Ben Grosser

thanks! indeed it might be a good moment for some plotting. though, whether it worked depends on what you mean by worked

as long as CA is banning loud commercials on streaming services, can we also ban loud logo soundmarks too (e.g., Netflix)? i've taught myself to mute them, but they still occasionally slip through TA-DUMMMMM

screenshot of the article header

When a chatbot’s words *are* its interface, how do we see the aesthetics of engagement they activate—and the politics they conceal? New article w/ @spold.bsky.social
dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

New paper w/ @spold.bsky.social. We introduce new methods to critique linguistic interfaces of AI chatbots, theorize one of ChatGPT's central engagement mechanics as the "praise/prompt envelope," and preview artworks that attune users to see its aesthetics of engagement dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

we need public social media

two billionaires, each with their own personal tech platforms—online forums where agreeing with the owner is the baseline condition for visibility—fight in public while the world watches. welcome to social media in 2025.

ChatGPT's palpably excessive praise over the last week isn't an error or misconfig—it's a deliberate strategy by OpenAI to fine tune praise as an engagement tactic. They've been slowly turning that dial for 2 yrs and only now did users start to notice (I've been recording its praise the whole time)

if Facebook really cared about giving its users a no algo feed, it would make their new friends feed the *default*

also, it’s a sign of how bad Facebook’s become that they had to build a new friends feed at all

Update: no, it's 1 ad for every 1-3 videos.

TikTok has increased frequency of ads on my For You to 1 ad for every 2-3 videos.

there's no way to chat with deepseek's web interface without giving up your data for model training or any other purpose. while i don't presume openAI/anthropic/etc won't violate the opt-out agreement we have (as a paying user), at least there *is* an agreement

Stuck in the Scroll A compulsive scrolling monitor for TikTok.

with tiktok back up, i’m still stuckinthescroll.com

nice

Minus A finite social network where you get 100 posts—for life

My social platform Minus will never be sold, never monetize your data, and never shutdown for anyone anywhere (unless it breaks and I'm unable to fix it). It also won't manipulate your psyche to extract more data or keep you endlessly scrolling or clicking. minus.social

so much pandering

if tiktok goes dark in the US, i expect there will be a non-zero number of humans who look up from their phones for the first time in 5 years

Whether or not TikTok goes dark in the US this Sunday, the looming shutdown exposes just how fragile and controlled our access to software has become.

Whether or not TikTok gets a reprieve, what the looming ban makes most palpable is how important it is to get (what feels to many like) public culture out of private big tech platforms.

Zuckerberg says many laughable things, but saying he will “intensely” focus on “the future of social media” is certainly high on the list. His approach—for the last 15 years at least—has been to hold social media in stasis, to freeze the idea for almost everyone. So little change, so much copying.

also working on that today (and probably tomorrow) :)

ORDER OF MAGNITUDE As the founder and CEO of the world’s largest social media corporation, what does Mark Zuckerberg think about? While we get clues from his posts on Facebook…

Zuck only cares about one thing. It's been consistent since day 1. Everything else is secondary vimeo.com/333795857

there were also new alternatives (with Threads being the leader in numbers). what’s the alternative to Facebook for most Facebook users? as for Threads, we may see some exodus—but mostly what i see there since the announcement is an increase in activity.

good question. twitter/x never had the ubiquity or lock-in of a facebook. x also implemented pay to be seen, elon forced into everyone’s feeds, blue check debacle, name change, degrading performance, etc. IOW hard to say what precisely blew up x. i expect zuck has data to know how this will go.

Zuck must believe cranking up mis/disinfo will benefit engagement. I expect he’s right—lies and obfuscations will induce impassioned reaction by those who believe and those who don’t. In fact, I expect the engagement boost from his announcement is already paying off.

Facebook and Instagram to Unleash AI-Generated 'Users' No One Asked For Meta says it will integrate AI-generated characters into Facebook and Instagram with their own user accounts.

Zuckerberg has spent the last 20 years conditioning users to become machinic in their online interactions. So, flooding his platforms with AI machine “friends” must feel like a next logical step towards further automations of user behavior.

www.rollingstone.com/culture/cult...

I want a t-shirt with one of Claude's favorite sentences-->

Tip: Long chats cause you to reach your usage limits faster.

good to know some manufacturers are working on it now. i wish they’d worked on it *before* introducing the auto hi beam tech, though. even if every new car had this system going forward we’d still have all the current cars blinding us for a decade+ i expect. thx for the info!

OpenAI's Sora ignores relevant data preferences you've already set with ChatGPT and instead defaults to sharing your data with the model and publishing your videos for everyone. It should import those preferences, not reset them.

I'm talking about pedestrians walking on the sidewalk getting blinded by oncoming cars turning on their brights because the car's sensors don't see another car's headlights. I don't see that addressed in the article you linked. Am I missing it?