misteraven

Thing is that that this fucks up their business model. Its not just as simple as them selling ad space and juggling a formula of 1 ad for every xx posts... First of all buy curating feeds, they're capitalizing on the behavior patterns of addiction. Can't recall what thread it was where someone posted one of the co-founders (I think of Facebook) discussing this and all of us sort of in awe that nobody at Facebook has been thrown in jail yet (maybe someone who remembers the video can repost it here). Further, it also disguises the "fatigue" part of whats happening. Most people follow a ton of people so by remixing the feed, it disguises that most people aren't posting all that often anymore. Your feed feels new each time, because it keeps remixing the it each time. This allows it to be more compelling as you get the feeling your seeing what's new, but in reality its only new to you and often was posted hours or days ago. This gets mixed in with posts that are genuinely new to leave you with the overall feeling that its popping. Meanwhile, a lot of people are given priority and these are the accounts that are strategic to Instagrams growth, whether its a celebrity account that helps expand the base or a commercial account that is putting money into sponsored posts and playin the game the way Instagram wants it played. Those not following so many people or the power users that are spending more time looking at their feed than there is followed content to fill . it, will then note that more and more "explore" posts and recommendations start showing up, presumably so they follow more accounts, which in turn keeps the hamster wheel turning. If you show posts chronologically, it literally fucks up the model and accelerates the decline of the platform.

You just copy / paste the URL and wait a few moments for it to process the link and embed.

I know its fairly simple to add a shortcut, but maybe post a little tutorial or some screen shots or something for the uninitiated? I kept going back and forth about deleting my personal account. Not sure I can really ever delete the 12oz one, even if I do let it lie dormant eventually. But yeah, definitely switched my routine up. Find myself refreshing the All Activity page a lot instead of scrolling Instagram. Also has become the first thing I check in the morning instead of IG.

Side note: Amazing she's still in politics (presumably) even getting caught on camera being that obviously insincere.

@luhemmind if I ask what you paid and what size? not interested in buying them from you, just curious what type of deal you got. seems to be selling in the $300 range.

