Alexander Chalkidis

Tag: meta

  • Will AI destroy Meta?

    Will AI destroy Meta?

    I’m not even starting on the joke of the Metaverse and the billions wasted by Meta trying to convince us that they aren’t Facebook and evil personal information thieves. We don’t use Facebook to share pictures in my clan.  Long time now.  We use Google photos.  For any trip there is a shared album.  If someone says “how was it?” I share the link to it.  Nobody else sees anything.  Google can use them all they like, Google actually provides useful stuff in return. And this should be worrying Meta a lot because more and more of us are finding other ways to share on our own terms.

    So do you use AI for marketing?  Superb! AI agents will soon take over preparing social media posts.  Maybe even other AI agents exploring social media, bringing back information, adjusting campaigns.  Fantastic! Will they be as good as a good human? No, not at first. But most companies don’t use “good humans” anyway, most corporate posts are mediocre at best.

    So the problem is that social media isn’t ready for this change.

    Already the Facebook feed is almost useless.  Between sponsored posts, ads and posts of people you don’t know that are probably also sponsored, there isn’t much of interest left.  Now imagine how much worse this will get with AI agents flooding the feed.  One way to try and handle it is like my kids do.  They are extremely careful about connecting to anyone.  Person or brand.  So a curated contact list in an application that only allows for content from your contacts.  That’s a good start. But it doesn’t leave much room for Meta to sell anything. And it is more than likely that they won’t do it on a Meta platform pretty soon.

    It’s also the death knell for mediocre social media posts from companies promoting something.  And that will include AI generated ones.

    Good content is still king.  Just in a different way. AI models are training on freely available information on the web.  So get your website up to speed.  Make sure it projects your expertise and goes in depth into your products or services.  In a convoluted way it will still eventually bring customers to your door.  But only if it is quality content with meaningful individuality.  Anything else will be competing with the bot armies in a sea of crappy mediocrity, AI generated or not.

    Companies are busy trying to get their vast swaths of data into a form that can be accessed by AI in order to milk some future advantage.  So they can discover the secret winning patterns nobody noticed all these years.  Well, while you are doing that, maybe also try and make sure you have enough original content which accurately describes what value you are adding where.  Because every other AI is trying to figure you out in order to bring the “best” result to their users.

    Those rushing to pronounce that “search is dead” haven’t really thought it through. Sure, we will run AI powered searches. And how do they learn? They LargeLanguageModel themselves silly, hoovering up data and trying to make sense of it. So if I ask “which is the best lightweight sleeping bag for hiking trips” they are scouring forums and websites and anything they can find. Well, they can’t find social media posts because Meta hides those. And when it comes to making sense and prioritising all this information the game hasn’t changed. A good product which has gained fans that talk about it a lot will still win. No matter who powers your search. It’s a long term game like it always was. And Zuckerberg is at heart a low level hacker in a hurry to make a quick buck like he always was. No innovation. No essential services for users. No trust in how he will milk our data. No real structure to all the information users have thrown on to his platforms all these years. No added value.

    AI is not Meta’s friend right now.  Because at the end of the day, really, what has Facebook ever done for us?

    (My personal Facebook account got wrongly suspended a year ago. Meta never even responded to multiple requests about it.)

  • Do no evil: ranking tech giants

    Do no evil: ranking tech giants

    Meta for sure is the most evil large technology company of our times.  It is at heart the extension of an extremely immature mediocre hacker.  Time and time again proven unreliable or just straight lying to everyone’s face.  Even if we accept that it has grown so much that it is now difficult for Facebook to act as bad as it used to, we know it will try.  How?  It’s the little things every day.  The lack of resources in policing content.  The experiments are still running on users all the time.  The lack of transparency.  Heck you can’t even export your data normally, they keep trying to hide deactivation menus or make not accepting cookies harder than they should.

    Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t want to connect people.  He just wants to connect your wallet to his bank account.  Plain and simple.  Facebook and Instagram are the crack cocaine of our digital world and he is always looking for ways to make them even more lethal to our psychological well being and social cohesion.  There is simply no upside to any of Meta’s products.  And even if there was some social aspect to them it is submerged in constant changes and lies of the platform.  One minute they are promoting facebook pages, get everyone to invest in those, the next they have relegated them and nobody sees them in the newsfeed.  Then it was video, the future of everything, go build studios in your companies….oh no, he ended that too without warning.  Nobody should take anything Meta says seriously anymore.

    Microsoft is of course evil but in a more traditional way.  This is old fashioned monopolistic behavior.  They build their products in all the ways they can to lock customers in.  Not as bad as Meta because after all this is the software that runs a lot of the planet’s infrastructure and day to day business.  But they do their best.  Complicated pricing structures that get you started and then hold you by the balls.  Lobbying to governments with shady deals that turn into long term locks.  They open up when they lose, like with mobile phones, just enough to try and keep a finger in every pie.  Just so they can weasel their way into your company’s backbone and get you paying a monthly fee for something or other.  And somehow that monthly fee grows over time.  They always find a way.  Microsoft is evil on a state level of lobbying and backroom dealing.  But at least they also get stuff done for the planet and occasionally actually improve their products.

    Google is much harder to consider evil because of the extremely unique business model.  Billions of people around the world have never ever paid Google a cent yet they use Google products all the time.  Google Maps, YouTube, Search, Docs, Android and other incredible and unique tools that are completely free.  Unlike what conspiracy theorists try to tell you, free means free.  In ten seconds you can get a Google account, 15GB for free and do absolutely amazing things on your phone, tablet or computer.  Google is what I call a benevolent dictator.  Sure, they could destroy the planet at any time.  They could ruin all of us.  They probably know what will happen a few years in the future better than anyone.  But they don’t.

    Chat GPT is an excellent illustration of this.  The “T” in GPT of course being a Google invention that the company gifted to the world.  Google could have released something similar a long time ago.  They didn’t.  The kind dictator knew it was too soon for humanity to handle it.  

    Apple shouldn’t even be on this list because it isn’t a tech company.  A giant yes, tech no.  Apple doesn’t innovate technologically.  It is a lifestyle company.  More importantly it is a staple of the American economy.  Much like the dollar.  Apple sells mainly in North America and doesn’t even bother to accommodate the rest of the planet in product design or support.  They make products with last year’s tech copied from everyone or from companies it buys out.  It makes “good enough” gadgets with the design language it has found works for it.  It’s financial success has nothing to do with any groundbreaking technology. Banks don’t run on Macs and neither does anything else of any consequence on the planet.


    So stop lumping “tech giants” in articles and opinions.  They are nothing like each other.  Sure there are product categories where they conflict.  But it is completely irrelevant.  The business models and the way they look at the world is so different that they should hardly ever be in the same sentence.  Some of us, the people that really try to think about technology, society and business care about these differences after all. Show some respect.

  • I did the one thing Facebook simply can’t handle

    I did the one thing Facebook simply can’t handle

    And I got murdered (on Facebook) for doing it.

    We all suspect that “deleting” anything on Facebook doesn’t really delete it. Our personal information is way too valuable. So hiding, archiving and any other option doesn’t really cut it. Under pressure from the EU and everyone else, Facebook finally provided a way to delete your activity. Of course they hid it in complicated menus which they keep changing.

    But worse still, it doesn’t even work.

    I know because I regularly delete all my facebook activity. I also regularly delete all my Instagram photos. It used to work, now it doesn’t. I resorted to writing a bot to do it “manually”, ie to go and delete everything one by one from my smartphone as if it was me doing it. Obviously Facebook doesn’t think anyone will have the patience to do it like that.

    And what happened when I went to Twitter to complain about it?

    They suspended my account. With no recourse to recovery according to them. That is how scared they are that more people will follow my example. After all I have always said that it is ludicrous to rely on Facebook or Instagram as a place to keep anything important. Right from the day they started I advocated basing your communications on your website so you can control it all best.

    And own it.