Hank Green was not getting a lot of traction on a promotional post on Threads about a sale on his store. He got just over thirty likes, which does not sound awful, until you learn that was over the span of seven hours and across Green’s following of 806,000 accounts on Threads.

So he tried replying to rage bait with basically the same post, and that was far more successful. But, also, it has some pretty crappy implications:

That’s the signal that Threads is taking from this: Threads is like oh, there’s a discussion going on.

It’s 2025! Meta knows that “lots of discussion” is not a surrogate for “good things happening”!

I assume the home feed ranking systems are similar for Threads and Instagram — though they might not be — and I cannot tell you how many times my feed is packed with posts from many days to a week prior. So many businesses I frequent use it as a promotional tool for time-bound things I learn about only afterward. The same thing is true of Stories, since they are sorted based on how frequently you interact with an account.

Everyone is allowed one conspiracy theory, right? Mine is that a primary reason Meta is hostile to reverse-chronological feeds is because it requires businesses to buy advertising. I have no proof to support this, but it seems entirely plausible.

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Jason Parham, Wired:

The uptick in artificial social networks, [Rudy] Fraser tells me, is being driven by the same tech egoists who have eroded public trust and inflamed social isolation through “divisive” algorithms. “[They] are now profiting on that isolation by creating spaces where folks can surround themselves with sycophantic bots.”

I saw this quote circulating on Bluesky over the weekend and it has been rattling around my head since. It cuts to the heart of one reason why A.I.-based “social” networks like Sora and Meta’s Vibes feel so uncomfortable.

Unfortunately, I found the very next paragraph from Parham uncompelling:

In the many conversations I had with experts, similar patterns of thought emerged. The current era of content production prioritizes aesthetics over substance. We are a culture hooked on optimization and exposure; we crave to be seen. We live on our phones and through our screens. We’re endlessly watching and being watched, submerged in a state of looking. With a sort of all-consuming greed, we are transforming into a visual-first society — an infinite form of entertainment for one another to consume, share, fight over, and find meaning through.

Of course our media reflects aesthetic trends and tastes; it always has. I do not know that there was a halcyon era of substance-over-style media, nor do I believe there was a time since celebrity was a feasible achievement in which at least some people did not desire it. In a 1948 British survey of children 10–15 years old, one-sixth to one-third of respondents aspired to “‘romantic’ [career] choices like film acting, sport, and the arts”. An article published in Scouting Magazine in 2000 noted children leaned toward high-profile careers — not necessarily celebrity, but jobs “every child is exposed to”. We love this stuff because we have always loved this stuff.

Among the bits I quibble with in the above, however, this stood out as a new and different thing: “[w]e’re endlessly watching and being watched”. That, I think, is the kind of big change Fraser is quoted as speaking about, and something I think is concerning. We already worried about echo chambers, and platforms like YouTube responded by adjusting recommendations to less frequently send users to dark places. Let us learn something, please.

Cal Newport:

A company that still believes that its technology was imminently going to run large swathes of the economy, and would be so powerful as to reconfigure our experience of the world as we know it, wouldn’t be seeking to make a quick buck selling ads against deep fake videos of historical figures wrestling. They also wouldn’t be entertaining the idea, ​as [Sam] Altman did last week​, that they might soon start offering an age-gated version of ChatGPT so that adults could enjoy AI-generated “erotica.”

To me, these are the acts of a company that poured tens of billions of investment dollars into creating what they hoped would be the most consequential invention in modern history, only to finally realize that what they wrought, although very cool and powerful, isn’t powerful enough on its own to deliver a new world all at once.

I do not think Sora smells of desperation, but I do think it is the product of a company that views unprecedented scale as its primary driver. I think OpenAI wants to be everywhere — and not in the same way that a consumer electronics company wants its smartphones to be the category’s most popular, or anything like that. I wonder if Ben Thompson’s view of OpenAI as “the Windows of A.I.” is sufficient. I think OpenAI is hoping to be a ubiquitous layer in our digital world; or, at least, it is behaving that way.

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Emily Price, Fast Company:

Meta’s Threads is on a roll.

The social networking app is now home to more than 400 million monthly active users, Meta shared with Fast Company on Tuesday. That’s 50 million more than just a few months ago, and a long way from the 175 million it had around its first birthday last summer.

What is even more amazing about this statistic is how non-essential Threads seems to be. I might be in a bubble, but I cannot recall the last time someone sent me a link to a Threads post or mentioned they saw something worthwhile there. I see plenty of screenshots of posts from Bluesky, X, and even Mastodon circulating in various other social networks, but I cannot remember a single one from Threads.

As if to illustrate Threads’ invisibility, Andy Stone, Meta’s communications guy, rebutted a Wall Street Journal story with a couple of posts on X. He has a Threads account, of course, but he posts there only a few times per month.

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Jason Koebler, 404 Media:

The best way to think of the slop and spam that generative AI enables is as a brute force attack on the algorithms that control the internet and which govern how a large segment of the public interprets the nature of reality. It is not just that people making AI slop are spamming the internet, it’s that the intended “audience” of AI slop is social media and search algorithms, not human beings.

[…]

“Brute force” is not just what I have noticed while reporting on the spammers who flood Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Google with AI-generated spam. It is the stated strategy of the people getting rich off of AI slop.

