Unless you count twoprops.net, I don’t do much social media. The columns that I post here do get syndicated to mastodon and Bluesky, but I rarely post otherwise. I do follow a hundred or so high signal-to-noise ratio accounts on mastodon, but I don’t have anything to do with Twitter/X or Facebook or Instagram or Reddit or any other service that tries to force me into a reinforcing algorithm that shows me what’s best for the platform (including advertising) instead of what I want to see. For everything else, there’s RSS.
Recently I started following the meshtastic hashtag on mastodon. There’s a small but useful amount of activity (and a lot of “Meshcore is better you losers” posts). A large proportion of it is in foreign languages. Mastodon handles that well, with a built-in translator that seems to do a pretty good job. Two things I’ve noticed:
- many non-English posts give me a fresh perspective that I don’t get from the mostly English-only accounts I usually follow
- the translate function has notably made me lazy: often I’ll start reading a post in a language I understand but don’t know particularly well, and instead of struggling through it and improving my language skills, I just hit the translate button
Are LLMs going to offer a similar brain-atrophy-inducing shortcut for all our content?
—2p