I believe it... I have noticed some people I follow doing a lot of a live streaming this summer. Super mundane every day type stuff and nothing particularly special. I've tuned in a time or two just to check it out and not seeing any big numbers watching it though. Being honest, I still suspect its got more to do with social media fatigue and people looking to try and make it fun than anything else. Couple things I noticed this week though... 1. The notes Facebook published in regards to Instagrams algorithm and how they prioritize posts is absolute bullshit. Their number 1 criteria and most heavily weighted according to them is supposedly based on interaction. Once again, I noticed a glut of Hypebeast and HighSnobiety posts in my feed. Literally 7 - 8 posts in a row, which I have not seen from anyone else (in fact, even two posts in a row from anyone else probably has never happened). Considering I have never like or commented on posts from either of them, this simply proves to me that there are other factors that are more prevalent in how posts are prioritized and that if Instagram / Facebook is going to lie about this from jump street, that I'm not going to trust anything else they have to say either. 2. That user engagement, at least according to their version of it is surprisingly balanced. That no doubt Hypebeast and Kim Kardashian seem to get a zillion likes and a million comments, but if you figure out it based upon percentage of followers, its falls well within the ballpark of what I do with 12oz and what I see the average joe person receive. This was a pretty big surprise to me actually as I expected higher engagement levels, especially from larger commercial accounts that you can likely assume are gaming the system since their feeds are run like a business. --------- Think I already got into this - can't remember since I've had the conversation with a few people as well - but I can tell you guys this... Historically 12ozProphet has done far better with product sales back via the forum than we have with social media. Admittedly causation does not necessarily equal correlation and I'll be the first to admit a lot more has changed than the introduction of social media... but at a time when we had 750 - 1000 members logged into the forum (perhaps 2000 total users. mind you logged in was defined as someone that actually logged in within the last handful of hours), which in turn represented about 16,000 active users (defined as members that had logged in the previous 7 days), that we did roughly 10x more sales on average than I see during the average successful release now. What this tells me is that the actual value of social media followers is exceedingly low. 12ozProphet has almost 55,000 users on Instagram. Our most successful posts will garner about 1200 likes. This converts to under 2.5% of our followers actually liking our posts, and thats the successful ones. Factoring in for fake followers that run bots to build their own followers, that still is unbelievably low. Now I also recognize that with the *curated* feeds, a significant portion aren't even seeing our posts, despite making the effort to follow. Regardless, it proves to me that despite how easy it is to post, the return on that minimal effort / investment is hardly worth it. Now considering the focus here is simply getting a follower to double tap an image, it becomes exponentially less when the goal is to get them to comment. Not that there's really anything to gain there considering most the time a comment winds up being an emoji or an acronym (LOL, SMH, etc) it really drives home the point. Ultimately the goal is to generally to convert to sales or at least traffic / exposure so you can imagine how poor those numbers end up being (especially when you can't put links in captions or make clickable posts (only stories if you have a business account). Exception is shoppable posts and who wants to lay a bet that this feature will not be free for too much longer? I suspect the only reason its still free is that the conversion to sales is so low, that few would actually pay for it. Likewise, with social media registration numbers tanking and even usage plateauing at best or declining at worst, it makes sense to leave this alone for the time being. Again, this begs the question... Social media isn't really engaging in the traditional definition of the word. It doesn't begin to compare to the engagement we saw back in the day where kids were literally on the forums for hours at a time, or even compared to the time on site numbers we see here now. It's mostly a place where people spend their idle team from what I see. It fills those empty minutes throughout the day, so that maybe someone checks in 25x a day, but rarely for more than a couple minutes. Meanwhile, though the effort / investment is very low, the return on that investment has become increasingly poor, despite being pretty terrible to begin with. I know most users aren't creating video edits and motion graphics for their feeds the way a lot of commercial accounts do, but I still see individuals putting a lot of effort into photos or thought in general to help make their feed cool. We're handing over content, then allowing these companies to monetize it through advertising, then monetize it further with analytics data and yet again by selling off individual private information (profiles). Pretty crazy that it hasn't altogether collapsed since it really has gotten hard to find the redeeming bits to it. I can only assume that people are still hooked into the idea of being *connected* and that the reality is that there just isn't any real alternative to fill that want. --------- This being said, there's about a dozen, maybe a dozen and a half of you that I've noticed have been extra active these last weeks after a pretty long hiatus. I won't call out specific users, but I have seen the same names pop up almost every time I look at the online list under activity. I'm curious how many of you guys have pulled away from Instagram or social media in general since rediscovering the forum or has it simply supplemented that usage?

@GnomeToysHas me thinking that maybe we have enough people to start a seed swap? Big thing I realized this year is that I didn't need to put most my stuff in raised beds. Unsure how to do it, but in the fenced off garden area I need to figure out how to remove the grass and till the soil without bringing in a full on tractor. I did summer squash and a few varieties of zucchini that did incredibly well. If anything, could have used more space between the plants but the output was far larger and far tastier than anything I've bought from a market. Plants grew fast and super hardy so thinking next year I'll plant twice as many and put them straight into the ground. My arugula did great as well and instead of pulling them out at the end and giving them to my birds, I let them grow wild and go to seed. Now there's a million seed pods, so about to start harvesting those along with seeds from all else that did well. Spent about $50 for quality heirloom seeds from https://www.rareseeds.com/ and thinking I'm probably good at this point between what I have left from this year and then saving seeds from what I'm growing. Sort of surprised by my tomatoes... I usually always do so bad with those. I think I got a late start (again) and they looked like they were going to be wiped out by too much sun, but they pushed through and now look pretty incredible. All are starting to show little tomatoes and figure I still have enough time left of warm weather that I'll actually manage to harvest them. Planning to can a bunch and sun dry a bunch to preserve in an olive oil, garlic and herb mixture. Cauliflower is throwing me off. Havent researched yet, but wondering of what I'm seeing are male and female plants or something. Some have nice tight heads like you'd expect, other look sort of like broccoli that is even looser and appear to be starting to flower. Never grown that before or seen anyone else grow any so unsure what I'm looking at. Definitely going to do a shit load more beets next year. As mentioned in an earlier post, you can eat the leaves for a picking or two and then still have the beet itself once it matures. I did a Detroit and Egyption variety and they seem to have done well. That said, I used those little organic cups that are supposed to break down once you transplant from inside and put it in the garden and turns out they stunted my beats since they dont break down fast enough. Another lesson learned is that I probably wont use those next year, though I'm unsure how I can do my plant starts while its still snowing out. Carrots are super tasty but also got stunted and ended up looking like ginseng plants.

