I Announced My Divorce on Instagram and Then AI Impersonated Me

And other mastodon servers, just like other email servers, can of course still modify the data they receive how they'd like.

You'd be surprised how many people in your life can be introduced to secure messaging apps like Signal (which is still centralized, so not perfect, but a big step in the right direction compared to Whatsapp, Facebook, etc) by YOU refusing to use any other communication apps, and helping them learn how to install and use Signal.

There is no feasible way for a normie like me to convince enough people to take any kind of action collectively that will be noticed by FAANG.

I think we like to pretend otherwise, like oh if enough people stop using Instagram, they will fail. This is only true in the most literal sense, because "enough" is an enormous number, totally unachievable by advocacy.

In the cases of special interest groups (think school/club/street/building groups), I just miss out, or ask for updates when I meet people. I am a bit out of the loop sometimes. No-one's died as a result of my leaving. When someone did actually die that I needed to know about, I got a phone call.

Honestly... just leave. Just leave. It's not worth your time worrying about these kind of "what ifs".

Unlikely.

Apparently I'm a luddite now, because yes, this. Stop using social media to communicate with people you ostensibly care about.

Major citation needed

Do not try LinkedIn. Not even once.

They track and log every reel viewed.

I suppose everyone does it but actually seeing it is another level of creepy.

You can choose the option to tell TikTok you are 'not interested' in videos like these, or block the account entirely. There are legitimate criticisms about social media algorithms, but I don't understand why you jump to the conclusion that you have to delete your account.

I am never, ever requesting that they delete the account.

I have a cellular hotspot with a phone number apparently recycled from someone who still has it tied to a fintech account (Venmo, or something similar). Every time this person makes a purchase, my hotspot screen lights up with an inbound text message notification.

This person makes dozens of purchases each day, but unlike my previous hotspots, this one does not have a web interface that allows me to log in and see the purchase confirmations. All I get to see is "Purchase made for $xx.xx at" on the tiny screen several dozen times a day.

Social media was a mistake.

Even my damn personal website was in the top 5 Google results for my name, despite no attempt at SEO and no popularity.

Today those sites are all gone and it’s as if I no longer exist according to Google .

Instead a new breed of idiots with my name have their life chronicled. I even get a lot of their email because they can’t spell their name properly. One of them even claimed that they owned my domain name in a 3-way email squabble.

I almost no longer exist and it’s kinda nice.

Only PeopleFinder and such show otherwise.

"If you want to have a baby, you won't be able to conceive. If you want to stay childfree, the condom will break."

If you want to find old logs of your IRC and AIM buddies from 20 years ago, they're gone. If you say something stupid once, it's kept forever.

Users are $$$. Nobody wants to talk about which are human and which aren’t. It’s all a game of hot potato.

We crawled the Internet, identified stores, found item listings, extracted prices and product details, consolidated results for the same item together, and made the whole thing searchable.

And this was the pre-LLM days, so that was all a lot of work, and not "hey magic oracle, please use an amount of compute previously reserved for cancer research to find these fields in this HTML and put them in this JSON format".

We never really found a user base, and neither did most of our competitors (one or two of them lasted longer, but I'm not sure any survived to this day). Users basically always just went to Google or Amazon and searched there instead.

However, shortly after we ran out of money and laid off most of the company, one of our engineers mastered the basics of SEO, and we discovered that users would click through Google to our site to an item listing, then through to make a purchase at a merchant site, and we became profitable.

I suppose we were providing some value in the exchange, since the users were visiting our item listings which displayed the prices from all the various stores selling the item, and not just a naked redirect to Amazon or whatever, but we never turned any significant number of these click-throughs into actual users, and boy howdy was that demoralizing as the person working on the search functionality.

Our shareholders had mostly written us off by that point, since comparison shopping had proven itself to not be the explosive growth area they'd hoped it was when investing, but they did get their money back through a modest sale a few years later.

As long as no one figures out it’s all fake, the line can keep going up and to the right and everyone is happy.

But I am a pedantic person who prefers to focus on the literal statements in text rather than the perceived underlying emotional current. So I’ll pedantically plod through what she actually said.

She’s dealing with two dimensions of divorce: who initiated it (husband, wife, or collaborative), and whether it was surprising or unsurprising.

That gives several possibilities, but she lists three. What unifies them is that they are all written from the perspective of the abstract woman undergoing the experience.

1. Woman initiated, surprise unspecified.

2. Collaborative, so assume unsurprising.

3. Man initiated, surprising (her situation).

She doesn’t claim this covers all possibilities. The point of that bit is just to emphasize that divorces are different, and to object to treating them as a genre for wellness AI slop.

Here is the original text containing that part so others can easily form their own opinion.

“I also object to the flattening of the contours of my particular divorce. There are really important distinctions between the experiences of women who initiate their own divorces versus women who come to a mutual agreement with their spouses to end the marriage versus women, like me, who are completely blindsided by their husbands’ decisions to suddenly end the marriage. All divorces do involve self-discovery and rebuilding your life, but the ways in which you begin down that path often involve dramatically different circumstances.”