I've moved every contact I can to Signal. I absolutely do not want Meta inserting some AI thing in private group chats. There's no option to disable this functionality. It's become standard for me to ask "Do you have a Signal account?" to anyone who contacts me via WhatsApp.
It's sad to have to turn away from a service that I used and loved so much. To be clear: I am not against the idea of AI chatbots, and I wouldn't mind one being available inside WhatsApp, but the roll out of this feature is horribly invasive: it's added to group chats, and there's a floating circle thing on the main WhatsApp page, and I can't disable it.
I did ask Meta AI in WhatsApp how to disable it and it told me that there's no official way to remove it and also suggested I might like to switch another messaging app like Signal.
I guess pytorch is kind of cool and useful, and actually came from Facebook and not a company they bought (like React coming from Instagram). Although I guess you could make the case that Facebook didn't really "invent" pytorch as it is/was a port of Torch.
That said, if you listen to the whole interview, then it really does come across that Zuck really doesn't know what a friend is, and never really has. And at this point in his life, I don't think that going to change. Dude lives in a house with meter thick RPG-proof windows. His reality very much is too distorted by his wealth. He's, literally, too rich to function.
Humans can have this range of social outcomes naturally because all parties are constantly in different moods. Sometimes humans careful choose their social behavior to manipulate others, and this is generally frowned upon. A machine cannot have a wide range of social rewards without being manipulative.
Most Facebook friends are already AI, so he’s just reifying the concept.
I suspect history will see Meta the same way it sees Purdue Pharma - their greed allowed them to convince themselves they were providing something good for the world, while they were actually creating something enormously harmful.
A long memory window will increase stickiness and I don't think this is too far fetched.
I thought too much screentime was bad, but man... Maybe this is how the people who thought TVs were bad felt when they saw people glued to phones.
Is this true? I don't believe this AT ALL. No way that the average American would say they only have 3 friends, that's beyond low.
If you remove family and online interactions, I'd wager most white men under the age of 40 who aren't married have less than 3 friends.
I'd also wager that most single women under the age of 40 have less than 5 friends.
My god, he thinks people like their feed algorithm.
No they won't.
I get the appeal, but there's something "you shouldn't have ice cream for every meal" about it.
"Zuckerborg's Grand Vision: Resistance is Futile"
in a future where AI is doing most of the mundane work, real / personal connections are infinitely more valuable as everything else becomes commoditized background noise
What if you could have your perfect information bubble from all your friends, who always are there for you, always agree, or act in just the right way?
Never thought about this one. Well, I guess that why he's a billionaire.
I'm happy I lived before this nightmare comes to life.
I'm pretty sure you wouldn't need a very advanced AI to replace most friends' interactions on Facebook, but that's completely missing the point.
That's not really friendship, or at least it's just a part of friendship, but I think that's the part that AI is most capable of.
That plan seems incredibly evil, but who gives a shit? Zuckerberg sure doesn't!
People would be willing to pay so much more if what they were paying for was the friendship instead, but so far, any attempt at taking friendships hostage and having people pay have gone nowhere.
So the logical conclusion is to just sell the friendships immediately; that way you can put a price tag directly on the friendship itself and earn much more money from it.
This is a perfectly reasonable business strategy when you're a soulless psychopath with an insatiable hunger for endless wealth.
Of course, this is entirely in conflict with the fact that he will be training LLMs to extract everyone else's money. But emotions aren't logical.
I dont get the impression there are many...
"… a conspiracy theory that asserts, due to a coordinated and intentional effort, the Internet now consists mainly of bot activity and automatically generated content manipulated by algorithmic curation to control the population and minimize organic human activity." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
Myself, I wouldn't say it's "coordinated" and therefore isn't a "conspiracy", but I would say it's a lot of uncoordinated groups who are intentionally trying to manipulate public opinion — the same people who have been trying to do so ever since whichever was was conceived first (if not named so) of "SEO", "spam", "propaganda", "preaching" etc., it's just that now we have LLMs that can personalise everything, I have to pinky swear I'm not a bot myself because you can't possibly tell from just my words alone.
I mean, if this were actually the case there would be no reason to "reify the concept." Reify for whom?