Started this book about a week ago. Began really action packed, then dragged for half the book, then got really good again. Another one of those books where the author pulls various current events and then extrapolates them into a societal collapse scenario, which comes off terrifyingly real since it’s likely not far from the truth.

Adding some levity to the discussion...

Garden looks great man. Any reason you don't grow more vegetable varieties?

Believe I read that Facebook wont actually delete your data, only your login and content from publicly accessible servers? That said, problem I have is slightly different... In the past, when 12oz had advertising, I had to have a FB account in order to participate with certain campaigns. Later accessing some tools, required a FB login and like many sites these days, there wasn't always an option to register independently. Obviously we no longer have third party advertising on 12oz, but as I work to reposition 12oz back into a brand and put out product, I quickly learned that the way that game gets played successfully these days is by leveraging social (namely Facebook and Instagram) and using their tools. Example: To have a business account on Instagram, it has to be linked to a Facebook page, which in turn must be managed by a Facebook user. If you don't have an Instagram account, you have no analytics and sort of fly blind in regards to posting and understanding your followers. Not the end of the world, but on a simple and small scale, its a reflection of what happens with the big dogs that are looking to better target their goods and services by optimizing their efforts through better and better targeting. Likewise, most small business' doing online sales have evolved to depend on sellable Instagram posts even if they aren't advertising, which usually goes hand in hand. To sell on Instagram, you need to have a Facebook store, which in turn requires a Facebook page, which again, needs a Facebook account. For now, you can sell on Pinterest and Etsy, which aren't tied to Facebook, but my own personal experience is those those platforms aren't nearly as affective as Instagram. Likewise, you're also just trading one middle man for another, even if for now none of us look at the owners of those platform in quite the same way we do Facebook. Sort of leaves me in a fucked up spot in regards what to do with my Facebook account.

Maybe someone can check Facebook?

Have a bunch of wild turkey out this way as well. Still have my turkey tags since I didn't get around to spring hunting, so hoping to bag a couple for Fall.

Almost seems time to start a homebrew group. Anyone here into Arduino? Wanted to put a project together that what look for power outages and switch to a battery bank instantly once grid power drops so I can run my water pump in case of outages. I know @Mercerhas built something similar, so wondering if maybe we can get a discussion (group) going?

Ah, okay... Got it.

Oh shit, somehow had no idea @Hua Guofangis female?!

Appreciate all the support man. Enjoy the extras!

Got to be careful with that. I know @Europeis big on wild mushrooms as he's mentioned in the off grid thread. Out here I was told you can only eat the mushrooms that come up after a fire. They even publish maps of past years burns so you can go out and pick the mushrooms that come up. Don't know enough about them to know why this is, but I do know that they sell for a lot of money. Small bag about the size of a softball is like $25 - $30.

?

Fuck man. Wondering how much deeper into the mountain I can move.

Some interesting links that are relevant. Facebook’s facial recognition will one day find you, even while facing away https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/06/facebooks-facial-recognition-will-one-day-find-you-even-while-facing-away/ Think it's cool Facebook can auto-tag you in pics? So does the government https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/27/facebook-tag-pics-government

Fuck man... That's a lot to digest. No doubt people in general wont give a fuck, many because they can never wrap their heads around the tech, let alone its implications and many because they're too caught up in the bullshit distractions that much of life today seems to revolve around. I sort of lost faith is all of it when the whole Snowden thing got glossed over. Media worked over time to make the story more about whether he was a traitor or not than actually looking at the data he dumped. Nobody seemed to freak when the government actually threatened to arrest anyone that downloaded the data, as if you needed a bigger red flag that what was going on was super fucked up. In the end, nobody gave a shit and just went back to whatever latest scandal broke on the newswire and whatever dumb shit was distracting people on social media.