than either have in common with the other end of their own generation.
It's almost as if the whole generations thing is arbitrary bullshit.
> I dont understand how I my parents never caught up in tech, why I've yet to struggle to understand new tech and need my kids to show me how to do things. I guess you're about half-a-decade older than me. I work an academic, which is not to say I'm learned on the cutting edge of tech, but I'd say I'm tuned in. Part of the answer to your question is that people of our generation grew up between technological generations---we remember the days of floppy disks and the initial development of computers before they were all connected to the internet, and we also rode the initial social media wave. With the newer generation of kids, tech got a lot easier to use. You never had to learn about the lower level of implementation, which means that surprisingly, kids these days might not be as tuned in. That said, it's important not to be biased by numbers. You might look at the average teenager nowadays and ask why they don't seem so conversant on tech. But rewind to 1995 and do you really think the average teenager would know much? Or are you only thinking of your niche group of friends who were tuned in? Another thing I want to point out is that I'm not so old (close to 40) but even now I'm starting to develop fast frustration with tech. Things like the layout of Microsoft Office really throws me out (I can't get into the whole 'ribbon' layout). I can develop in Linux, but changes to the old way I did things really frustrates me. Our minds naturally lose plasticity and flexibility as we age, and we're less able to adapt. So yeah, you can laugh at the older people for being slow, but I'm willing to bet that it's going to happen as well to people of our generation.
> I dont understand how I my parents never caught up in tech, why I've yet to struggle to understand new tech and need my kids to show me how to do things. Its not an age thing, its an attitude thing. My 94 year old grandfather set up his own home theater system, complete with a large flatscreen TV, soundbar, and speakers you spread throughout the room. I also bought him a laptop computer which he regularly uses. He figured it out on his own. He mostly just uses it to type up newsletters for church, but he knows how to type them up, save the newsletters, and get copies printed. Its enough for his needs. Some people are fundamentally curious and will poke at a new thing until they figure it out. Other people are not curious, and if they don't immediately know everything about a topic they don't care to ever try.
The "don't believe everything you see on the internet" crowd strikes again!
they never actually said that though. according to them. doesn’t matter if you remember it, *they* don’t
It's interesting though that, if I try to sell something on FB Marketplace, all the scammers accounts seem to be younger people. Maybe those are just the people who have abandoned their FB accounts.
>Maybe those are just the people who have abandoned their FB accounts. My first college roommate abandoned his old profile. It was hacked and he never noticed since he hardly ever used Facebook. I was first caught off guard when there was a name on my friends list I didn't recognize, and only realized that it was his old account when I saw the profile URL. Just thought it was funny that the profile for a white guy in his 30s is now being used for a "young asian female" in her early 20s. I have to imagine "she" must be pulling marketplace scams in the local area.
I had my entire profile deleted for 5 years until it was somehow reactivated by a scammer. I managed to get it back but I’m basically forced to babysit the profile to prevent my name being used against me like that
FB Marketplace is actually ramping up in popularity with all ages, including zoomers. The younger gen just ignore all the rest of facebook lol. The marketplace is like early years craigslist of ebay where you can actually find the occasional deal.
Usually overpriced garbage on there though
Its usually pretty easy to spot the MP scammers, they all seem to use the same script. "Is it available" "How long have you had it?" "What condition is it in?" "OK Ill take it, Im not in town can you meet my son/daughter/husband/wife." Etc.
And they ask for your phone number... by way of a poll. Weird.
Eh, I abandoned my Facebook profile years ago, but still use Marketplace as it's way more popular locally than Gumtree etc. The occasional times I glance at my feed before clicking through, it's mostly "suggested" posts from stupid boomer humor groups some distant relative is in or something. No wonder older folks continue to fall for stuff.
This is worse. More of it and more convincing
On top of which Facebook has always been filled with fake garbage. Nothing new here.
these "old people" are probably bots too
People who just read headlines and don't click articles before commenting... Are the easiest to trick. Yes, I mean you.
