Good, so it's not just my imagination

[vraiblonde]

Google, Amazon, and Meta are making their core products worse — on purpose

Google, Amazon, Meta, and other big tech companies are making their core products worse and ruining everything from apps to the internet.

www.businessinsider.com

Gist: Tech is turning their product over to ads, spam, and clickbait instead of delivering what consumers use them for.

I've noticed that when I try to search for something, the first results are a bunch of crap that has nothing to do with my search phrase. When I go to a news site to get...you know...news, it's covered in a bunch of gross ads for ear wax and skin tags. Facebook hardly shows me anything from friends in my feed - it's ads and garbage. You have to really wade in to find what you're looking for and I've lost interest.

My prediction is that we'll start moving away from cyberliving and go back to being normal humans with normal social interactions. Since I gave up most internet social life and started living predominantly in the dirt world again with real humans, I really am a lot happier and I think more and more people will start embracing that. Go back to using it as a tool instead of it being their whole life. Add political censorship into the mix and Big Tech has pretty much signed their own death warrant.

Certainly there will be the socially awkwards and emotional shut-ins who will still live a cyberlife and have AI as a best friend. I'm content to leave that stuff to them. I don't get down with AI - replacing human creativity and interaction with bytes is a sign of mental illness. "Hey, computer, how can I find a girlfriend? What should my opinion be on (current event)? Can you write a poem about trees?"



AI was fun for about a half hour, then it was like...help me understand why I care about this...?

And don't get me started on "social media influencers"....

Anyway, that's my rant for the day!

 

[Merlin99]

I do a search on Amazon for a book author and they give me a half dozen different authors I'm not looking for before they show me a single book by the author I'm actually looking for, if there's a second page to look through it starts over again.

 

[Loper]

Google, Amazon, and Meta are making their core products worse — on purpose

Google, Amazon, Meta, and other big tech companies are making their core products worse and ruining everything from apps to the internet.

www.businessinsider.com

Gist: Tech is turning their product over to ads, spam, and clickbait instead of delivering what consumers use them for.

I've noticed that when I try to search for something, the first results are a bunch of crap that has nothing to do with my search phrase. When I go to a news site to get...you know...news, it's covered in a bunch of gross ads for ear wax and skin tags. Facebook hardly shows me anything from friends in my feed - it's ads and garbage. You have to really wade in to find what you're looking for and I've lost interest.

My prediction is that we'll start moving away from cyberliving and go back to being normal humans with normal social interactions. Since I gave up most internet social life and started living predominantly in the dirt world again with real humans, I really am a lot happier and I think more and more people will start embracing that. Go back to using it as a tool instead of it being their whole life. Add political censorship into the mix and Big Tech has pretty much signed their own death warrant.

Certainly there will be the socially awkwards and emotional shut-ins who will still live a cyberlife and have AI as a best friend. I'm content to leave that stuff to them. I don't get down with AI - replacing human creativity and interaction with bytes is a sign of mental illness. "Hey, computer, how can I find a girlfriend? What should my opinion be on (current event)? Can you write a poem about trees?"



AI was fun for about a half hour, then it was like...help me understand why I care about this...?

And don't get me started on "social media influencers"....

Anyway, that's my rant for the day!

I have the same... but now FB has started throwing in the whole "suggested for you" posts... WTF? I don't need more crap with the already mucked up feed.

 

[LightRoasted]

For your consideration ...

Google, Amazon, and Meta are making their core products worse — on purpose

Google, Amazon, Meta, and other big tech companies are making their core products worse and ruining everything from apps to the internet.

www.businessinsider.com

Gist: Tech is turning their product over to ads, spam, and clickbait instead of delivering what consumers use them for.

I've noticed that when I try to search for something, the first results are a bunch of crap that has nothing to do with my search phrase. When I go to a news site to get...you know...news, it's covered in a bunch of gross ads for ear wax and skin tags. Facebook hardly shows me anything from friends in my feed - it's ads and garbage. You have to really wade in to find what you're looking for and I've lost interest.

