Social Media is for the Birds #nobodycares

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

A couple of years ago I joined LinkedIn because I was stupid.

I got it because I was starting to get serious about maybe doing 3D work for money and had this impression that having a LI page was more or less a standard part of establishing your legitimate existence as a worker in whatever field you work in. This seemed to make sense to me, because before I joined LinkedIn, whenever I clicked on someone's LI profile it was basically just some personal info, their education, and their employment history. And that looked reasonable to me and I thought that's what LinkedIn was. Then I got an account.

It turns out that in reality LinkedIn is a Facebook-like social network; there's a feed of posts that an algorithm pushes at you. About half of it is want ads and event notices from whatever sectors you claimed an interest in, which makes sense and is what I expected. But the other half is...just, god-awful. Overconfident advice from self-described hustle gurus, hype-CEOs, and grifter influencer types gushing about how much they love being soulless corporate stooges who devote every spare second of their lives to their company.

Like, remember all those videos of everybody crying when Kim Jong Il's death was announced, and it just goes on and on and even keeps escalating with people trying to outdo each other because nobody is going to be the one who stopped crying first, or didn't wail loudly enough? Imagine that, except instead of theatrical displays of phony grief it's toxic positivity and people bragging about how they work even on vacation and, like, while they're in the hospital and stuff. That's the LinkedIn social experience.

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

I just ignore all mails from LinkedIn even if they're announcing a post by someone who is actually a personal friend. I never log in to it. I have only deliberately used it in the context of an immediate need during an active job search.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

Social media companies are slowly waking up to the fact that, unlike the US, European governments (including the UK) regard freedom of speech as a qualified rather than an absolute right, meaning that they're allowed under the ECHR to restrict freedom of expression to the minimum extent necessary to, for example protect others from hateful or defamatory speech and to prevent the promotion of terrorism, terrorist organisations, crime and disorder. And governments expect social media companies to cooperate with them in this endeavour.

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

Telegram is not end-to-end encrypted so whether it's using encryption between the servers and the end users is irrelevant, everything's subject to monitoring and moderation, he just declined to do any.

 

[Free]

Telegram is not end-to-end encrypted so whether it's using encryption between the servers and the end users is irrelevant, everything's subject to monitoring and moderation, he just declined to do any.

Pretty much yup.

 

[Free]

Just a backend technical update for the continuing Tumblr masses.

Tumblr migrates more than 500 million blogs to WordPress

Parent company Automattic insists the user experience won't change a bit.

arstechnica.com

 

[Free]

Author of "very demure, very mindful" catchphrase seeks federal trademark

"Very demure, very mindful" has become the latest vocabulary defining the internet's summer. And TikTok content creator Jools Lebron is working to trademark uses of her now-viral words.

Lebron filed to trademark "very demure very mindful" for various entertainment and advertising services, including the promotion of beauty products, last week with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Two filings dated Thursday are under her legal name, a representative for Lebron confirmed to The Associated Press.

Social media's love for "very demure" content started in early August, when Lebron took to TikTok to describe the hair and makeup she was wearing to work. Her delivery took off and she kept going, with "mindful" and "cutesy" flooding the internet as scores of fans, including big name celebrities, shared their own playful takes to describe just about any detail of day-to-day life.

Not sure she gets how the internet works.

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

A couple of years ago I joined LinkedIn because I was stupid.

I got it because I was starting to get serious about maybe doing 3D work for money and had this impression that having a LI page was more or less a standard part of establishing your legitimate existence as a worker in whatever field you work in. This seemed to make sense to me, because before I joined LinkedIn, whenever I clicked on someone's LI profile it was basically just some personal info, their education, and their employment history. And that looked reasonable to me and I thought that's what LinkedIn was. Then I got an account.

It turns out that in reality LinkedIn is a Facebook-like social network; there's a feed of posts that an algorithm pushes at you. About half of it is want ads and event notices from whatever sectors you claimed an interest in, which makes sense and is what I expected. But the other half is...just, god-awful. Overconfident advice from self-described hustle gurus, hype-CEOs, and grifter influencer types gushing about how much they love being soulless corporate stooges who devote every spare second of their lives to their company.

Like, remember all those videos of everybody crying when Kim Jong Il's death was announced, and it just goes on and on and even keeps escalating with people trying to outdo each other because nobody is going to be the one who stopped crying first, or didn't wail loudly enough? Imagine that, except instead of theatrical displays of phony grief it's toxic positivity and people bragging about how they work even on vacation and, like, while they're in the hospital and stuff. That's the LinkedIn social experience.

 

[Essence Lumin]

Yeesh. A post on the local facebook group. It could be worse I guess.