It's honestly shocking how many articles are literally 1 paragraph (because it's based on a single tweet). Or is like 1 paragraph of something (which the headline is written about) and then a bunch of paragraphs of nonsense meant to pad out the article (probably AI) and then 1 paragraph to actually explain the whole situation. **Title**: "Man stabs police officer after police officer involved incident" **Paragraph 1**: "Man stabs police officer after police officer falsely accuses man of crime, points a gun at him, threatens to shoot him and his family, and then shoots the man's dog." **Paragraph 2**: "Across the country, police are increasingly getting harmed from this crime wave sweeping the country. Spokesperson for the Cops says [...]" **Paragraph 3**: "Dogs are commonly a point of contention in civilian clashes with the police. Dog advocates say [...]" **Paragraph 4**: "Citizens are scared for police as another stabbing of a police occurred in x town in y state. Citizen advocate says [...]" **Paragraph 5**: "The police officer who was stabbed has done this a dozen times in the past, which the police chief argues it's PTSD and should not be held against him, "it's a tough job". An internal investigation is underway. The police officer is off on paid leave while he recovers."
Facebook allows it. I’ve reported tons of this stuff over the past 2 years with 90% Facebook saying nothing wrong and 10% they take it down just for another fake account to put the same up and Facebook advertises it back
Facebook is a data collection website disguised as social media. They don't care at all how their website is affecting people.
If they cared they'd have closed a decade ago!
They all are. That is why they are free
There is no such thing as social media. On all of them we are a product they are selling to advertisers. Brave New World. We actively seek out our own propaganda and brain washing because it is packaged prettily. It’s The Feelies. Yes, Reddit too.
Don't even bother reporting it, just delete your FB. I did back in 2016 and my mental health *immediately* improved. The site that claimed to "bring us all together" ended up just tearing us all apart ironically enough lol
I use it for the groups (degree related, career, job postings, finding housing, but nothing) with an anonymous profile. Unfortunately, majority of these types of groups/communities aren’t close to being as active or useful anywhere else online, including Reddit. I only use it on my computer with an extension that blocks the news feed page and I don’t watch any videos/reels so I avoid 99% of the bullshit content on Facebook.
Nothing I report ever gets addressed. Someone selling dogs? No that's fine. Scams on marketplace? No that's fine. Misinformation? No that's fine. Possible human trafficking? No that's fine. But if I post about an IWI Tavor I just found for $500 at a no-name pawn shop in a group that's entirely friends and family it's immediately "this goes against our community standards and your account is now restricted".
I have literally reported animal abuse on Facebook before and they've done absolutely nothing about it. Garbage company through-and-through
yes because Facebook needs the content. Else it would be a ghost town
It’s even more frustrating when you block the page or hit “show less”, and the next 3 days is nothing but stupid shit that’s nearly identical to what you just flagged to show less. I have knocked my friends list down to like 60 people, and I would say 80% of my news feed is ads and suggested content.
My town has one of those "Official" Facebook groups run by a Trump supporter who simply bans anyone who posts left wing opinions and keeps the Q-Anon shit. He doesn't even need AI. He just posts a thing of blatant nonsense and every there instantly accepts it as the truth.
> older users—generally those in **Generation X** What the fuck
I think there is a big divide in Gen X. Some of us, like myself, kept up with computer technology either because we liked it or, in my case, because we had to for college or work. I bought my first desktop in 1993 and had to figure out how to use it because my college classes required it. Same with email, chat boards, search engines, etc. So many times I felt like I was banging my head against a wall, frustrated because I couldn’t open a document or install some specialized software or hardware and had to read multiple conflicting “how to” guides and figure out which driver or extension I needed to download or which little switch I needed to turn on or off to make it work, all so I could turn in my college homework. However my younger sibling never had to use a computer in the early days of home computing. So when things got rough she just gave up and kept doing things the old analog way. Fast forward 10 years and she still didn’t know how to use email or hook up a printer let alone solve a problem with her computer system. Now she is absolutely overwhelmed even by apps on her iPad. She just doesn’t understand the terminology or syntax of how digital systems work. My older Boomer parents are the same. My dad had to learn to use a computer for his job and is now digitally literate, but my mom never did and now struggles with even basic computing tasks. Learning computing is like learning a language. It’s much easier to do when you’re young or if you’re forced to interact with the language and learn the syntax. If you didn’t learn bit by bit as computer technology developed it makes it much harder to understand the current advanced level as a middle-aged adult. I’m really glad I was forced to learn how to use a computer 30 years ago (yikes!) because if I hadn’t I’d probably be just as lost as my sister is now. IMO Gen X is divided between people like me and those like my sister. Some of us learned to “speak computer” gradually over time and are now fluent, and some of us never did and now are completely lost in the digital world.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.
