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One day, you won't be able to delete your social network account anymore. There will be a delete button, but the account will stay, and it will keep posting aft
by rpigab 10mo ago
One day, you won't be able to delete your social network account anymore. There will be a delete button, but the account will stay, and it will keep posting after you're gone, it won't care whether you are doing something else entirely or whether you're dead, the show will go on.
The shareholders will be content, because they see value in that. The users might not, but not many of them are actual humans, nowadays they're mostly AI, who has time to read and/or post on social media? Just ask your favorite AI what's the hottest trends on social networks, it should suffice to scratch the itch.
- washadjeffmad 10mo agoThere's a short story with a similar plot from "Valuable Humans in Transit" by qntm.
- Fwirt 10mo agoIt’s still up on his website as well: https://qntm.org/perso https://qntm.org/perso
- siliconpotato 10mo agoI made a tiktok account to write a comment on a video I hated. Now when i sign in again I am presented with lots of awful videos from the guy I dislike. I cannot delete my viewing history using the website, and following other accounts doesn't remove the obsession tiktok has with always showing me his videos as the default. I'm not installing the app, so the only way around this is to delete my account completely.
- rpigab 10mo agoClassic "any interaction is positive interaction". That's modern platforms to you. Do not try LinkedIn. Not even once.
- fallinghawks 10mo agoJust recently, Twitter started making the default view "For You" instead of "Following" with no way to switch back. Fortunately there's an extension that fixes that and lets you eliminate the For You view entirely.
- fakedang 10mo agoLinkedIn blocked my account for security reasons and is apparently asking for more information, so I don't care. I simply quit LinkedIn. And is it just me, or has LinkedIn Recruiter become all the more useless after the LLM age? At least we're not renewing that abomination next year, opting to use more flesh-and-blood headhunters.
- adzm 10mo ago> the only way around this is to delete my account completely You can choose the option to tell TikTok you are 'not interested' in videos like these, or block the account entirely. There are legitimate criticisms about social media algorithms, but I don't understand why you jump to the conclusion that you have to delete your account.
- BobbyTables2 10mo agoFacebook is spooky that way. They track and log every reel viewed. I suppose everyone does it but actually seeing it is another level of creepy.
- baubino 10mo agoSomeone created a tiktok account using my email address. Tiktok won’t let me delete the account without first verifying it with my phone number. I refuse to give tiktok my phone number because I don’t want my phone tied to social media. I don’t have tiktok (or any other social media accounts) and don’t look at it. But I’m stuck getting several email notifications a day from them. Not quite what you’re saying, but a couple of steps in that direction.
- anonym29 10mo agoReport the emails as spam, report the sender address to spamhaus. When enough people do this and tiktok's emails stop getting delivered, a one-click unsubscribe button in the email body that actually works will very quickly be born.
- madaxe_again 10mo agoSomeone signed up for a Walmart account with my email address. Once every few weeks they order either sex toys, Dolly Parton paraphernalia, or beef jerky in incredible quantities, or some combination of the above, and I get the email receipt. I am never, ever requesting that they delete the account.
- addandsubtract 10mo agoUntil an insurance company or palantir treats that data as your own, and you reap the consequences. Hope the LULs were worth it, though ;)
- mingus88 10mo agoPoisoning data used by data brokers has been a tactic for at least a decade If anyone using palantir wants to draw incorrect conclusions based on unverified data, the impact to them is certainly going to worse than it is to any of us normal citizens
- array_key_first 10mo ago
- bko 10mo agoI don't know, I've heard for years that everything your write will be forever on the internet, but from my experience, it's the opposite. I tried looking into my old blogger, photobucket or AIM conversations and they're nowhere to be found. Sure maybe they exist in some corporate servers when the companies were sold for scraps. And I suppose if I became famous and someone wanted to write an expose about my youthful debauchery, but for all practical purposes all this stuff has disappeared. Or maybe not. How much do we know about the digital presence of someone like the guy who shot Trump or Las Vegas shooter. Or maybe it's known but hidden? I'm impressed that Amazon has my very first order from over 10 years ago, but that's just not par for the course. Why would AI steal my identity and post as me? I'm not that interesting. My data is just not the valuable and I imagine that within the next 5-10 years AI will be trained almost entirely on synthetic data.
- BobbyTables2 10mo agoAbout 20 years ago, my name showed up on a handful of websites that I could find. Was related to school activities I participated in. Used to surprise me then. Even my damn personal website was in the top 5 Google results for my name, despite no attempt at SEO and no popularity. Today those sites are all gone and it’s as if I no longer exist according to Google . Instead a new breed of idiots with my name have their life chronicled. I even get a lot of their email because they can’t spell their name properly. One of them even claimed that they owned my domain name in a 3-way email squabble. I almost no longer exist and it’s kinda nice. Only PeopleFinder and such show otherwise.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 10mo agoInformation storage is the same as fertility. "If you want to have a baby, you won't be able to conceive. If you want to stay childfree, the condom will break." If you want to find old logs of your IRC and AIM buddies from 20 years ago, they're gone. If you say something stupid once, it's kept forever.
- deltoidmaximus 10mo agoI'm having trouble finding it now but I recall a mostly dead physics forum using LLMs to make new posts under the names of their once prolific users. So this has already happened at least on a small scale. It seems nuts to me shareholders would be happy about a bunch of fake users, at least ones that don't have any money.
- BobbyTables2 10mo agoRemember Twitter a few years ago? Users are $$$. Nobody wants to talk about which are human and which aren’t. It’s all a game of hot potato.
- binary132 10mo agoI don’t think advertisers want to spend money for bot clicks.
- nullocator 10mo agoOr maybe they do, because the big open secret in advertising is that they do spend quite a bit of money on exactly that
- ryandrake 10mo agoI don't even think it's a secret anymore, open or otherwise. As long as Vanity Metric Goes Up, it doesn't seem like anyone, anywhere, actually cares how much "economic activity" is fake.
- Viliam1234 10mo agoThat's why the social networks don't want to talk about the bots, but they are happy to have them.
- BobbyTables2 10mo agoI suspect it’s the “nobody got fired for buying IBM” mentality. Who in marketing doesn’t want to champion the success of “we got 25% more views this month!”
- thih9 10mo agoUsers will be content too, corporations will find a way to do that. Via discounts, promo codes, gamification, whatever else they’re using today to get people to install their apps and sign over their privacy.
- KurSix 10mo agoAt that point, deleting an account stops being an act of exit and starts looking like a philosophical disagreement the platform simply ignores
- elvcastelo 10mo agoThe first paragraph sounds very much like the plot of Cam (2018).
- gs17 10mo agoThe future is Google People: https://qntm.org/perso https://qntm.org/perso
- BloondAndDoom 10mo agoThis is wild, never even heard of it but kind of tracks
- AStrangeMorrow 10mo agoIt seems like it is fiction, from what I could find. I was doubting it at times but it feels like for how old it was some of the tech wasn’t quite there then. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37723862 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37723862
- bdangubic 10mo agoI can cancel any account at anytime. If a delete button doesn’t work start posting the most vile pictures you can find and watch yourself get booted out in no time. the easiest thing will always and forever be to kill your social media account
- bdangubic 10mo agoeven easier - say something bad against few countries you cannot ever say anything bad about, that will get you canceled in seconds.
- istillcantcode 10mo agoHow is this going to work with real id to get on the internet everywhere? Wouldn't that mess with the fake bot problem?