Swarmed by bots, and other social media woes.

So. It’s a super weird time. Everywhere, for everything. Topsy-turvy. Looney Tunes.

My Facebook page has always been my primary social media account, and lately, it’s being Liked… a lot! By bots. And honestly, I have no clue why they would find my little author page, of a cryptid Regular Human Author who writes about Fantasy characters and the weird shit that happens to them, alluring as/for/by bots.

Twitter is a dumpster fire now.

I’m not on BlueSky or Threads.

TikTok is… a whole other beast that honestly, had its moments earlier this year for this author, but I don’t want to post random stuff all the time in hopes of pleasing the algorithm to actually show the irrelevant stuff to people, just to hope they’ll actually see the important stuff later.

Algorithm, algorithm, algorithm.

I put entirely too much time into writing and creating posts instead of writing books!

And don’t forget the videos about AI, encouraging you to let ChatGPT write books for you and then sell them as words you wrote! It’s like, so easy to make money doing that. That’s not depressing or anything.

Between bots, algorithms, and the weird manipulations that people pull in order to rage-bait engagement (cooking videos with shoes in the fridge, intentionally putting nasty/weird stuff in recipes, feigning ignorance, etc etc etc), it all feels very… fake. Like, this is the first time I’ve stood back and gone, damn, this place isn’t full of human people looking for connections anymore, is it? Comment sections are ground zero for anyone and everyone’s anger dump, including aforementioned bots who drive engagement with nonsense, and

I

am

just

bamboozled.

Humans have the uncanny knack to absolutely meta everything to maximum level efficiency and ruin it, and we’ve hit this weird place where doing that means manipulating actual people in order to get clicks and get paid. It makes the social part of the context feel irrelevant. Is there a point to this post? Who knows! I am just lamenting the state of things, and I guess grieving the social media of yore. (You know, for the dramatics.)

Aaaaaaaanyway, it’s nearly the Holly Jolly Days, folks- Illegitimi non carborundum.