Regardless of whether you have been following Koebler’s A.I. slop beat, you owe it to yourself to read this article at least. The goal, Koelber surmises, is for Meta to target slop and ads at users in more-or-less the same way and, because this slop is cheap and fast to produce, it is a bottomless cup of engagement metrics.

Koebler, in a follow-up article:

As I wrote last week, the strategy with these types of posts is to make a human linger on them long enough to say to themselves “what the fuck,” or to be so horrified as to comment “what the fuck,” or send it to a friend saying “what the fuck,” all of which are signals to the algorithm that it should boost this type of content but are decidedly not signals that the average person actually wants to see this type of thing. The type of content that I am seeing right now makes “Elsagate,” the YouTube scandal in which disturbing videos were targeted to kids and resulted in various YouTube reforms, look quaint.

Matt Growcoot, PetaPixel:

Meta is testing an Instagram feature that suggests AI-generated comments for users to post beneath other users’ photos and videos.

Meta is going to make so much money before it completely disintegrates on account of nobody wanting to spend this much time around a thin veneer over robots.

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From the official Bluesky account:

With this release, you can now display replies by “hotness,” which weights liked replies that are more recent more heavily.

I believe this replaced the past reply sorting of oldest to newest. People seem worried this can be gamed, but there is good news: you can just change it. There are options for oldest replies, newest replies, most-liked, and one that is completely randomized. Also, you can still set it to prioritize people you follow.

Imagine that: options for viewing social media that give control back to users. Threads is experimenting, but Meta still fundamentally distrusts users to make decisions like these.

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Speaking of podcasts, Michael Hobbes dove into Jonathan Haidt’s “The Anxious Generation” — previously mentioned — for his “If Books Could Kill” podcast. At two hours, it is the longest single episode they have done, but it is worth it for Hobbes’ careful exploration. There is some profanity.

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Ashley Belanger, reporting for Ars Technica in July 2022 in what I will call “foreshadowing”:

Despite all the negative feedback [over then-recent Instagram changes], Meta revealed on an earnings call that it plans to more than double the number of AI-recommended Reels that users see. The company estimates that in 2023, about a third of Instagram and Facebook feeds will be recommended content.

Ed Zitron:

In this document [leaked to Zitron], they discuss the term “meaningful interactions,” the underlying metric which (allegedly) guides Facebook today. In January 2018, Adam Mosseri, then Head of News Feed, would post that an update to the News Feed would now “prioritize posts that spark conversations and meaningful interactions between people,” which may explain the chaos (and rot) in the News Feed thereafter.

To be clear, metrics around time spent hung around at the company, especially with regard to video, and Facebook has repeatedly and intentionally made changes to manipulate its users to satisfy them. In his book “Broken Code,” Jeff Horwitz notes that Facebook “changed its News Feed design to encourage people to click on the reshare button or follow a page when they viewed a post,” with “engineers altering the Facebook algorithm to increase how often users saw content reshared from people they didn’t know.”

Zitron, again:

When you look at Instagram or Facebook, I want you to try and think of them less as social networks, and more as a form of anthropological experiment. Every single thing you see on either platform is built or selected to make you spend more time on the app and see more things that Meta wants you to see, be they ads, sponsored content, or suggested groups that you can interact with, thus increasing the amount of your “time spent” on the app, and increasing the amount of “meaningful interactions” you have with content.

Zitron is a little too eager, for my tastes, to treat Meta’s suggestions of objectionable and controversial posts as deliberate. It seems much more likely the company simply sucks at moderating this stuff at scale and is throwing in the towel.

Kurt Wagner, Bloomberg:

In late 2021, TikTok was on the rise, Facebook interactions were declining after a pandemic boom and young people were leaving the social network in droves. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg assembled a handful of veterans who’d built their careers on the Big Blue app to figure out how to stop the bleeding, including head of product Chris Cox, Instagram boss Adam Mosseri, WhatsApp lead Will Cathcart and head of Facebook, Tom Alison.

During discussions that spanned several meetings, a private WhatsApp group, and an eventual presentation at Zuckerberg’s house in Palo Alto, California, the group came to a decision: The best way to revive Facebook’s status as an online destination for young people was to start serving up more content from outside a person’s network of friends and family.

Jason Koebler, 404 Media:

At first, previously viral (but real) images were being run through image-to-image AI generators to create a variety of different but plausibly believable AI images. These images repeatedly went viral, and seemingly tricked real people into believing they were real. I was able to identify a handful of the “source” or “seed” images that formed the basis for this type of content. Over time, however, most AI images on Facebook have gotten a lot easier to identify as AI and a lot more bizarre. This is presumably happening because people will interact with the images anyway, or the people running these pages have realized they don’t need actual human interaction to go viral on Facebook.

Sarah Perez, TechCrunch:

Instagram confirmed it’s testing unskippable ads after screenshots of the feature began circulating across social media. These new ad breaks will display a countdown timer that stops users from being able to browse through more content on the app until they view the ad, according to informational text displayed in the Instagram app.

These pieces each seem like they are circling a theme of a company finding the upper bound of its user base, and then squeezing it for activity, revenue, and promising numbers to report to investors. Unlike Zitron, I am not convinced we are watching Facebook die. I think Koebler is closer to the truth: we are watching its zombification.

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