#dark pattern

Did a little comic scene for @flamingolawn ! Dark Pattern and Serastes are both immediately clocking each other for being sycophants <3

If you have an account on a Meta services like Facebook or Instagram you should have gotten this email:

And “objecting” isn’t even an in-app toggle or something, you have to go to the link in the email (which is different url depending on region so I can’t even give you the link here lol) log into their help center and submit an “objection” and even if you do submit that objection?

If some bitch who doesn’t care reposts your pics or @–s you it’s going into Meta AI anyway lmfao

“As social networks become bigger, content becomes garbage.”

But the concept of wide networks of social ties with an element of broadcasting is dead. 

Too big to succeed

Most social networks are now publicly traded companies — they’re always chasing growth. Growth means more revenue and revenue means that users need to see more ads.

The best way to shove more ads down your throat is to make you spend more time on a service. If you watch multiple YouTube videos, you’re going to see more pre-roll ads. And there are two ways to make you spend more time on a social network — making you come back more often and making you stay longer each time you visit.

And 2018 has been the year of cheap tricks and dark pattern design. In order to make you come more often, companies now send you FOMO-driven notifications with incomplete, disproportionate information.

Private communities

Centralization is always followed by decentralization. Now that we’ve reached a social network dead end, it’s time to build our own digital house.

Social networks that haven’t become too big still have an opportunity to pivot. It’s time to make them more about close relationships and add useful features to talk with your best friends and close ones.

And if you have interesting things to say, do it on your own terms. Create a blog instead of signing up to Medium. This way, Medium won’t force your readers to sign up when they want to read your words.

Just look at this extremely informative (/s) email I got.

This is the entire body of the email. They aren’t telling me what the changes are. If you go to the linked update page to find out?

“We are making other updates” WHAT ARE THE FUCKING UPDATES??? WHAT ARE THE UPDATES PAYPAL. WHAT ARE THESE “OTHER UPDATES” THAT YOU ARE MAKING?

You gotta download the PDF and compare line by line with the previous Statement to know wtf was changed. And I think this might be a previous-previous addition rather than the newest but:

The Agentic AI will perform… what tasks??? What actions are going to be initiated on my behalf??? What exactly is this “Agentic AI” learning from me???? The AI can’t be trusted with decisions and yet??? It operates with a degree of autonomy? What is the degree of autonomy??? There is no explanation.

I can’t opt out of AI/automatic decisions because the laws of my region do not force PayPal to give me that option, so I either have to delete the entire account I rely on as there aren’t many other options for getting paid for international remote work OR I keep paying them fees to do shit with my information they don’t even tell me about. Like? Paypal business fees ain’t cheap but hell, I might even agree to a higher fee for the “premium” of having control of my account and its data but they don’t care and since they have de facto monopoly internationally, I just have to suck it.

Companies like Visa are being pressured into enforcing censorship by proxy (and I have an unsubstantiated guess as to what might be behind it)

Like, I’ve always thought the technology and principles behind cryptocurrency were noteworthy; I just didn’t care for the ponzi scheme the speculating cryptobros turned it into. Now I see the value of decentralization more than before.

Like. I actually am fine with government regulating financial transactions (for the most part) and the service providers having my records but why am I de facto forced to agree to my information being sold to third parties and/or being used for unrelated purposes that they’re not even obligated to transparently disclose. Why can’t I just pay for the service I am using, no more and no less. I didn’t ask for my experience to be enhanced. There is nothing to be enhanced I am sent money and PayPal takes a fee off the top and then I send the rest to my bank account and PayPal makes money off of that too. The only enhancement to be made is lower fees but you’re not doing that so what more do you want.

I love Google AI overview explaining to me how there is no direct and permanent way to turn off Google AI overview.

At this point Google is not my primary or even secondary search engine but I do use it sometimes for some things and like, you are a search engine why are you pushing the search results farther down with AI generated summary that you admit can be wrong.

I don’t really like that DuckDuckGo incorporated Search Assist which is pretty much the same thing, but at least its pretty easy to turn off entirely.