Human Slop: A still picture, or someone just pointing to words on a screen on a reel IS NOT ART. It is just money-making slop. It is the equivalent of selling blank canvases as art, or duct-taping bananas to walls.
The failure of Facebook to actually enforce standards against bullying, racism, and rampant sexism. A couple weeks ago, I saw a post OPENLY calling for bullying of traditionally-disenfranchised populations, I reported it to Meta, who decided that that post blatantly supporting bullying did not go against their rules about bullying. Appeal? Same thing.
Blatant and flagrant misappropriation of funds - they spent $40B on the Metaverse, and couldn't even come up with anything as advanced as Second Life was 20 years ago. Why? Because their ONLY focus was on making as much profit as possible.
The state of stage-four decline of Meta isn't the fault of AI - the onus lies upon humans, and the singular obsession with making money at all costs.
I’m with you on most of this, especially that the rot at Meta is human and incentives-driven, not some inevitable side‑effect of AI. The tools just poured gasoline on a fire they’d already lit.
Where I’d push a bit is on “slop” and art. A still image or someone pointing at text can absolutely be art in the right context; the problem on Facebook isn’t the medium, it’s the optimization loop. When your feed is tuned for maximum cheap engagement, you get the lowest‑effort version of every medium: AI spam images, reaction bait, reheated TikToks all wrapped around an ad stack. That’s not creativity, it’s arbitrage.
On the enforcement side, I think your bullying example is exactly why the “AI slop machine” frame matters. If your core KPI is time‑on‑site, you will always under‑enforce against content that drives outrage, even when it’s explicitly targeting marginalized groups. The trust & safety language stays “values‑driven,” but the actual decisions are model‑driven: “does this hurt engagement?” more than “does this hurt people?”
And the metaverse spend is the same story in a different costume. You don’t blow tens of billions failing to clear the Second Life bar because nobody at Meta is smart; you do it because the org is optimized for extracting rent from a captive attention pool, not for building a weird, player‑first world. The money went into trying to manufacture a new ad surface, not into making somewhere people actually wanted to live.
So I read Facebook’s “death spiral” less as a tech failure and more as an endgame of a business model: if you monetize attention hard enough, for long enough, you eventually burn the culture that made the platform valuable. AI didn’t cause that, it just made it faster, cheaper, and harder to walk back.
The bigger problems with Meta are:
Human Slop: A still picture, or someone just pointing to words on a screen on a reel IS NOT ART. It is just money-making slop. It is the equivalent of selling blank canvases as art, or duct-taping bananas to walls.
The failure of Facebook to actually enforce standards against bullying, racism, and rampant sexism. A couple weeks ago, I saw a post OPENLY calling for bullying of traditionally-disenfranchised populations, I reported it to Meta, who decided that that post blatantly supporting bullying did not go against their rules about bullying. Appeal? Same thing.
Blatant and flagrant misappropriation of funds - they spent $40B on the Metaverse, and couldn't even come up with anything as advanced as Second Life was 20 years ago. Why? Because their ONLY focus was on making as much profit as possible.
The state of stage-four decline of Meta isn't the fault of AI - the onus lies upon humans, and the singular obsession with making money at all costs.
I’m with you on most of this, especially that the rot at Meta is human and incentives-driven, not some inevitable side‑effect of AI. The tools just poured gasoline on a fire they’d already lit.
Where I’d push a bit is on “slop” and art. A still image or someone pointing at text can absolutely be art in the right context; the problem on Facebook isn’t the medium, it’s the optimization loop. When your feed is tuned for maximum cheap engagement, you get the lowest‑effort version of every medium: AI spam images, reaction bait, reheated TikToks all wrapped around an ad stack. That’s not creativity, it’s arbitrage.
On the enforcement side, I think your bullying example is exactly why the “AI slop machine” frame matters. If your core KPI is time‑on‑site, you will always under‑enforce against content that drives outrage, even when it’s explicitly targeting marginalized groups. The trust & safety language stays “values‑driven,” but the actual decisions are model‑driven: “does this hurt engagement?” more than “does this hurt people?”
And the metaverse spend is the same story in a different costume. You don’t blow tens of billions failing to clear the Second Life bar because nobody at Meta is smart; you do it because the org is optimized for extracting rent from a captive attention pool, not for building a weird, player‑first world. The money went into trying to manufacture a new ad surface, not into making somewhere people actually wanted to live.
So I read Facebook’s “death spiral” less as a tech failure and more as an endgame of a business model: if you monetize attention hard enough, for long enough, you eventually burn the culture that made the platform valuable. AI didn’t cause that, it just made it faster, cheaper, and harder to walk back.
Preach.