The individuals actually on most people's Facebook friends list are people they know (who probably haven't logged in to the site in 5+ years on average) but the actual feed you see when interacting with the site is like 1-5% those people and 95-99% shit-posting meme accounts you never asked to see that almost certainly are entirely AI driven at this point.
I'd be skeptical of that at this point.
A few years ago I began to ponder what "friendship" really meant, and whether I indeed had any friends at all. Sure, I retained a few friendly faces from my high school years, but that's about it. My sister and my cousins won't even accept my FB friend requests.
Another thing I noticed was that a large percentage of my FB "friends" were becoming cagey about their own identity. Their profile photos weren't RL depictions; sometimes they weren't even cartoon avatars. A frequent trick for married Catholic women is that they put up a "couples photo" with their husband. Fine, I get it, but that's not what profile photos are for.
So I began to wax skeptical about the identities of the people controlling FB accounts. And you know what? There's no way to know. Even if you've met in person and you're completely satisified that your RL Friend controls the FB credentials, that doesn't mean they're 100% always going to be controlling that account when they're out of your sight.
So I drastically pared down "friends" to people who have my intrinsic trust and faith that they will not fuck around with their identity. Again, I really have no way of knowing. But being that my "friends" list is down to about 5 lucky contestants, I'm not too worried.
Unfortunately that means that my newsfeed is filled with a lot of non-friend content. I try to mostly follow "Official Pages" of reputable businesses with whom I have an actual relationship, so I do get news that I can use, but it's dull reading that newsfeed, honestly.
There's substantial evidence that it makes people live happier, longer and healthier lives, eg [0].
[0] https://mcpress.mayoclinic.org/healthy-aging/a-surprising-ke...
The first thing we look for when his mental health starts to go is social interaction. As soon as he starts to get antisocial we know his mental health is tanking.
Humans need social interaction. Happiness is a muscle and it's best strengthened with other people. Seeing people at all improves mental health.
Humans are social creatures whether people want to believe it or not.
Being isolated and alone will make almost anyone unhappy and unwell, whether that person will admit it or not.
Women, who tend to maintain more social connections, will often thrive without a partner in their old age. Men will often just kind of wither away.
It's a miserable life though; for one, not everyone even has a romantic partner, and even for those who do, being 100% dependent on one person is incredibly toxic.
So yea, while being friendless might not kill you, realistically, adults need friends.
> In my life and in the life of people that I observe regularly, there is no real need for friends.
My condolences. I hope one day you find people that you can actually connect with and care about each other.
I think we just become so comfortable and okay with not being happy that we can't identify we're not happy. Everything becomes a routine, everything is automatic. We maintain systems that ultimately don't benefit us because we're terrified of what would happen otherwise.
Which means you can't let non family members too close.
Most "competition" in our modern world is artificial. Try figuring out who benefits from it and where this mentality originates. You'll find that those two tend to overlap :)
I mean, in the strictest sense no, in that you're unlikely to die if you don't have any. But most people would consider having friends fairly essential to a happy life.
So, besides this being hilariously out of touch, how come he (seemingly) believes this? Is this perhaps what he says to the public, while believing something else? Or surrounded himself with yes-people who won't actually tell him what they think? Or is he maybe just extrapolating this from usage data and assume because X hours of their day was spent on the feed, they like it?
It's just so hard to imagine how he got to that place, as I don't think I've ever heard anyone (online or offline) about how they like their feed order, it's always complaints about it and how they have to jump through hoops to get it into a chronological order, and hide all the spam/non-friends stuff.
Management put up the metrics they care about and think they are doing well when those reach some thresholds. They stop thinking about the qualitative side of anything over the time, and truly believe if the metrics are going where they want to it's because people love the experience overall.
It's very McNamara fallacy-y. Even more when you get sycophants around to push whatever your vision is, even to the detriment of the overall experience.
I've noticed that rich and/or powerful people have a particular bias. They have a tendency to think their thought processes and preferences extend out to everyone, because they are successful and everyone wants to be successful.
I noticed this with RTO. I think a lot of executives genuinely, really thought it would improve our (ICs) jobs. Because think about what executives do. They sit around, talk to a bunch of people, make a bunch of decisions, and ultimately try to "sell" things. Well, that kind of stinks over zoom. So for them, it's true, RTO does make their job better. They can't really fathom, or maybe they just refuse to, what our job is. They don't sit there and walk a mile in our shoes.
