The good and bad of technology

bigpoppa

bigpoppa

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I've been forced to use tiktok for marketing my business and found it to be surprisingly effective and superior to all American social media platforms (its also WAYYY less depressing)
I've also taken up a bit of guitar playing and turns out the apps do a better and more convenient job of tuning than any analog standalone device.

I've also stopped using twitter, its so ******* depressing and bad for you.
Just watching your country fall apart all around you day after day is not good for your mental health.
 
Twitter is a total cesspit. I still look at it for news about Ukraine and also local police stuff etc. Otherwise it’s populated by russian bots and the dumbest people on earth provoking rage bait clicks.

Tik Tok isn’t something I look at as I don’t think I’m it’s demographic. Seems to be targeted (like most of these things) to people with limited attention spans.
 
I have heard that Tik Tok can and is a great marketing tool once you get the algorithm correct for your product and/or service.
X (Twitter) I think is on a general decline as it seems to be home for posts with an agenda and typically not a good one.
I lasted on FB for 1 day before my account was banned and removed, suspect AI security of doing this.

To be fair I am not a fan of social media anymore, I think as it continues it will only become harder to regulate and you'll find organizations (like we've seen) suing them for how they "change" younger people..
 
Never even considered to utilize TikTok for my business. I associate it with stupid short videos of idiots doing dumb things.

But as with all things, it’s not the technology per se…it’s how the users utilize it for their own benefit.

Some good, some bad. That’ll never change.
 
I also practiced my Spanish verbs on TikTok, you can use it for anything.
 
bigpoppa said:
I've been forced to use tiktok for marketing my business and found it to be surprisingly effective and superior to all American social media platforms (its also WAYYY less depressing)
I've also taken up a bit of guitar playing and turns out the apps do a better and more convenient job of tuning than any analog standalone device.

I've also stopped using twitter, its so ******* depressing and bad for you.
Just watching your country fall apart all around you day after day is not good for your mental health.
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Watch a couple of road rage videos and the algorithms feed you more. On one hand it's good to realize how things escalate but it can induce paranoia.
 
I see it as little more than a data gathering system that like other social media does little if any good and certainly some damage to the kids who are easily addicted by their sophisticated algorithms. Since the chinese have access to tiktok they're just even worse than the rest.

Time to scream at the clouds.......
 
nobbie48 said:
Watch a couple of road rage videos and the algorithms feed you more. On one hand it's good to realize how things escalate but it can induce paranoia.
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It’s been a calm day around the house, and the Leafs are ahead 2.0

I’m bored, need some excitement. Maybe asking TikTok for some JT vs PP stuff can get me worked up.
 
Also Shazam is voodoo black magic.
I remember when it first came out, it was kind of clunky and didn’t work so good, now?

Holy smokes 😲
 
I was all on board with avoiding TikTok as something potentially linked to the CCP, but then I saw how pro-Palestinian accounts got systematically shadow banned, shut down or silenced on the American platforms and realised none of the above are really free speech vehicles. (And before anyone gets all 'what-about-Hamas' on me, these were peace organisations and people who were amplifying things like MSF and the UN.)

Twitter has become a cesspool of NUDES IN BIO, conspiracy idiots, and genuine nazis, Facebook is great for radicalising Grandpa by showing him deep fakes of Biden, and Instagram is all about stealing content and farming it out. Twitter used to be great, but there hasn't been any meaningful migration to BlueSky or Mastodon, and Threads is garbage. The only spot I visit regularly is Reddit, but even that has gotten worse since the IPO.

Finding good journalism that can be trusted is hard, but going off all social media seems to be the best approach...
 
Priller said:
I was all on board with avoiding TikTok as something potentially linked to the CCP, but then I saw how pro-Palestinian accounts got systematically shadow banned, shut down or silenced on the American platforms and realised none of the above are really free speech vehicles. (And before anyone gets all 'what-about-Hamas' on me, these were peace organisations and people who were amplifying things like MSF and the UN.)

Twitter has become a cesspool of NUDES IN BIO, conspiracy idiots, and genuine nazis, Facebook is great for radicalising Grandpa by showing him deep fakes of Biden, and Instagram is all about stealing content and farming it out. Twitter used to be great, but there hasn't been any meaningful migration to BlueSky or Mastodon, and Threads is garbage. The only spot I visit regularly is Reddit, but even that has gotten worse since the IPO.

Finding good journalism that can be trusted is hard, but going off all social media seems to be the best approach...
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Have you tried TruthSocial.com?

From their home page…

“Truth Social is America's "Big Tent" social media platform that encourages an open, free, and honest global conversation without discriminating on the basis of political ideology.”
 
