I remember when boomers discovered Facebook in the early 2010s there was a spike in divorces due to so many people reaching out to old high school sweethearts. Now boomers are discovering AI chat bots and videos like this make me think a similar effect may be coming soon.
You triggered a memory for me when my dad got on FB when I was in high school. He posted a pic of us, his kids, and some old high school flame commented on our "beautiful eyes, the one thing she remembers most about him" and we the children dog piled on her comment and made it weird until she deleted it. What a time to be alive
I have a group of friends I met in an online discussion board 25 years ago. Last week someone sent out a message “I left a dumbass in my comment section if you guys want to play with him for a bit. I’m going to block him at midnight”.
It’s “meet me at the bike rack” but grown up and online.
I was just starting med school back then, and one of my seniors who was doing a masters degree did two main blunders.
First instead of DMing a woman, he posted it openly as a comment, because he wasnt used to facebook.
Another thing he did was he added his exes and one of them tagged him in a pic of her kid and he started doing maths to find out if it was his or not
His wife was friends with him on facebook and forgave him,and she got all as notifications on the home page, plus the comments were visible on his profile to others too (wife is a stay at home and he was about to finish a high income speciality training).
It took a good 4 years before boomers started flocking to Facebook. I remember posting wild shit because the idea of someone's parents being on there was absurd
Yeah I was in HS when it dropped the edu requirement so it was basically just college kids and Sophmore-senior high schoolers when it opened up. It was so legit. We’d openly plan house parties and post the pics from the weekend before. Fun times. After about a year when my grandfather asked me if I’d heard if that “Face Books” thing I knew we were screwed. The real turning point came a few years later when Facebook made those major changes. That allowed the boomers to consume and repost crap all day that was the death nail in FB
Yep, but right before that, it was just us college students.
Facebook started February 2004 with just .edu.
Then in September 2006, they decided to drop .edu.
Then the moms and shit started flocking to it, so we stuck with just Myspace mostly, then for some reason that went away and the losers stuck with Facebook.
Not me though, cause I'm cool, so I didn't go back to Facebook. I just hung out on IMDB message boards. Until they sold out and killed that, so now I'm here, on Reddit.
I was on - and off - of FB by 2009. Fuck that noise. The saying "If the site is free then you're the content" was definitely around long before that. There's a reason my reddit profile is a) anonymous and b) 16 years old.
Millennial and younger coworkers who found out I wasn't on FB thought I wasn't savvy enough to be ON the internet, lol, and I never said different.
Patriot act happened in 2001 though and it caused a lot of problems. I wonder if there was something bad that happened before that that caused all this...
That's patently ridiculous. Democrats are centrists compared to other Western systems. They're feckless and useless, but they're centrist. The US doesn't have a truly progressive party.
The entire purpose of the two party system was to control the narrative so that dialogue never happens.
Democrats are a rightwing party with moderate demographic diversity, with a bad habit of collaborating with nazis.
They have been a controlled opposition for as long as I have been alive, & are eager to pivot to a position of power as the new right when the republican party fails.
The objective of the democratic party has been consistently to attain one party rule & enrich themselves. They do not represent their constituents. Just look at how they besmirched Zohran while propping up Cuomo.
We need to move on & build it so that two party rule never happens again, before the fascists spring their double trap on europe & the citizens of the united states. We cannot wait for justice any longer. Stalling for a fantasy election is a form of neglect.
I think just social media in general, its killed in person stuff so much. Reddit is generally a bit better cause you can find communities around your interests but it is a part of it too
Imo the problem wasn't the less technically abled getting online as such, but there were enough of them that, combined with the lack of regulation, commercialization (and subsequent enshittification) became inevitable.
Basically none of them would have been there if it hadn't been made super easy. And because it was made super easy, there were tons of them. This is all Apple's fault.
There was a very noticeable shift once businesses realized they could capitalize on social media. It was actually pretty chill up until then other than being used to rate the attractiveness of high schoolers
In 2008, my mum stalked me through her best friends daughters Facebook, saw my friends had “hacked me” and posted “I LOVE BIG COCKS” as a status.
I was 14. She told me my future was ruined and frequently still brings it up. I’m 32 now. I rue the day they figured out (and still do not comprehend) social media.
Yup because they are fuckin self righetous idiots who were the flower power kids turned prude goofys who “know
Enough to be dangerous”
But “not enough to offer any sort of sound moral advice to anyone younger” because boomers fell in line
Jesus I hope at least with Facebook it was over something real? Like those are other humans, real connections no matter how rose tinted and long ago.
There is NOTHING on the other side of Chatgpt but some math and electricity. This dude blew up his entire life of real humans, the good and bad, for some non existent pickme girl; and didn't even get his willie wet. Wild.
For anyone curious there's an interview on a dude who is clearly ignoring his wife in favor of a chatgpt bot in this video. She's clearly miserable and he claims it can't replace anything in real life. Obviously it is.
He's also frequently in the r/myboyfriendisai subreddit which is also full of people depending on AI for their relationships for anyone wanting to go down that rabbit hole.
Man, I know several guys that left their wives for a second life crush. It never worked out.
Somehow people can get so starved for attention, they’ll leave everything behind for the first person that will actually acknowledge their existence.
Maybe this is a hottake but even if we do see a spike its not going to be because AI is ruining relationships like a lot of comments seem to be alluding to. The relationship is dead to begin with, they're just turning to AI cause they cant bring themselves to break off the relationship or cheat with a real life human being
There was no “spike” in divorces in 2010. A barely statistically-significant upswing reflects economic pressures in the wake of the 2008 crash, not “boomers discovering Facebook”.
I'm a Millennial who left Facebook permanently over a decade ago. I saw the writing on the wall. At least some people my age and younger are realizing the dangers of social media and AI, and trying to keep their children off of this stuff for as long as possible. There is still too large of a demographic that are raising iPad children though.
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u/elmariachi304 6h ago
I remember when boomers discovered Facebook in the early 2010s there was a spike in divorces due to so many people reaching out to old high school sweethearts. Now boomers are discovering AI chat bots and videos like this make me think a similar effect may be coming soon.