"Now, you know it's up to you whether or not you want to just do the bare minimum. Or... well, like Brian, for example, has thirty seven pieces of flair, okay. And a terrific smile."

My only use for social media is finding a $30 push mower or used TVs on marketplace.

Other than that, the content around most social media sites is mostly a slurry of bullshit mixed with Ai, so... waste of time, mostly.

That isn't an accident.

There is this insight that I remember reading about internet scams, that they are poor quality with lots of misspelling by design. According to what I've read, this acts as a useful filter: If you're smart enough to pick up on things like misspellings, we don't want to waste our time scamming you.

That is now essentially the entire ethos of the modern internet.

yeah and I gobble that shit up like candy.

I am not immune, and I don't find all algorithms predatory - for example, I log on knowing that steam is selling me a product, but I am not the product. I just said in many ways I am successfully avoiding "the algorithm", though the scare quotes immediately following a run down of social media networks was meant to indicate a specific type of algorithm that is meant to induce engagement or enragement (both are profitable) and change my behavior because I am the product.

I still have plenty of time for algorithms that serve me up games for that crucial 15% of my library that I bought but haven't played yet.

One thing at a time Maxxie.

Many props to you. I feel like reddit doesn't count as social media, but I couldn't energetically defend that position. They are certainly engaging in social media tech bro behavior, so the distinction probably doesn't matter at this point, but it felt different than social media before it went to shit. Now, obviously when it "went to shit" is a point in time that is highly relative to the observer, but always sometime after the observer joined. That's just the nature of enshittification.

There is a lot of heated debate about this. They're saying due to COVID, that "early" can mean anything from 0-8 now, which obviously I don't understand but what can you do? They are saying it.

I must assume from your helpful correction that 2006 is the actual year twitter came out but even then I literally cannot be arsed to look that up on purpose because, I cannot stress this enough, I very much do not care about social media, as per my comment. So if you say 2006, that is what we're going with.