I don’t doubt that happens to people but I’ve been curating my feed for over a decade, I don’t get any of that – for my main feed it’s a mix of video game analysis/essays, speedrunning, science videos, and RWBY, and I’m in the process of re-curating to get RWBY to show up instead of science because I never actually interact with the science videos beyond watching and I have an entire other feed for edutainment.
HEY YO XBOX AHOY IS BACK?
Hold up I’ve missed how many videos?
Why hasn’t youtube been pushing them to me I used to love their vids
110% this is the way.
I still have friends of nearly 20 years whom I met on the official Wizards of the Coast forums back when those still existed and I’ve managed to meet a handful in person once or twice. I’ve made friends through Discord, fanfic sites, even youtube whom I’ve also met IRL (usually at cons), even if I have been terrible at sticking around sometimes. I’m even making friends on here just by posting and generally being nice and being around, which tbh I wasn’t expecting both because of the low traffic and because of the depersonalized nature of this inherited-from-reddit interface.
I may have expressed myself poorly, then, because my point was that people were anthropomorphizing the pencil with googly eyes just the same as they are now with AI. It’s not that I blame people for doing what they are innately, biologically programmed to do (form social bonds), it’s that people are so blindly against AI that they’ll accept wildly incorrect assumptions like (quoting a friend here) “they made an AI work a retail job and it wanted to kill itself” without examining what’s at play, like the people who were momentarily horrified that the professor snapped the pencil in half.
I am almost continuously reminded of a tumblr post I saw about a college professor that brought in a pencil with googly eyes, did a little voice, then snapped it in half and told the class (of whom at least some gasped in shock) “we’re at that stage of AI right now”. And that post was years ago now. I know people are apes that pack bond and imprint on anything, but it’s getting ridiculous how many people don’t recognize it.
What an impeccable combination of image with username
Legitimately thanks for that. That had stood out to me as “one of these things is not like the others” but my mind only went to sex workers, I did not think at all about men who bought prostitutes.
I literally haven’t used the subscribed feed in over a decade ever since they first started doing that shit. At one time I was subscribed to 300+ channels, now I’m only subscribed to one singular channel I never check (Tomii11, a young boy who at the time had brain cancer and wanted to be a youtuber so there was a grassroots effort to help him find success) because they thoroughly enshittified the subscribed feed (and no I’m not going to click the fucking bell I don’t want notifications, I want a functioning feed).