Jolt Country

AArdvark wrote: Fri Sep 01, 2023 2:53 am My, the air is thick with disparagement today.

Wait. Pinback is disappointed with the community as a whole. Myself included.

Iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii am just giving you reasoning. My previous reasoning. I'm on your side now, Vark! Now I am going to be a M U S I C P I R A T E!

Shiver me timbers!

I am going to screw over, in the music business, the A-RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!! guy. That's a music pirate joke.


That is a joke about music and pirates.

I pirate everything. I'm a rebel and so much cooler than everyone else. Fight the power.

One of my followers recently pointed out that my BigRobsVan Instagram account is pretty lopsided, with a 1:3 follow/follower ratio. I did not think it was that out of whack and so I looked and sure enough, I have around 2,500 followers but follow 7,500 people. This has not always been the case, so what happened? After a quick look I discovered that literally thousands of times, people have sent me friend requests along with automated DMs that say "follow me back and also follow my YouTube channel." In almost every case, those accounts unfollowed me immediately after I followed them. I just hadn't noticed. I guess having more followers than follows is seen as some sort of pathetic power trip... one I decided to remove myself from.

I looked online for some "how to unfollow people who aren't following you on Instagram" scripts and there are several out there, almost all of which either (a) cost money, or (b) ask for you to provide your login/password to a third party. Both of those are a no go for me. But, hey, we're computer people, right? I decided to roll my own script and eject these people from my account.

The first thing I had to do was identify who I was following who wasn't following me. Instagram allows you to download your data including those lists, so after exporting each list I pasted them into ListDiff.com, which creates delta information between two lists. Once I had my target list, I sat down in PowerShell and wrote a script that unfollows people. The web version of Instagram is designed to make automation difficult with pop-ups and no hotkeys, but I got it working reliably. My intent was to have the script unfollow 10 accounts, wait a few minutes, do the next 10, wait, and continue until it had done all 5,000.

Unfortunately, my script had a slight problem -- I used the wrong pause command, which PowerShell ignored and instead attempted to open 5,000 Chrome tabs, all of which were attempting to log into my Instagram account. It was well into the thousands before I could abort the script and stop the tasks, but by then it was too late. I'm not sure if they saw it as a DoS attack or simply a wayward bot, but Instagram instantly locked down my account preventing me from doing almost anything. A bit more research revealed that anything more than 60 follows/unfollows per hour or 150 follows/unfollows per day will get you a 24 hour timeout.

I spent a few hours sweating, but my account was eventually unlocked. I fixed the error, and I am now unfollowing 150 people a day. It'll take me 2 months to get rid of all these assholes who tricked me into following them and then instantly unfollowed me, but I'll get there.

Anyway, today's great moment in computer programming is brought to you by me. I did a great, terrible thing.

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote: Thu Aug 31, 2023 7:53 pm To support the artists

Too bad the labels and streamers don't feel the same responsibility. Thanks to them we have no new shows being written now.

What does following / follower do for a person on Instagram?

AArdvark wrote: Fri Sep 01, 2023 2:12 pm What does following / follower do for a person on Instagram?

Well, like any social media site, when people follow you they see what you post, and when you follow someone else, you see what they post. On Facebook, that's a 1:1 ratio -- when you "friend" someone, you are friends with them and they are friends with you. On other sites like Twitter and Instagram, that's not the case. You can follow someone without them following you, and vice-versa.

But with most celebrity and major brand accounts, they are really only interested in sharing content. They are not reading your content. Wendy's, the burger chain, has 3.8 million followers on Twitter. Wendy's does not care what 3.8 million people's weekend plans are. They are just posting funny things and advertising their brand. Those accounts are not like real life relationships. In real life, you and I might meet up for coffee, you would tell me about your life and I would tell you about my life. These accounts are more like one-sided like radio and television, where a famous person or brand broadcasts content and other people receive it. I just checked and Kim Kardashian has 364 million followers but is only following 288 people. The 288 accounts she follows are her family, other celebrities, and brands she owns shares in. People follow her account and mistake it for that real life relationship at the coffee shop.



Now, some people have decided that because those "big" social media accounts always have more followers than people they themselves follow, they play this stupid game and try to keep their own ratio the same way. For example, you can buy followers. According to Google, you can buy followers "for as low as $2 for 100 followers to $950 for 100,000 followers." Now, those aren't real people reading your content or anything -- they're just some botnet farm somebody set up, but just think how important you would look if you were only following a few people and had 100,000 followers! Why, you would look as important as Kim Kardashian!

But the other way people do this is by following people's, getting those people to follow them back, and then immediately unfollowing them. Instagram, Twitter, and most sites don't inform you when someone unfollows you -- it defeats the whole "dopamine" angle -- and so most people are none the wiser. There are enough scripts and automation tools that people do this all the time and it's not always a manual thing. In this weird little rabbit hole I've gone down, I've found scripts that promise to grow your follower count by randomly liking and/or commenting on other people's posts, and also by following random accounts, waiting for those people to follow you back, and then unfollowing them.

