AI content robots

MRH Blog

Better yet, just use the MRH blog.

Personally I've had enough of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to name a few for the very reason Joe states...

But don't hold your breath...

Hi Joern,

As one who has enjoyed what you have posted, Yes,  its worth a challenge. But good luck finding a real human who can do something about it. And don't expect it to be fixed in a speedy manner 

Instagram's big brother Facebook recently decided to take down without notice "all news feeds" in Australia because they are in a dispute with our Federal government over paying for use of those news feed links. They took out a lot of government, health, emergency service, and individual Facebook sites as well as the targeted "news" sites at the same time. The sites were gone in a blink at about 3am local time. It took Facebook a the week to put the sites back after they "agreed" that they would put the sites back up.   

These AI bots aren't as "smart" as the programmers thought they were. It takes a fraction of a second to run a computer job like one of these bots. It can take weeks to unscramble the mess if the programming doesn't do what everyone thought it "would do"  

I wish you well, from a destructive computer tester who has broken mainframes "by accident" when testing. But that's a different "war story", 

Once bitten?

Hi. I don’t use Instagram but am curious why you would invest a lot of work recreating content on Instagram after they just deleted your content. One would think it will likely happen again, no?
jeff

No mistake

Mr. japachl is well known as a counter-culture model railroader. 

[pssst: he's a TT Scale guy. Might even be subversive by promoting TT.] 

All kidding aside, the entire social media complex can take a flying leap. The social media platform here at MRH, and one or two other similar sites concerned with different subjects is all the "social media" I need.

Object lesson

This should be a good learning experience to everyone as to how fragile online content can really be.

Your provider goes belly up, they decide to charge ten thousand bucks a month, or someone just doesn't like your topic and BOOM, it's gone.

I find it funny how many people think that anything online is like a book in the Library of Congress; when it can all vanish without a trace an hour from now.

Murphy at play

That’s certainly true, it can vanish fast from where you want it to be.  But it’s also true that it can be impossible to get rid of it if you really want to, because of all the scraping, reporting, and archiving that goes on.

It's hard to get through to a real person

As Joe says, it's all about the A. I., I once got suspended from Twitter by letting my temper get out of hand just a bit and saying "I hope (insert celebrity name here) chokes on that!" Yes, it's a bad thing to say but it is one of those expressions that people let get out of their mouth sometimes without thinking. Most people don't actually mean things like that when they say them. You can convince a reasonable human being you didn't really mean that, apologize and move on. Good luck trying to deal with some emotionless algorithm though.

HO used in the wrong order

HO used in the wrong order will get you Put in Facebook Jail,  Instagram I do believe is now owned by Facebook.

Car guys are seeing the same issues, (Facebook Market Place)  You just can not post a VW Tranny or VW Trans Axle for sale any more, I have heard the Blowers get bumped as well as Rear Ends a single Head might get you a waring but Heads will not.  Ball Joint Front End for sale is ok, but you can not use BJ as in BJ Front End.   etc.   etc.  it is mostly in the Market Place section of Facebook,  has not crossed over too much in the message are.

Have fun and with no one to contact...You are SOL if the Robot thinks it is bad or not.

Reach out

As one that will never and have not ever,  wasted my time with any social media.  For me only!

I still do NOT understand the idea that these formats or what ever, really want your membership for Your sake.

It is all about the money. Ad 1, Ad 1, Ad1,  it is like an infomercial every time one logs in and they start the machine some place to collect data for sales and research to sales.

Some of us have helped make 1984 reality.  At what cost of privacy?

For all the folks who feel the need for social media use,  please remember,  some one is always watching for the chance.

Reach out and touch some one was the slogan then.  AT&T for the younger fans.

Boudreaux,  B.C.E.  R.R.

"Loose lips sink ships!

Cloud Computing in General ...

The advice I always give my clients when moving into the cloud is to make sure they always have their own own backups. Nothing has changed from conventional on-premise IT in that regard. Major platform providers like Microsoft, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. do lots of backups, but usually only for their own purposes for hot site data centres.

Social media platforms offer even greater risk to their users as, in addition to the technology risk, one has to deal with social interference and the latest "woke flavour of the day", implemented as others have stated here, through the use of AI bots and crawlers.  The terms and conditions of services like Facebook, Instagram, etc. usually include tiny clauses indicating you have no right to your data once it is published there, and therefore you have no certainty that it can't/won't be removed.

It would be nice if sites like MRH that are much more geared to a genuine audience provided a convenient extract and archive utility for members so they can periodically take and image of their blogs at least and store them in multiple places for safekeeping.  Some of the blogs here run several hundred pages and include a wealth of layout history, techniques, etc. and we can only hope that Joe and family/staff have plans to maintain the platform and retain the content in perpetuity.  

