Category: Social Media

Thoughts on socia media, which has addicted many and alienated others.

Get real (again)!

The Internet and social media in particular, which essentially guarantee anonymity and prevent accountability, have gone a long way in destroying trust between people who do not know one another. When the current torrent of AI-generated text and images is added to the picture, trust can safely be declared dead, and it shows no signs of being resurrected. 

This technology was exciting and promising at the outset some decades ago, but it has gone astray, led off the path by the promise to platform providers of fabulous wealth and by the arguably justified confidence that the ignorance and inaction of people sleeping at the wheel, including both legislators and user-victims, would protect their gold mine.

Given the poor prognosis for recovery, I think it’s time to retreat from the digital world and “advance back” into the real world, and the real world is not on your iPhone screen or computer display.

Get real!

Please, Microsoft!

Please, Microsoft, stop promoting things to users of LinkedIn that are patently bullshit. Your AI should be able to figure out what is bullshit, but maybe there’s money to be made by promoting bullshit.

With the only clients most freelance translators can acquire quickly moving to eliminate their need to use and pay professional translators, Microsoft’s LinkedIn recently decided to suggest a post for me from a translator advising beginning translators not knowing where to start to do volunteer translating.

The post ends with the requisite wall of hashtags aiming at getting engagement, and it features a lovely carousel of places that want free translation. It’s classic LinkedIn eye candy and totally meaningless.

There is a good reason why new translators don’t know where to start, and it’s because there are almost no places and ways to start translating for a living since AI use by translation-brokering agencies transformed the business of freelance translating into a non-business.

Almost no translators, and particularly newcomers, are fit-for-purpose in a market that does not value professionals and requires professionals wanting to survive to engage in translation as a business, for a while, anyway, until everything goes away.

The subject suggested post, of course, gives no hint as to what these volunteer translators should do to earn a living after they virtue signal with pro bono translation and build a portfolio of work they’ve done for free. There are very few ways to make a living translating these days, and those very few ways are accessible to only a tiny number of translators. Let’s stop the bullshitting. People dreaming of being translators need to be told to look elsewhere to make a living. They don’t need to keep their day job, they need to search for one.

The Church of LinkedIn

I am exceedingly tired of LinkedIn.

It is awash with phoniness, including that of coaches preying on desperate LinkedIn users searching for “LinkedIn” success.

And I’m tired of the delusions that in general proliferate on LinkedIn.

I am tired of people who are addicted to LinkedIn and are believers in the myth that posting on LinkedIn will somehow bring them something good. Only their own efforts will bring them good, and they need to make those efforts in places other than LinkedIn.

LinkedIn itself is a delusion, and the disturbing reality is that the delusion called LinkedIn has been bought into by a frightening number of people.

I guess people want to “believe” in something. LinkedIn is sort of a religion that gives them something to believe in without having to ask for evidence. If you need that, go for it. I prefer the evidence-based real world beyond my computer screen.

The Demise of Authenticity

Is authenticity no longer a “thing?”

I encountered a conversation on LinkedIn yesterday where the original post was clearly written in ChatGPTese or a dialect thereof, and every single comment was responded to in the same ChatGPTese. 

When I questioned whether the original post and the responses to numerous apparently human-created comments were being written by a carbon-based entity or something else, I received a quick response, also in ChatGPTese. It didn’t at all read like there was a human behind it.

Authenticity is becoming rare, both on LinkedIn and on other social media platforms. The only input needed from a carbon-based participant is a prompt to a silicon-based assistant, then you just post the result.

Who could tell the difference? Well, just about anyone more intelligent than a starfish and who has not been blinded by the AI hype.

And now, a moment of silence in memory of our dear departed friend, Authenticity.

Carcinogen Ads Promoted by Microsoft’s LinkedIn

[This was posted originally on LinkedIn on March 21, 2025, but I have since decided to stop uploading significant posts to a platform controlled by Microsoft, preferring rather to place them here, on a venue that I control.]

Microsoft’s LinkedIn sends me ads for Japan Tobacco. I am attempting to stop them, but don’t know if it will work. Japan Tobacco sells carcinogens.

While Meta is totally criminal and partners with criminals on its several platforms, I never got a Japan Tobacco ad on Facebook when I was a user of that criminal platform.

Partnering with JT is simply sleazy and doesn’t reflect well on Microsoft.

JT cannot advertise on broadcast media, and I suppose it is using what it can get, which is a complicit company like Microsoft.

Seeing this kind of literally toxic garbage thrown at me gives me new encouragement to post just anything I want to LinkedIn. Screw Microsoft’s cover story of LinkedIn being a business networking platform. It’s nothing of the sort.

I’ll need to see if telling Microsoft that the JT ads are “annoying or not interesting” works. If not, something else might be in the works from here in Curmudgeonville.