Wait so I am learning today there is a Pride Fest at [removed] on Friday 10/18…..cool. But adult bondage vendors and adult sex paraphernalia vendors will be there. My son attends soccer on Fridays and if he needs to use the bathroom at [removed] he has to walk thru god knows what else as a 9 year old boy? Yes sometimes people wear extreme fetish outfits to pride events. How is this okay for unexpecting parents?? Sorry adults can do what adults want to do but surrounding a kids field and playground… sick. This is not normal.

 

[Free]

Recreational Benadryl??? Jesus Christ, people, go get a fucking milk shake.

 

[Noodles]

Yeesh. A post on the local facebook group. It could be worse I guess.

The real problem here osnwhat donthey consider to be "sex toys" or "extreme outfits.

Because some of the worst anti LGBTQ people would put "Things with rainbows" in that category.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

https://mastodon.social/@mhoye/113347100877232029

Twitter's final form is going to be a few hundred thousand warring propaganda bots propping up a potemkin playground "society" for a few hundred credulous journalists and those journalists will be absolutely convinced that if they go anywhere else, they won't have the visibility or impact.

'

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Recreational Benadryl??? Jesus Christ, people, go get a fucking milk shake.

You know I never really thought about it before, but it occurs to me that one of the things that's definitely done the most to keep me away from recreational drugs is reading people talking about their hallucinations as if they're real even after they've sobered up.

 

[Free]

Darwin was not an influencer.

Influencers Drowned 'After Refusing to Ruin Selfies With Life Jackets'

Moments before tragedy struck, the influencers had posted photos on Instagram.

petapixel.com

 

[Free]

TikTok is strong with the Darwin Awards crowd.

For fame or a death wish? Kids’ TikTok challenge injuries stump psychiatrists

As clinicians see more TikTok challenge injuries, explaining them is often hard.

arstechnica.com

 

[Govi]

It's the age-old child's conundrum answered incorrectly: "Would you jump off a bridge if your friends did it?" "Yes!"

 

[Free]

Cory Doctorow on social media enshittification, and how one can't be promised it won't happen. He has a point about building an audience on a platform that can sever ones relationship to that audience. I guess it matters to those with an audience. For those, I say just set up a fucking blog and move on.

Bluesky and enshittification

No one is the enshittifier of their own story.

doctorow.medium.com

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Adam Ellis (@adamtots.bsky.social)

social media :)

bsky.app

 

[Free]

One of those "this is news?" bits.

Research Finds Conservatives Vastly More Likely to Share Inaccurate Articles Without Even Reading Them

Researchers determined that US conservatives are substantially more likely to share false information without even reading the article.

futurism.com

A team of researchers led by Penn State have found that American conservatives on Facebook are substantially more likely to share article links containing false information — without even reading them.

Liberals aren't off the hook, though; Facebook users overall were astonishingly bad at vetting information before spreading it online.

"The closer the political alignment of the content to the user — both liberal and conservative — the more it was shared without clicks," study author and media effects researcher S. Shyam Sundar said in a Penn State writeup of the research. "They are simply forwarding things that seem on the surface to agree with their political ideology, not realizing that they may sometimes be sharing false information."

 

[Free]

Anti-social media.

Pump.fun Is All of the Internet's Worst Impulses on One Site

What do you get when you mix unmoderated livestreams with cryptocurrency? You get Pump.fun.

gizmodo.com

In the trenches of the livestream meta, one man reigns supreme. Livestreaming from a sparse room in California, a Trump 2024 flag pinned above a mattress on a floor, Trevv freebased using a birthday candle sticking out of a woman’s ass to heat up the drugs. “I made a wish,” Trevv said after he inhaled. “All the drugs I could ever, ever want.” Trevv was live on a website called Pump.fun, trying to take a new memecoin he’d created to a high market cap.

Pump.fun is a website founded in 2024 where users can create a new Solana-based memecoin with the click of a few buttons. Then they can livestream to an audience on the website with the goal of pumping the coin. There is no moderation, no rules, and no restraint. It’s going exactly how you’d imagine.

People are streaming the kinds of things that are normally taboo on the mainstream internet. One dev is sitting on a toilet until his coin reaches a $50 million market cap. This is SHITCOIN and if the timer behind him is to be believed, he’s been there for 82 hours.

There’s a guy who smokes meth on stream, a drunk lawyer who gives shitty legal advice that degenerates the longer the stream goes on, and a guy promising not to sleep until his coin hits a $10 million market cap. There is, of course, sex and porn on Pump.fun, but there’s also a lot of darker stuff.