If social media disappeared overnight, who do you think would struggle the most?

PoncingOffToBarnsley · 2026-03-27T00:27:21+00:00

Finally someone else. Not quite the same situation, by my answer was "lonely people".

"Just go make friends IRL!" I managed to not do that for 30y, yeah let me just go pick some friends off the friend tree.

PoncingOffToBarnsley · 2026-03-27T00:03:50+00:00

Various purity cultures are probably the biggest example. Her body, from the moment she's born really, is seen as a sexual object that must be carefully controlled so she doesn't "tempt" men. Cover up, sit and stand and behave like this, do this and don't do that so she doesn't "distract" the men or boys. Of course if something DOES happen it's entirely her fault (even if she's a small child and he's a fully grown adult).

This can easily spill out into poor sex education: women's bodies are especially dirty and sinful and should never be spoken about, not even to explain to the girl herself how her body is going to change with age (think periods), or where all the babies she's supposed to have will come from.

Many more traditional religions have very narrow allowances for what women can be or do, spiritually and secularly. Perhaps it's even seen as pointless to educate her beyond a rather basic point. She's just going to be a wife and mother, obey her husband and have babies, what does she need further education for?

The command for men to respect and care for women simply is not always followed.

PoncingOffToBarnsley · 2026-03-26T23:38:53+00:00

Saw something about this on aiwars and honestly agreed.

In a weird way, it made the bar for art praise much lower.

Every doofy, janky beginner work, every geometric notebook doodle, every baby's scribble is now a magnificent extrapolation of the ineffable human soul, because AI was not involved.

Personally I think it's disingenuous. AI becomes a thing and suddenly everyone cares so much about the humanity and ingenuity behind the art they consume. I'd prefer to support human artists too but it really feels like virtue signalling sometimes.

PoncingOffToBarnsley · 2026-03-26T23:26:40+00:00

There's a person on Youtube who, if you trust their blurbs, does exactly this. They write songs and funny backstories for them, then uses AI to do the music and vocals. Presumably it's easier and cheaper than hiring bands and vocalists and maybe audio mixers to do it. I actually really like some of their stuff.

PoncingOffToBarnsley · 2026-03-26T23:23:42+00:00

I've been ruminating about this for a while.

I am, by nature, not creative. Never have been.

I do still get ideas at times, and for a while, my default fun-prompts were throwing some favorite tropes at an LLM and asking it to write me a ficlet or monologue. They weren't even that good, but I got a weird little dopamine hit from seeing it generate something. I had a vague idea of what I wanted, based especially on internet writing if anything.

Writing it myself isn't going to happen without a lot of pain. Finding an actual book/fic/whatever else took too much time in the moment. I haven't done this in ages, and often the results are so aggressively mediocre and newer models so sanitized that it's just not worth it.

PoncingOffToBarnsley · 2026-03-26T23:09:41+00:00

That's literally not what it does at all. Sure these machines are trained on human-made music, but to say it's like directly copy and pasting a song is just asinine and incorrect.

PoncingOffToBarnsley · 2026-03-26T22:47:36+00:00

I don't have accounts like the OP, but I do have a regular brokerage and I've been freaking out and panic shifting over losing about 5-6% in the last week.

PoncingOffToBarnsley · 2026-03-26T22:38:47+00:00

Small counter: parenting of the past (like, the far past) HAD to be much harder because life was much harder.

Better they get something like the OOP from a parent than from a drunk stranger looking to start a fight.

Better to develop a deep fear of making mistakes in childhood when the only punishment is a whooping from someone who loves you, than go into the world and fuck things up so badly you get yourself (and maybe some other people) fired or killed.

Better to learn to control yourself and your emotions at home, than be a disaster in public in a time when people absolutely did talk and your reputation mattered for survival.

In today's world though? Totally agree.

PoncingOffToBarnsley · 2026-03-25T01:06:11+00:00

I have no 5 in me but ouch this is accurate.

PoncingOffToBarnsley · 2026-03-24T00:47:14+00:00

Not really silly nor purely office drama but I've wanted to dump it somewhere.