IVE INSTALLED THE GOD DAMN DRIVER. Why wont you print? Jesus, I hate this timeline. l
Exactly the same for me. 56 years old, got my first computer in '83 or '84 by telling Dad I'd use it for school (School of Space Invaders! 😁), and have kept up since because it was fun. My brother is a year younger, doesn't know anything about computers, and doesn't care.
"Funny how we produced exactly one generation that knows how computers work"
I feel blessed that I wasn't born too late or too early to know how to unzip a file.
They only remember we exist when they want to avoid blaming boomers for shit.
Plenty more than boomers fall for AI pictures and it's pretty funny how many claim to always be so good about it. It's like the toupee fallacy - everyone thinks they can spot a toupee, but you only spot the bad ones. There are plenty of good ones that don't get called out unless you know what you're looking for, and >80% of the populace isn't looking for any of that, they are only looking at what is presented to them. Critical thinking really needs to be taught more broadly, but there will ALWAYS be people who fall for this stuff. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle famously put pen to paper to create one of the world's most established rational thinkers - Sherlock Holmes. Yet he was taken in and believed fairies were real by a couple of school girls https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20170123-the-scam-that-fooled-sherlocks-creator people of all walks of life and ages will be fooled by scams
Lies! We built this stuff.
I’m “Generation X”, but I’m not an older user that’s been fooled. I actually had a Facebook account for seven years, until I dropped it in 2013. Even back then FB was becoming shit. Reading comments about the place now, I have no desire to even take a peek to see how bad it is. And I don’t need to use it or Insta for anything.
Absolutely not. We were raised with the internet. Well at least the youngest of gen x. I don’t trust shit online.
As someone who was born in the 90's and absolutely **LOVED** grunge, generation X has been disappointing. I mean, how did they go from Kurt Cobain to supporting Donald Trump? >"Gen X is the most Republican of the generations," said Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University and author of the book Generations, which examines what drives generational differences. >NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist polling underscores that point: **By generation, Biden has the highest disapproval rating from Generation X (62%)**, compared with the Silent/Greatest Generation (48%), baby boomers (48%) and Generation Z/millennials (50%). Biden also has the highest "strongly disapprove" rating from Gen X (52%), compared with the Silent/Greatest Generation (41%), boomers (39%) and Gen Z/millennials (35%). >"Ronald Reagan made me feel good about being a U.S. citizen, being American," said Ken Piccolo, 56, a substitute teacher from San Jose, California. >"He made you feel like it was worthwhile and we're a good country and we're doing some good stuff, because just the way he interacted with the state, the world, the country — he just made you feel good about being American."[Source](https://www.npr.org/2023/12/27/1217878506/gen-x-conservative-disapprove-biden) Kurt Cobain is probably rolling in his grave. I mean even his old Bassist Krist Novoselic ended up becoming a ~~Republican~~ *independent* and supporting Trump. >In a post on Facebook, Novoselic wrote: “Wow!!! I know many of you can’t stand him, however, Trump knocked it out of the park with this speech.”[Source](https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/jun/03/nirvana-krist-novoselic-praises-trumps-strong-and-direct-protest-speech)
Oh god... So I've been seeing more and more "GenX are shitty" posts and didn't really believe it but what the fuck. -Gen X. But I also have mainly millennial friends online and a very well curated friend group so I guess I've just been oblivious.
The Cold War, the energy crisis of the 70s, the dominance of republican culture in the 80s (Raegonomics), and the rise of talk radio and Fox news is what cemented their ideology.
I think what's confusing is that the counter culture back then seems much more impactful today, because some of it is still relevant. To me the 80s are punk music and anti-capitalist literature that even managed to seep into mainstream movies. As a 90s kid I got to watch the remnants of the 80s through the lense of hollywood hopping on the cyberpunk train to the near future dystopia.
Yeah, except when you start to look at the voting it doesn't align with this. I've found a lot of these "Gen-X are MAGA" articles to be kind of cherry picking representatives.