My prediction is that we'll start moving away from cyberliving and go back to being normal humans with normal social interactions. Since I gave up most internet social life and started living predominantly in the dirt world again with real humans, I really am a lot happier and I think more and more people will start embracing that. Go back to using it as a tool instead of it being their whole life. Add political censorship into the mix and Big Tech has pretty much signed their own death warrant.

Certainly there will be the socially awkwards and emotional shut-ins who will still live a cyberlife and have AI as a best friend. I'm content to leave that stuff to them. I don't get down with AI - replacing human creativity and interaction with bytes is a sign of mental illness. "Hey, computer, how can I find a girlfriend? What should my opinion be on (current event)? Can you write a poem about trees?"



AI was fun for about a half hour, then it was like...help me understand why I care about this...?

And don't get me started on "social media influencers"....

Anyway, that's my rant for the day!

Yeah. They are making it difficult, for those that only do it the "easy" way, allowing the algorithm to do the searching for them. Try searching using the advance search in Google. Click on the top right gear looking thingy to bring up the quick setting page then click on advance search. Best way to get the results you want.

 

[HemiHauler]

Google, Amazon, and Meta are making their core products worse — on purpose

Google, Amazon, Meta, and other big tech companies are making their core products worse and ruining everything from apps to the internet.

www.businessinsider.com

Gist: Tech is turning their product over to ads, spam, and clickbait instead of delivering what consumers use them for.

I've noticed that when I try to search for something, the first results are a bunch of crap that has nothing to do with my search phrase. When I go to a news site to get...you know...news, it's covered in a bunch of gross ads for ear wax and skin tags. Facebook hardly shows me anything from friends in my feed - it's ads and garbage. You have to really wade in to find what you're looking for and I've lost interest.

My prediction is that we'll start moving away from cyberliving and go back to being normal humans with normal social interactions. Since I gave up most internet social life and started living predominantly in the dirt world again with real humans, I really am a lot happier and I think more and more people will start embracing that. Go back to using it as a tool instead of it being their whole life. Add political censorship into the mix and Big Tech has pretty much signed their own death warrant.

Certainly there will be the socially awkwards and emotional shut-ins who will still live a cyberlife and have AI as a best friend. I'm content to leave that stuff to them. I don't get down with AI - replacing human creativity and interaction with bytes is a sign of mental illness. "Hey, computer, how can I find a girlfriend? What should my opinion be on (current event)? Can you write a poem about trees?"



AI was fun for about a half hour, then it was like...help me understand why I care about this...?

And don't get me started on "social media influencers"....

Anyway, that's my rant for the day!

You are positively adorably stupid.

This is all that “social media” has ever been or will ever be.

The smarter among us (that doesn’t include you) have always understood this.

 

[Gilligan]

Great. I feel like I just found a turd floating around in my morning coffee.

 

[vraiblonde]

You are positively adorably stupid.

This is all that “social media” has ever been or will ever be.

The smarter among us (that doesn’t include you) have always understood this.

See, this ^^ is what I mean by "socially awkwards and emotional shut-ins". People like you need some kind of outlet to vent your mindless rage at the universe, and having you mill about in polite society is just asking for trouble. So you'll still live your life online, ranting like a loon, but I think normally abled people are going to start gravitating away. Soon social media will be nothing but trolls attacking and insulting each other. The rest of us will watch this show briefly, then it gets repetitive and boring.

You see it already on Twitter - almost nobody has anything interesting to say. Reddit - nobody has anything interesting to say outside of "Please, strangers on the internet - pick me, choose me, love me" because they don't have any friends in real life.

 

[Kyle]

Great. I feel like I just found a turd floating around in my morning coffee.

I would have bet it would take longer for Hemi to come up with the cash.

Bail for molesting ducks must not be too high.

 

[HemiHauler]

See, this ^^ is what I mean by "socially awkwards and emotional shut-ins". People like you need some kind of outlet to vent your mindless rage at the universe, and having you mill about in polite society is just asking for trouble. So you'll still live your life online, ranting like a loon, but I think normally abled people are going to start gravitating away. Soon social media will be nothing but trolls attacking and insulting each other. The rest of us will watch this show briefly, then it gets repetitive and boring.