I didn't realize I was on the receiving end of this for so long until it was too late. I'm following 7,500 accounts, and being followed by 2,500. Now that I'm actively trying to get paid and/or sponsored for some of this stuff, when a person or company looks at my account, they see an account that looks like 5,000 people have unfollowed me due to bad or boring content. Nobody wants to sponsor a loser. If the numbers were flopped, those companies might say, wow! So many people want to follow this guy's content! And then to the vast majority of the planet, it has absolutely no bearing on anything at all. It's kind of like those snooty women who go around reminding people they aren't supposed to wear white after Labor Day. To people in the know this is a terrible fashion offense, and the rest of the world is completely oblivious to the fact such a fashion faux pas has been committed.

So in a nutshell, what I'm attempting to do is "right-size" my follower ratio on Instagram by removing all those people who playing that stupid friend/unfriend game. This is important to a handful of people on the planet and not to the majority of the 8 billion others.

I could never be an internet personality. This and the Gas Chamber is the extent of my social media

And Discord.

AArdvark wrote: Sun Sep 03, 2023 9:37 am I could never be an internet personality. This and the Gas Chamber is the extent of my social media

I recently watched a YouTube video where two people prepared a meal in their van. They cooked part in their tiny oven, part on a propane stove, and part over an open fire. When they were done they put it all together and showed video of it from every angle. It looked beautiful.

At the end of the video they had a "behind the scenes" moment and said the meal was awful, mostly because by the time they were done capturing all the footage, cleaning everything up, and putting everything away, the food was cold and mostly inedible. They used a microwave (not shown) to reheat parts of the meal, but said it wasn't very good by then.

There are people in this world perfectly content to create beautiful meals and eat them without sharing any knowledge of it with anyone else on the planet. There also also people in this world perfectly content to create beautiful meals for the sake of gaining likes and followers and never even eat the food. Both groups can co-exist. What's important is belonging to the one that makes you happy.

I forgot about Discord when I wrote the above. I'm just happy to provide content once in a while and make people secretly roll their eyes, whether it's here or the other places

Flack wrote: Sun Sep 03, 2023 9:03 am

Is this an example of someone that pulls this shit?

S'gotta be. It's a German Insatagrammer

My brother bought Youtube Family so he could get the NFL games. He added me.

Google started having me default to putting my events on the "Family" calendar, not my Google Calendar. Because that's what you fucking want, that's how it works, that is not a privacy nightmare. And it would be great to lose everything if something got FAMILIES mad at each other, which never happens. I was able to move my events back to my calendar and to delete the Youtube Family Calendar, but as always, this never, ever ever ever should have happened in the first place. Fucking Google.

They want to crawl up everyone's ass with a microscope and send them ads.

I haven't linked a personal icloud on my iPhone. I only use it for app testing, so all it needs is testflight to download the app. Testflight is happy with my company email, I can get app updates, so I am happy with testflight and the phone. Apple, though, is not happy with me!

Whenever I start the phone, I get a popup telling me to go into settings to update my email address. It has two options: "open settings," and "not now."

Apparently Apple's definition of "not now" is "remind me again immediately," because this is exactly what happens.

Furthermore, you are not able to open the app switcher until the alert goes away. The only way to actually get it to leave you alone is click open settings, wait for settings to load, then minimize it and get on with your day.

I can hear the defense to this: I am a bad user, I should just give Apple my email address and let it associate all of that sweet, sweet data to me, because I really don't have anything to worry about, unlike all those other companies. Also, this is not actually that big a hit to my productivity, thanks to the iPhone's amazing, new, lightning-fast processors... on the 14, that is. Oh, you don't have that one? Too bad!

And that is fine. My issue--the issue, is the mirage of this "not now" button that just brings the stupid dialog back. What is this gaslighting for? If they want to force me into settings, just take me there--or only give me the one button. But no, they have such contempt for their users that they taunt them with the possibility of something useful, but choose not to make.

Alternate explanation:

Apple is required to offer users an alternative to providing their email address.
Apple is not required to offer users a convenient or good alternative to providing their email address.

I get so much schadenfreude when I read about Apple users having issues. I've been dealing with brain damage in the software I run for decades. I'm a Linux user, so brain damage is included in the package. Everyone else was having a great time. Nowadays? Now you suffer too, motherfucker! For different reasons, yes, but suffer nonetheless.

We're even now. We're the same, you and me.

It didn't have to be this way! The entire company was founded by a Type-A details madman slave driver type who would throw shitfits if things were a pixel off. Oohhhhh but if we can't have your data then let's intentionally roll garbage out to you. PFFFT.

Pffft, I say.

Join us.

JOIN US!

JOIN US!

That's the call of the Apple