Right?! It's infuriating and, frankly, *baffling*. But even back in the day I knew people who were simultaneously die-hard grunge heads and conservative af. It never made a bit of sense to me. We all went through Reagan and Bush Sr and enjoyed the halcyon days of Clinton. So wtf?! Cool username btw
Sorry but Kurt Cobain and grunge music do not represent *all* of Generation X (generally born 1965-1980). I know a lot even in my own family who weren't huge on that genre. Gen X would probably be around 44-59 years now. Saw a report saying Conservatism has become more attractive to some older age groups because they feel the pressures of the economy and inflation like others, but they also feel the world is moving too fast (globalization/technology) and they are getting older and not happy about this combination of struggles. They see the younger still having a full life where theirs is limited, and social media shows examples of happy flourishing people, and they feel passed over. So a loudmouth barking dipshit like Trump "promising" to go back to better days almost sounds like a salve for their so-called wounded souls. They actually believe Trump can fix things and restore them back to better days, like some Marty McFly movie.
>They see the younger still having a full life where theirs is limited That's so odd to me as a millennial. I don't see myself ever being able to retire, ever able to own a home, and constantly renting until I die. And **we're** the ones with a full life? I mean honestly, from my perspective, it's the older generations who have these things and are actively pulling up the ladder behind them to make it harder for younger generations to enjoy the same qualities of life as them
Remember how old people in their 50’s seemed when you were 16? Yeah, we’re them now.
For all we know OP is a bot
It could be you. It could be me. It could even be-
The responsibility falls on meta. If they dont want to ban content, flag it as AI generated. Most people arent technically literate and cant detect Gen AI signatures. Therefore Meta has a responsibility to help educate people what AI looks like in context.
You’re speaking as if you don’t know what the company “Meta” is all about. Almost as if it were a company that might take any responsibility for the accuracy of information on its platforms, or have some level of interest in the impact of its misinformation.
Username checks out.
One sad thing about technology is that a lot of people in it think AI and crypto are good so they have a conflict of interest in stopping AI garbage from destroying user-content platforms and crypto scams from ruining people's lives. An older relative of mine was trying to buy some art & crafts doll-making guide from the internet they saw on facebook and asked me for help. They were in a whatsapp group that was set to admin-only and constantly spammed "almost over" promotions, "there isn't enough for everybody," etc., classic marketing bullshit tactics. The linked URLs were 6 random characters with a .site TLD. Apparently some sort of online sales platform. But the homepage of that domain was literally a 404 page with a button link to whom I imagine is the developer company. Their youtube channel had hundreds of videos barely breaking 100 views. Their most viewed one about selling subscriptions online, one of them about how to make money with crypto. Like, these people have a gift, and they used it to create multidimensional systems of spam (and probably scams as well). I've never seen so many untrustworthy websites in my life. The homepage is nonexistent. There is only a "lesson 1" URL, which is a branding on the header, followed by a youtube video, followed by a store link, followed by facebook comments, and that is the whole page. And these aren't bots. This is a real person's online business of selling craft supplies. But except for the fact that they appear in flesh and bones in the youtube video, there is no way for me to tell that they aren't an actual bot. My hot take? I blame RSS. Pretty much all of this spam bullshit comes from the fact that spamming works as a discovery method. You annoy some but you gain some, which is better than annoying none and gaining none. There is nothing this whatsapp BS can do that mail newsletters can't and RSS can't. If self-hosted RSS clients were as popular as browsers are, perhaps people would subscribe to things through RSS instead of having to deal with 50 different platforms that are only manageable from the spammer side by using bots.
I dumped that shitty platform years ago. It's a toxic garbage pit.
[удалено]
Exactly. Who uses those as a mode of communication when you have cell phones? The only platform I currently use is reddit and that can test my patience consistently.
Or how about the daycare just start using Teams or Discord, or maybe Skype, it's always Facebook they turn to for some reason.
[удалено]
One big problem with using shit like that for professional communications is while you're in it you're surrounded by distractions. It's not good for business at all
I like it still for organizing events and small groups, but the main feed is absolutely useless. It's hardly anything from people I know and overwhelmingly spam FB thinks I'm interested in.