You see it already on Twitter - almost nobody has anything interesting to say. Reddit - nobody has anything interesting to say outside of "Please, strangers on the internet - pick me, choose me, love me" because they don't have any friends in real life.

Doubling down on the stupid is always the right move

 

[Gilligan]

Doubling down on the stupid is always the right move

She nailed it though...you sick fuk.

 

[Kyle]

Doubling down on the stupid is always the right move

It’s what we’ve come to expect of you.

 

[Gilligan]

Doubling down on the stupid is always the right move

https://www.yourtango.com/self/why-do-i-crave-abuse-signs-emotional-masochist

 

[SamSpade]

My prediction is that we'll start moving away from cyberliving and go back to being normal humans with normal social interactions. Since I gave up most internet social life and started living predominantly in the dirt world again with real humans, I really am a lot happier and I think more and more people will start embracing that. Go back to using it as a tool instead of it being their whole life. Add political censorship into the mix and Big Tech has pretty much signed their own death warrant.

Hemi's response is MY prediction - people will NOT move away from cyberliving but will dive in deeper and become increasingly jaded with others.

Years ago, I read a book called "City" by Clifford Simak. It's actually what they call a "fix-up" and some sci-fi novels are like this - basically a collection of short stories with a framing story (think Illustrated Man or The Martian Chronicles). But the recurring theme is the concept of humanity and their kinds of cities and why they have them. In pre-history, they built villages for families; they built bigger ones to accommodate people with diverse skills to work together - they built WALLED cities to protect from invaders - later, castles where vassals went for protection when their lands outside the castle became threatened.

And so on. Until the day came, when technology became so prevalent - they didn't need them. Then - they didn't need neighbors. Eventually, the population of the Earth began to PLUMMET. The narrator describes humans like magnets of like polarity on a globe - spread out as far from each other as possible, eschewing all interaction with OTHER humans.

In the framing story - humans are in fact, long extinct, but in some of the stories, they've gone off world or what have you.

But - instead of dying off by plague or nuclear holocaust - they simply die of isolation. WILLINGLY.

 

[vraiblonde]

Hemi's response is MY prediction - people will NOT move away from cyberliving but will dive in deeper and become increasingly jaded with others.

I think some will but most won't. People in urban areas (where journos and techies live) are more likely to have antisocial tendencies because, frankly, everyone around them is a dirtbag. But folks in the burbs and rural areas still know their neighbors and value human interaction, which is why Metaverse isn't taking off the way the LA/NYC/Chi/etc urbanites and hermit-like techies thought it would. They think because they interact with no humans, it means nobody wants to interact with humans and that's just bubblethink.

I live in a resort town and work in the hospitality industry and these are highly social people. Their kids are being raised socially, and as such are unlikely to want to cyber-live as adults. City journos and tech developers don't see children playing together and making new friends, riding bikes, shooting hoops, and hanging out, but that is ALL I see. It's all I saw for 5 years on the road - not just at the RV parks, but all over.

These media people want me to believe that everyone is like them, but it's simply not true. They write for each other about each other, ignoring an enormous America out there. When CNN brags that it has 4 million viewers, that's only 1.5% of the adult US population. Pretty much nothing. And FNC isn't much better. WE watch and WE pay attention, but the vast majority of Americans don't give a chit about that rot. They don't tweet; they don't swipe right; they don't care if YTA. They're busy having a real life.

But we'll see....

 

[SamSpade]

I do a search on Amazon for a book author and they give me a half dozen different authors I'm not looking for before they show me a single book by the author I'm actually looking for, if there's a second page to look through it starts over again.

For searching - Amazon can be the worst. It doesn't even matter if I give a long and very specific description - I will still get sometimes the EXACT SAME RESULTS if I leave one out. Sometimes I just throw my hands in the air and think sorry Amazon, you lost this time - and go look elsewhere. Today I tried looking for electric turkey deep fryer - only one of the first several pages would satisfy the description - got propane fryers, little counter top fryers, air fryers and propane fryers. If you'd given that description to an actual salesperson to find one for you, and they gave you that, you'd probably LEAVE.