For someone like Zuck, maybe this is how he would prefer his friends to be. That's kind of sad and pathetic, but what's even more sad is that he seems incapable of understanding other perspectives.
Mine right now is:
1. Friend
2. Ad: Mothers day promotion — mine died years ago
3. People you may know
4. Someone commenting on a post shared by a friend, but FB didn't expand the post so I could actually read the comment, this was just an announcement that such a comment exists
5. Friend
6. Ad: jewellery
7. One of my own posts
8. "Are you interested in this post?"
9. One of my own posts
10. People you may know
11. The same people in #2 with a different picture for the same deal
And this is relatively competent! Usually it's just an endless stream of recommendations for things I have no interest in — meme groups, or support a team I've never heard of in a sport I don't follow in a state I've not visited in a country I was last in before the pandemic, or services I can only buy if I was both a citizen of a different country and living in an additional different country, or both (but as separate ads) dick pills and boob surgery.
I may not be interested in the mother's day promo or the jewellery, but I could at least theoretically buy them if I was.
But then I refresh it, and the friend's posts are reminders to vote… in the UK local elections… which were last week… and I live in Berlin.
On the plus side, this makes it very easy for me at least to not find it at all addictive. If only everyone was so lucky…
All of these algorithms are insanely effective. Thousands of smart people smarter than you made them, how could they not work? If they don't work on you, you're an outlier, they work on everyone else. They work on you, but you just don't realize it. All of these algorithms are insanely effective. Thousands of smart people smarter than you made them, how could they not work? If they don't work on you, you're an outlier, they work on everyone else. They work on you, but you just don't realize it. All of these algorithms are insanely effective. Thousands of smart people smarter than you made them, how could they not work? If they don't work on you, you're an outlier, they work on everyone else. They work on you, but you just don't realize it.
Basically, my life hasn't been enriched by seeing the feed in any way. The one in the top spot was fine but I actively follow that person anyway and check their profile from time to time, so I wouldn't have missed it.
Then their AI users can interact with each other in their shiny metaverse so we humans can be left in peace.
Numbers like that can warp a person’s perspective
edited to add [some]
Addictions are strange to comprehend.
I don't know many people in real life who praises it, it's a thing that some are absolutely addicted to, others use as a pastime in the bathroom, in queues, anywhere they would get bored. Many even display the same behaviour as addicts, they don't want to be there, and have to create friction and obstacles to make them avoid it, just this weekend I taught a friend on how they could limit their time on Instagram after he opened up that it was just making him sad and he couldn't stop, tried deleting the app a few times and always ended up reinstalling in a couple of days.
You are falling into the same trap as Zuck, just because usage is high doesn't mean people like it.
And that's without counting the addictive vs. valuable distinction that the other replies are making.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/14/podcasts/why-boys-and-men...
I don't have any more links off hand, but I don't think this is a "new" thing as I've seen it discussed quite a lot over the years. Things such as "Why do white men kill themselves so much more than other groups?"
I don't want to get into the whole "white men's problems are more important than other groups problems" because it's very sensitive and that isn't the point I was making.
There are a ton of reasons why this seems to afflict white men a bit more and I don't know which of them are more valid than others. Whether the idea that it affects white men more is probably contentious in itself. That's not the point.
I'm not claiming I'm right or that it's a serious issue. It's just an interesting topic that probably has a billion factors contributing. It's interesting to think about and can be eye opening to what other people are going through.
TIL a new word, which totally explains my teenage interest in the occult, Wicca, shapeshifting magic, etc. — although I did also have a syncretic New Age/Hindu/Catholic mother, which was the more obvious proximal cause.
Nothing really out of the ordinary - though of course I would as soon kick a puppy, as say so to someone in the throes of it! People deserve to enjoy themselves and kids deserve to be kids. But I do take "chuunibyou" (chūnibyō) as just part of what we do around that age, to begin the process of cleaving unto ourselves and defining who we are. It only happens English doesn't have a word for this aspect specifically; luckily for us, what it does have is a habit of mugging other languages for loose vocabulary.