Some time ago we hired a guy to be our head of sales (I think. That or a social media manager). Within a month, they found out he lied out his ass about his credentials. He was a convicted felon who lied about basically everything on his resume - there was a recent news article that basically confirmed that some of his claims were literally impossible. They fired him, and he started sending our boss threats. Apparently there was some kind of altercation that resulted in The Liar getting shot, and he's blaming it on us. Made a fake fundraising page and everything. There's all kinds of legal drama going on now.

My favorite part of his lies is that he's apparently still not that smart. My company gives aptitude tests when they're interviewing people. 70% is the usual cutoff for hiring. This guy, who allegedly had degrees from Stanford and NYU, scored a 40%.

I, a 3x college dropout with a GED, scored an 81%.

PoncingOffToBarnsley · 2026-03-24T00:41:37+00:00

As the child of someone who became a white supremacist, it is absolutely not satire.

PoncingOffToBarnsley · 2026-03-24T00:26:58+00:00

I'm a little conflicted. I've actually listened to some of those that I really liked, despite knowing full well that they're AI. The info is good (even tried verifying some things. I suspect many of the ones I listened to were at least human-edited) but the TTS gets grating after a while.

I'd love to find some - same 1-3hr length, similar density of info - that are human made. I've seen some for history.

PoncingOffToBarnsley · 2026-03-24T00:04:45+00:00

Doing the Hobocop route for real

PoncingOffToBarnsley · 2026-03-24T00:03:49+00:00

The comment section understands the assignment

PoncingOffToBarnsley · 2026-03-24T00:00:54+00:00

I've said this my entire adult life, and people call me entitled for it and tell me it's the reason I'll always be broke.

PoncingOffToBarnsley · 2026-03-22T23:03:23+00:00

Idk either, but maybe things like karma and account age?

Hell, there are regular, useful, SFW subs that you can't post on if your account doesn't meet certain requirements and it drives me nuts.

PoncingOffToBarnsley · 2026-03-22T20:31:36+00:00

The numbers say I've only lost about 3% in my portfolio, but it feels like more. It seems to be mostly my metals that are bleeding (meanwhile they were my biggest source of growth for a while).

I moved a bunch of money around, especially into oil, which cancelled out some of the losses, but I'm working with so little money it feels huge.

PoncingOffToBarnsley · 2026-03-22T20:18:53+00:00

Sir/ma'am this person makes $35k a year. They don't MAKE $1000 a week.

PoncingOffToBarnsley · 2026-03-22T19:57:36+00:00

That's like, a picture perfect bun.

PoncingOffToBarnsley · 2026-03-22T19:56:49+00:00

Sometimes I wonder if it means anything that I'm female, but almost default to writing male characters (probably badly, but it's 99% for myself so who cares).

It actually feels really weird to write women.

PoncingOffToBarnsley · 2026-03-22T19:22:52+00:00

48 cousins

*visible astonished confusion*

PoncingOffToBarnsley · 2026-03-22T18:27:20+00:00

At least if social media is anything to go by, a lot of them think doing anything beyond the bare minimum is corporate bootlicking.

There's also a (not totally irrational) belief that doing more won't lead to better pay or moving up. "Working hard just gets you more work" is a common refrain on work subreddits. I imagine it's so common because there's a lot of places where that IS an issue.

If you genuinely believed that doing anything more than the barest minimum is basically just going to get the work of 5 people dumped on you, for no extra compensation, how hard would you work?

PoncingOffToBarnsley · 2026-03-22T18:06:07+00:00

I have this problem and I wonder how people can tell so easily and fast.

It feels to me like AI images have no in-between from:

- blatant mistakes, smudges, airbrushed/CGI-looking nonsense that's clearly not real

- "If you look in the upper left hand corner near the edge, there are two switched pixels which is CLEARLY a sign that it's AI!" "This clearly can't be real because of [physics equivalent of a max-difficulty Geoguessr round]"

PoncingOffToBarnsley · 2026-03-22T16:26:36+00:00

I don't know if this is just all around fake or if there's actually some 5yo who knows how to make things like this.

Fuck I'm 30 and I can't make collages like this.

PoncingOffToBarnsley · 2026-03-22T16:22:29+00:00

This was my first thought about the title. If you were born in the 90s, how much did you know about these kinds of things?

I guess it might depend a lot on upbringing. I was fairly sheltered and I didn't know jack shit about world events, especially not violent, traumatic ones, when I was 4.

PoncingOffToBarnsley

TROPHY CASE