Facebook has been a bad product since the introduction of the News Feed, but the switching costs have always been high and it was optimized by some of the best engineers our universities could produce for stickiness. The dual onslaught of Groups, which incentivize low effort/high engagement content, and AI junk, which sometimes checks both of those boxes just right, makes it an even worse product.
It’s still sticky, because we’re all still here, but will that last? Will it last when most of the posts I see give me zero value? Will it last when groups, which are weighted so heavily in the feed, are cesspools of AI-generated nonsense? I hope not. I hope a product manager at Meta is losing sleep over this problem tonight.
This is happening to the whole Internet, though. AI slop is already filling up web pages and discussion forums. Reddit will succumb to it because upvotes are the metric. Comments sections were already astroturfed; now the astroturfers will just cut out the humans sitting in the phone farm. I just had a meeting today where one of the topics was using AI to generate blog posts. There’s no turning back from this garbage because the incentives to use it are so high, and the bill for that convenience won’t become due until the entire Internet is consumed by it.
I printed (and web published) a ‘zine because I believe print is going to make a comeback very soon. By its very nature, print defies the logic of machine generation. We need analog back. The digital ocean is polluted.
Tag: Zines
Quartier des Fantômes 1
It’s a zine about lots of stuff, including: art, architecture, poetry, photography, the South, Tallahassee, ghosts, and nature.
I made it.
I hope others will help me make the next one.
C.B. Crenshaw 