 

[HemiHauler]

I think some will but most won't. People in urban areas (where journos and techies live) are more likely to have antisocial tendencies because, frankly, everyone around them is a dirtbag. But folks in the burbs and rural areas still know their neighbors and value human interaction, which is why Metaverse isn't taking off the way the LA/NYC/Chi/etc urbanites and hermit-like techies thought it would. They think because they interact with no humans, it means nobody wants to interact with humans and that's just bubblethink.

I live in a resort town and work in the hospitality industry and these are highly social people. Their kids are being raised socially, and as such are unlikely to want to cyber-live as adults. City journos and tech developers don't see children playing together and making new friends, riding bikes, shooting hoops, and hanging out, but that is ALL I see. It's all I saw for 5 years on the road - not just at the RV parks, but all over.

These media people want me to believe that everyone is like them, but it's simply not true. They write for each other about each other, ignoring an enormous America out there. When CNN brags that it has 4 million viewers, that's only 1.5% of the adult US population. Pretty much nothing. And FNC isn't much better. WE watch and WE pay attention, but the vast majority of Americans don't give a chit about that rot. They don't tweet; they don't swipe right; they don't care if YTA. They're busy having a real life.

But we'll see....

Boy, you sure do buy into every culture war element your handlers throw your way, don’t y’a?

You ever tried thinking for yourself?

 

[vraiblonde]

Boy, you sure do buy into every culture war element your handlers throw your way, don’t y’a?

You ever tried thinking for yourself?

Yes, dear, we know - all your "friends" are imaginary so you think everyone else has imaginary friends as well.

 

[vraiblonde]

For searching - Amazon can be the worst. It doesn't even matter if I give a long and very specific description - I will still get sometimes the EXACT SAME RESULTS if I leave one out. Sometimes I just throw my hands in the air and think sorry Amazon, you lost this time - and go look elsewhere. Today I tried looking for electric turkey deep fryer - only one of the first several pages would satisfy the description - got propane fryers, little counter top fryers, air fryers and propane fryers. If you'd given that description to an actual salesperson to find one for you, and they gave you that, you'd probably LEAVE.

I always find exactly what I'm looking for on Amazon, mostly because I go there knowing exactly what I want down to the model number. Occasionally I get sidetracked by an alternate, but typically I buy what I came for.

But if you're browsing, I agree they're terrible. Dozens of "featured products" that have little to do with what I asked for come up first. They're the Google of retail.

 

[3CATSAILOR]

Google, Amazon, and Meta are making their core products worse — on purpose

Google, Amazon, Meta, and other big tech companies are making their core products worse and ruining everything from apps to the internet.

www.businessinsider.com

Gist: Tech is turning their product over to ads, spam, and clickbait instead of delivering what consumers use them for.

I've noticed that when I try to search for something, the first results are a bunch of crap that has nothing to do with my search phrase. When I go to a news site to get...you know...news, it's covered in a bunch of gross ads for ear wax and skin tags. Facebook hardly shows me anything from friends in my feed - it's ads and garbage. You have to really wade in to find what you're looking for and I've lost interest.

My prediction is that we'll start moving away from cyberliving and go back to being normal humans with normal social interactions. Since I gave up most internet social life and started living predominantly in the dirt world again with real humans, I really am a lot happier and I think more and more people will start embracing that. Go back to using it as a tool instead of it being their whole life. Add political censorship into the mix and Big Tech has pretty much signed their own death warrant.

Certainly there will be the socially awkwards and emotional shut-ins who will still live a cyberlife and have AI as a best friend. I'm content to leave that stuff to them. I don't get down with AI - replacing human creativity and interaction with bytes is a sign of mental illness. "Hey, computer, how can I find a girlfriend? What should my opinion be on (current event)? Can you write a poem about trees?"



AI was fun for about a half hour, then it was like...help me understand why I care about this...?

And don't get me started on "social media influencers"....

Anyway, that's my rant for the day!

You will find younger generations strongly addicted to it. That is until a power outage happens.

 

[Gilligan]

Where Hemis came from.