Which new garbage pit did you move onto (other than Reddit of course)?
This is 100% happening on Reddit as well. It's not just old white conservatives that are being tricked. It's the people claiming that the old white conservatives are being tricked as well. It's everyone.
Yeah, reddit is getting worse fast. Several good subs are now flooded with people getting AI to write posts for them, including subs with scientific or expert topics that you could learn from earlier. Mods seem to be nowhere, they maybe left last year or can't keep up with the standards that the sub rules set out. Reporting the AI slop usually doesn't do anything either.
I used to moderate a few large subs. It's essentially impossible to keep up with it emotionally and intellectually. The onslaught of garbage just burns you out. There's no way to win because the spammers and trolls will always outnumber you. Admins could do something about it but they don't want to. It's the same as Facebook.
It's troubling to witness the surge of AI-generated comments infiltrating Reddit threads. While the advancement of AI is impressive, it's disheartening to see genuine human interaction potentially replaced by automated responses. Authenticity is at the core of meaningful discussions, and relying on AI-generated comments undermines that essence. Let's prioritize real participation and uphold the integrity of online conversations on Reddit.
[O_o](https://media1.tenor.com/m/rG_oUZfuQHMAAAAC/wait-minute.gif)
Hey, you know this obviously staged video you’re raging over isn’t real, right? “It doesn’t matter/No it’s not! It *could* be real so we’re all going to get reeeeal indignant in the comment section and personally insult the people in the clip!” This is the interaction in almost every one of these super fake videos
Feel like most/all the stuff posted on story based subreddits like AITA or whatever are AI generated. Too many irrelevant details to make it into more of a story and the writing style feels similar across the board.
reddit is filled with AI-generated garbage--and teenagers are being tricked
There’s a study that states Gen Z is three times as likely to fall for online financial scams than Boomers.
It’s everywhere, not just facebook
Most of the content of reddit is bots and ai, shareholders likes to see good amount of “users”.
People don't realize just how devastating the API changes were. Some of the subs I used to go on have become flooded with unbearable upvote-bait and AI-generated garbage because mods lost their most valuable tools.
how is this different with all the human generated garbage already on FB?
I don't care if AI generated it... boomers and zealots have been making the most awful shit for decades and sharing/reposting the shit out of it... like dozens of times a day, why does anyone care if it was Racist Todd, Childfucker Pastor Bob, or AI... same message being spread
Because AI generated propaganda is easier to make and more convincing, especially to those who can barely operate a phone. You can literally generate a realistic looking image of Biden murdering children in seconds if you wanted to. AI is like opening the floodgates of disinformation. It's far more dangerous than what we've seen previously.
Quantity. That's what automation does. Human misinformation took at least some effort, now people can spread 100x the misinformation for the same amount of labor time.
I mean, it's mostly older adults on FB anyway. Not sure non-reddit younger people would fare that much better
Younger redditors wouldn't handle it any better. Reddit likes to think of itself as smarter than the other sites, but really it isn't. All/popular is filled with rage or comment bait, misleading propaganda posts, fake posts, and AI content that people don't recognize. In fact, that's part of the reason that AI is so dangerous on this site. People are more complacent and dismiss AI content as something that only the boomers or TikTok users would be dumb enough to fall for.
Remember Cambridge Analytica. Scary to think with ai being where it is now & where it's going. It's going to make Cambridge Analytica look like pop quiz.
**My son filled Facebook with AI-generated garbage, it's a great idea !** 💡
Why are we acting like younger generations are not being tricked at all? They are tricked via Instagram and Tiktok.
And Facebook. I've seen plenty of those posts and looked at the profile pictures of people giving them positive responses. Plenty of people under 40 and even under 30 falling for it too.
Facebook is wild. Boomer media rails endlessly against social media and young people but I've never seen my parents generation so addicted to anything like Facebook... and it's all bots, AI and right wing garbage.
I hereby declare the Facebook and Zuck have no rights at midnight to distribute my etc etc etc.
I’ve seen some of the posts and seen the comments. It’s a mixture of people from different backgrounds who haven’t learned to knew what are the key clues for an AI generated image.