Experiences vary ...

I can't figure Reddit out. It seems to be an enormous random mess. Can't follow conversations, can't find anything useful. Obviously some people know how to use it, but not me.

I've never opened TikTok except when a link elsewhere opens something in it. Don't know what it's for.

Xitter is a mess. Only reason I look at it is that a number of Ukraine information sources and a number of motorsports sources are only there. It's tolerable with Elon Musk blocked, and with ongoing blocking of Tesla/Musk shills and advertisers.

Facebook, Instagram, and Threads all share the issue of blocking legitimate news sources, which makes countering misinformation a challenge. Near useless for real news or factual information.

I follow a fair number of YouTube channels. I also block a lot more. If the algorithm repeatedly serves up suggestions that I know are clickbait or outright misinformation, I block them. AdBlock is essential.

Can't live with, can't live without.
 
Instagram is awful for random followers of the "nudes in bio" variety. I've found it worse than Xitter, and that's pretty bad.

I haven't looked at Bluesky, Mastodon, or Telegram. I refuse to look at Truth Social (I see more than enough of tfg a.k.a. the farting guy as it stands). I just saw that Post News is shutting down ... I think I set up an account there, but only ever looked at it a couple of times.
 
Brian P said:
I can't figure Reddit out. It seems to be an enormous random mess. Can't follow conversations, can't find anything useful. Obviously some people know how to use it, but not me.
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It took me a while to wrap my head around it, as it's very different from most social media. Essentially, you follow topics ('subreddits') more than you follow individual people. And the value of the subreddit varies massively depending on the community and the moderators, who don't work for Reddit, but have set up the subreddit, make the rules, and police the postings themselves. It's really like a collection of forums in one place.

I find there's a sweet spot in size, above or below which things get a lot less useful. Too small, and there's just not enough activity to make it worthwhile. Questions go unanswered, most posts are ignored. On the other end, really big subreddits are usually dominated by stupidity and a flood of answers to questions, most of which are wrong. The r/motorcycles subreddit is a good example of this.

(Or to use a better example, the r/genoacfc subreddit for the Genoa soccer team is mostly dead, because there's hardly any supporters outside Genova, let alone Italy. But the r/premierleague subreddit is too big and flooded with partisan nonsense and juvenile 'banter'. The r/asroma subreddit, though, is fantastic because it's in that Goldilocks sweet spot for activity with lots of AS Roma supporters around the world.)
 
Priller said:
It took me a while to wrap my head around it, as it's very different from most social media. Essentially, you follow topics ('subreddits') more than you follow individual people. And the value of the subreddit varies massively depending on the community and the moderators, who don't work for Reddit, but have set up the subreddit, make the rules, and police the postings themselves. It's really like a collection of forums in one place.

I find there's a sweet spot in size, above or below which things get a lot less useful. Too small, and there's just not enough activity to make it worthwhile. Questions go unanswered, most posts are ignored. On the other end, really big subreddits are usually dominated by stupidity and a flood of answers to questions, most of which are wrong. The r/motorcycles subreddit is a good example of this.

(Or to use a better example, the r/genoacfc subreddit for the Genoa soccer team is mostly dead, because there's hardly any supporters outside Genova, let alone Italy. But the r/premierleague subreddit is too big and flooded with partisan nonsense and juvenile 'banter'. The r/asroma subreddit, though, is fantastic because it's in that Goldilocks sweet spot for activity with lots of AS Roma supporters around the world.)
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Yeah reddit is a weird place. It's just a big forum basically for everything. I only signed up over the past year or so because I wanted some more info on a couple of topics, which seemed to come up a lot in goggle searches pointing to Reddit. But after that I got a little sucked into other areas, most of which are cesspools of garbage, so much nonsense and misleading people. I'm not just talking about political crap, even this DIY sub started showing up on my feed, and it all as fake garbage of posts about reactions (you know what I mean "how do I fix this" type posts with no info and just a photo) so nothing about the topic of DIY. And there is this Canadian sub which is a complete echo chamber for dim witted people who just like to think in narrow terms.

Anyhow I've started to stop spending time on there or only focus on my core subs to get any useful info, as the rest is a waste of time.
I'll look to turn off my feed for any other random subs as this is how they try to hook you.

Insta is all fake, unless you are some pretty young thing being shot in trendy places, I guess it's great if you like being superficial. Most of it is run by bots and social mills to artificially elevate the status of accounts by follower numbers.

FB has become the meme or joke spreader, other then that some of the groups are ok to be on, once they clear out the spam accounts.

Maybe people will come back to forums for more engaging online interactions, or we just keep these places to ourselves and not tell everyone.
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