The Click-Bait Headline Thread

I don't do it for the +1s. I do it for the love of the craft.

Orlando Theme Park Will Immediately Walk Guests Out If One Souviner is Purchased - Universal Orlando won't let you walk around the park with the replica medieval swords available for purchase at IoA.

Bonus points for misspelling "souvenir" in the headline.

I copy/pasted. That's all them.

Oh, I went back and checked. That's a high-quality publication there.

So now we have competing contributors to this thread? Curious to see who is going to be able to one up the other contributor.

At this point simply cutting/pasting the headlines is going to get boring. The contributers are going to have to put their own special flair on them in order to keep my attention.

Hey, I've posted to this thread before. I've got two posts on page one but the thread has still survived!

GoBucks89:

I am progressively seeing more items on the feed on my phone that only make sense if created by AI. If not, they are written by people who do not understand the subject matter well at all.

I still am not sure that they are AI, in part because a lot of them pre-date a time when that was prevalent. If they're not AI, I think the people doing it know exactly what they are doing and are probably doing $ome pretty good numbers on it.

I'd estimate about half of the things that I see on Facebook that aren't from people or groups I follow are AI generated.

I just wrote about exactly that on my blog. FB is becoming increasingly useless, and Instagram feels like it's going the same way.

Facebook is hot garbage. I see ads, group posts similar to groups I actually follow, and every senior citizen I'm friends with posting the same copy/paste crap about how they don't give Facebook permission to access their photos or that said copy/paste post will magically fix their algorithm. I'm only there to keep up with scattered family members, follow a few hobby groups, and maintain an archive of pics going back to before I had a kid. I only ever go to Instagram to see what my kids posts. I can be reasonably entertained by Tik Tok for 15 or 20 minutes a day and I use Twitter to keep up with news and sports without the frustration and garbage on Facebook.

Twitter is a dumpster fire, always was. I refuse to even look at TikTok. I don't need more time wasters. I still use Instapoopy, but in general I mostly post stuff as a function of journaling. I doomscroll very little.

I've given up on pretty much all of the social media platforms. I'm tinkering with Blue Sky, but only because it is not yet trying to monetize my eyeballs.

Any advertising-driven model (which is to say: all of the rest of them) works only by increasing your engagement with the platform. And, it turns out that negative emotional sentiments gather our attention better than positive ones. So, guess what happens?

This is hardly new, of course. It is not particular to social media. Even dating back to the Three Network Nightly News era, the news was basically "crap that is bad," plus one 90-second "human interest" piece.

Relatedly, this is on my books-to-read list at the moment:

https://www.goodreads.com/b...do-nothing

The really unfortunate thing for me is that you can't monetize without blanketing pages with ads that cover what you really want, which the socials do by putting them in between posts. After a great December, my ad revenue is back in the crapper.

Jeff:

I just wrote about exactly that on my blog. FB is becoming increasingly useless, and Instagram feels like it's going the same way.

Yeah, your blog post is spot on...well, except for Elon's Nazi salute. Your statement that "Critical thinking is effectively dead in America" was (both fittingly and ironically) in full swing a few days ago: a friend of mine rage posted a photo of Elon's so-called salute a few days ago and I rather civilly responded asking him (and the echo chamber of folks who replied confirming that he is no doubt a Nazi) to do a little critical thinking, as all I saw was a very, very awkward wave to the crowd executed by a very awkward man. He was incredulous that I was defending Elon, and later that evening made a separate post on his wall that he can't handle social media anymore now that he's discovered that some of his long time friends are sympathizers, and promptly deleted his Facebook account.

So yeah, social media has hit an all time low for me, for reasons beyond just AI. Also, I guess I'm a "special kind of asshole."

"It was just an awkward wave."

And no, I'm not going to "just answer your very civil question."

Jeff:

Twitter is a dumpster fire, always was.

I hear this is a lot and agree to some extent, but Twitter is the only social media app where you have even the slightest ability to control what you see. I never use the For You tab and just stick with reading what I follow in chronological order. If I don't like something or it pisses me off or it no longer has anything I value, I just unfollow. Yeah, there's a lot of ads, but I can tolerate it.

I tried to do that to curate my feed in a way that didn't rely on outrage, faux- and otherwise. I failed, and just gave up.

This was well before it went Under New Management.

Brian Noble:

And no, I'm not going to "just answer your very civil question."

Whatever, dude. You weren't a part of the conversation.