For You

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Even before dumbfuck Musk bought Twitter, the clowns running it would occasionally switch my default feed from "Following" to "For You." The algorithm. Every one of these big tech companies has some way of sending you shit you don't want.

Because an embarrassing manchild hadn't yet bought the company, I never tried that view because I had enough friends use Twitter that I just wanted to read what they said. Enough time has passed that very few people I follow use it, so I got the idea in my head to look at the "For You" tab the last time it changed to be default for me.

Why does Musk change it?

A step back: Facebook is also incapable of just showing me what my friends post. There is no way, unlike Twitter, to get it to do that, as far as I can tell. When I mindlessly scroll Facebook, it at least seems to have detected what I will stare at. It shows me accounts that I have never engaged in that paste comic book pages. It shows me "Reels" of beautiful women, none of whom I follow or have otherwise seen before. And it has kind of figured out that I like arcade games, but it constantly shows me For Sale ads from a lying thief from Oregon that was the co-conspirator in the fake arcade game selling scam that I posted about on this site a couple of years ago. I promise this is real. I see a pinball ad, I take a look and - yep. It's from Oregon, being sold by a guy who should be locked up.

So FB at least has some idea of what I am ok with on the screen. Not Twitter. As I scroll, I block the following:

- Anyone MAGA because they are worthless and we know the Russians are on Twitter with their fake accounts trying to divide us
- Hall Monitors. Just to define this, anyone with any view that attempts to shout at people to have a certain mindset on something. I don't care if it's far left or right.
- Anything involving the Middle East.
- Anything obviously posted to try to drive "engagement" for the originator's nonsense
- Anything antivax

And so on.

There is simply no code written to detect what I block and read and what it sends me. None. In a way this is not surprising: Musk is incompetent and regardless of who is running Twitter, if they are doing what he says, their code is going to seem incompetent. I can block 50 MAGA morons in a day and the next time I go to Twitter it will show me posts about the Blue Jays, the Padres (for some reason), old video games and people supporting the orange retard.

The conclusion I draw is that they simply don't care what the end user wants to experience, they are sending this shit out in an incompetent, desperate way to drive engagement and "get people worked up" and yadda yadda.

Doomscrolling has always been something that I know is a time suck for me. I want to stop it and I can easily - the way the Brave browser works on Android, it will give you a home screen of your most visited websites. It does Bookmarks too, but just having the little icons show up is easier. All I have to do is just use 16 other sites more than Twitter for a bit, after I clear the browser history, and I'll just not visit Twitter with an idle mind. I was able to do it with Hackernews, which was always an awful site filled with dumb nerds like Musk, but it got to the point where once a day they had the whole "WFH versus In Office" debate in the comments, and every single one of the posters thought they were expressing the same 4 ideas about it for the first time.

Anyway, enough of this crap. If you guys have a pleasant website to read that isn't run by pigs, let me know. This is the kind of site I try to read more of:

https://www.timeextension.com/

[Flack]

I think Facebook, followed closely by Twitter, will go down as some of the greatest bait-and-switch examples of all time. Facebook started as this thing where you could find old friends and then turned into the only way I communicate with lots of people (friends and family) and there are lots of businesses that set up Facebook pages instead of establishing websites. They waited a decade before they started really messing with the algorithm. There was a time when my Facebook feed was just a steady stream of updates from people I friended. Fast forward to today and my entire feed is ads, Reels, and posts from pages I don't follow. I spent a week closing and blocking every single post from people, pages, and groups I don't follow and Facebook simply replaced them with worse ones. And because it's a (bad) habit, I keep checking the site only to find more and more garbage and less and less updates from friends. I wonder if this business model evolved over time or if this was the plan all along. In the end it doesn't matter because here we are, and it sucks.