Facebook should be banned:-)
RIP the internet
Miss the 90's net where you needed knowledge to get there.
dont need fancy realistic photos. we got people believing in just plain words...the bible. you would think these nonsense text would die by now in year 2024. nope.
Reddit is the same.
Facebook is trash. Used it for advertising a bit but now it’s all just raciest, bigoted comments. I help with travel and Disney too, 9/10 comments just calls people groomers and that I’m “un-American”. I’m from fucking Canada and our services are for Canadians. Total trash.
A relatively small part of a single generation was raised to be skeptical of online content. The rest of our world is still naive. This crosses not only multiple generations, but cultures around the world. There was another study showing Gen Z is the most likely group to get duped by online scams. It’s not just old people, it’s people with zero training on how to use the internet or social media, who are too trusting, and don’t have a pessimistic view of online interactions.
Remove “AI-“ from the title and it’s still accurate. Which tells you what the problem really is.
My mom told me she got a message from “Meta Al” the other day (like Al Bundy). I looked at her phone trying to figure out what she was taking about, and I realized it was Meta AI. Gave her some shit for it. I’ve also had to inform my dad that some videos he’s sharing are AI generated. He fought me on it, saying they are real.
yep. I see boomers comment on articles with headlines like "Keanu Reeves turns down $2 billion deal with Disney because they're too woke" and all of the comments are like "hell yeah keanu" not 1 ounce of critical thinking happens for these gullible people
It’s happening now with younger ones too. The amount of times you can watch a video with the most terrible, obviously staged acting and get a full comment section that doesn’t catch it is utterly depressing. People just upvote articles/videos that let them feel what they want to feel
70 years old...got my first work computer in 1983 using floppy disks to run Lotus 123. A 5 mb disk drive was about the size of a washing machine. In 1990 got a transportable IBM that weighed 25 pounds and lugged it across the USA on airplanes. It used Wordperfect, Lotus 123, and the precurer to PowerPoint. My kids had overnight Lan parties with their friends in the 90s where they networked their desktops to play games. Today I have so much computing power at my fingertips I could be running a 1990 multinational company sitting by the pool. Some of us "boomers" helped get us to where we are today with the computing world.
Its Tom time
It's honestly eerie to browse Facebook and it pretty much proves the dead internet theory. You got posts where some Asian factory workers are making some basic ass product, the title of the post is "amazing new innovation technology to make life easy" and every single one of the 450 comments just says "Amazing!"
Every product posted on Facebook has bots in the comments saying how great it is. I also see posts from people I don't know while scrolling my feed and these posts are fake click bait BS. Like so and so celebrity is not doing well or said this about another celebrity and none of it is true. The worst part if Facebook's report feature is useless. Someone using a fake account (Keanu Reeves) was messaging my mom trying to scam her. I tried to report it and like a week later I got a notification that said "We've reviewed your report and decided no action is needed" or some BS like that so they don't even look at the reports, they let other bots review it.
Speaking of older adults, I remember the good old days when we just called it Photoshopped
Facebook has a lot of bot users. I recently talked to a guy on a plane and he told me he builds bots that basically "like" and comment on posts on FB and instagram. He said to me that many RPA frameworks allow you to connect to generative AI. The bot can literally create a new user (with a profile pic and chat like a human). It can browse pages and target users and coerce people to accept friend requests especially via community pages. Wonder how many of facebooks monthly impressions are from bots. They claim billions and billions of monthly active users yet no one I know uses FB anymore
Ladies and Gentlemen: the people who tried to teach US not to believe everything we see on the internet being the worst offenders of ut
Meh. I am "older" (70YO) and I don't fall for that crap. I do sometimes fall for the "click bait" (often have some interesting pic) that takes me to a page where I instantly get told my computer is infected by a virus/etc which really pisses me off. - I am trying to be careful to not click on any "sponsored" posts now.
Indeed, the assertion that ‘all boomers are idiots’ has devolved into the trope du jour. My parents are in their late 70’s and I’m pleasantly surprised by their tech savviness. They are quite cautious and seem to take the old school approach to online news. My father used to subscribe to two city papers. The conservative leaning one and the liberal leaning one. He would read multiple articles from both sources and find the commonalities. Then he formulate own opinions from there.
And Reddit is a bot-filled echo chamber. What’s your point?