The upcoming migration of this forum to a new platform will give us all a glimpse of how a platform shift can affect our content.  Hopefully nothing will be lost, or altered, but if you have stuff on here you need to be sure hangs around, you may want to be doing some backups!   

I agree, forget Instagram and go MRH

I never understood why some people will do Instagram and facebook when we have a perfectly good site dedicated to Model Railroad Social media posting.  MRH has one of the best photo uploading setup out there, and it is stored here and searchable.  I deleted all my Instagram and Facebook and just decided to stick with railroad forums.

Thanks MRH for creating a great place to share and learn.

Gone

Most of the stuff from the early internet, web pages, user groups, etc, is gone. Maybe someone somewhere has a copy of some of it, and the Internet Archive sure tries to grab everything they can, but good luck. At some point, we can't retain all data indefinitely when we're making millions of terabytes or something every year.

The Why

For those that don't understand why people would use something like Instagram over MRH, there are several possible reasons with the primary one being ease of posting I would guess.  Hopefully the new MRH site will provide a much easier interface for posting photos directly from a device, but it is currently a multi-step process where as social media sites make it way easier and those that don't read forums can see them - their reach is far greater than the MRH site.

Not to say I use any of those (I'm down to just Facebook mostly for buying and selling stuff), but I do understand why some do.

Reposting old pictures

I will definitely not repost everything, just a few selected pictures. I have my picture collection on Flickr and Deviantart. Instagram, I just use as a sideline to connect with some people, in particular from the diorama community.

Joern

Backups

Actually, nothing was really lost by the deleted account. I did not use Instagram to store my pictures, just to stay connected with some people that are not active in the other forums. However, I met some interesting people there, in particular from the diorama and art scene.

Joern

Thank you

Thanks for having the b**** to point out facts!

In this subject matter,  I have first hand examples of how folks have no clue to the facts or how they came about.

As a life long Independent voter,  who's family has been a proud military family.

From POW's to current members.  We will defend our country,  per the Constitution.

Social Media is not public and so many do not understand that.

Thank you again,

Boudreaux,  B.C.E.

keep on tracking

You're right, Joe,

it looks really like a decision of a rather less intelligent AI. I did only post my own pieces, so it could not bea  'guilty by association' case. However, one day before the deletion, I was asked by Instagram to perform an SMS authentication procedure to prove that I'm not a robot. After having done this, they said that my account will be checked and I will get a notice within 24h of how I can reactivate my account in the help section. On the next day, I got the message that my account will be permanently blocked for violating the terms of use and cannot be reactivated. Obviously, the AI came to the conclusion that my interests are so out of the mainstream that I cannot be human.

Joern

Facebooked...

I just don't get why people use social media for hobby stuff in general.

here and on any general forum of its type, you can look up heading for topics that might be a few years old, the info is still just as good as when it was posted.

Facebook, not so much. I don't get the appeal as there's no way to look long-term info up. Once you post something, before long it's tamped down somewhere by what someone else had for lunch or a collections of overused memes. It's one of many reasons I don't 'do' social media. I have nothing to do with it out of some sort of crusade against it, but it's that I just don't understand the appeal.

I go online for hobby stuff, trying to get info on something specific, or looking to buy something specific. I'll post on the stuff I do for my hobby or other hobbies I have. Otherwise, I spend the time doing things off a screen as I can accomplish real things like that.

Before I got a smart phone, I went with a group of friends to Leavenworth, WA in the fall of 2010 and they all plopped down for over an hour, trolled social media and never spoke to each other. I just stood there dumbfounded, as I didn't have a phone that did anything but call people. I swear I came so close to leaving them there, I was walking away when one only then realized what that must have been like for me. But nobody apologized, and I asked, "Why did you all come here just to sit and troll social media?" Nobody had an answer. I doubt any of them today realize they're a huge reason why I never got into social media. Leavenworth is a really neat town and they missed a lot of it by being online for no real reason!

That day was a real wakeup call, as I had a lot of time to look over shoulders and I saw a lot of posts showing what people were eating that day. over a decade later, I still don't understand the deal with that!

Counter-culture

That's why, my model railroad homepage has the headline 'Railway Modelling out of the Mainstream'. If you do not fit into the pattern of the mainstream culture, the bots will become suspicious.

Joern

It is what it is

I totally deleted my Facebook presence a few years back but then I found that certain  things I wanted to participate in, most notably the John Allen Gorre and Daphetid group was on Facebook. I now have a very limited footprint there  with only a very few close friends and membership in a Ham Radio and a Model Rocketry group as well as a couple of other Model Railroad groups. I'd prefer not to be on there at all but I had to go where certain people were and it is what it is.

The politics are gone...

... hopefully to never be seen again. 

I learned an important fact

I learned an important fact from Facebook 10 years ago: my life is just not that interesting, and neither is anybody else's.

Watch this

Click here for a hilarious video on why Facebook stinks...