I have very limited internet access at the moment and thought I’d go back on Instaham briefly every now and then as a way to quickly share some photos and promote my stuff. A while ago I was scrolling though my feed on there and clicked ‘like’ on a few pictures that I liked and Instagram bots decided it was suspicious activity, and that I would be blocked from clicking ‘like’, commenting, or posting up new things. Seems strange that clicking ‘like’ would seem suspicious. Somehow I managed to find a way to contact them (through a ‘report a problem’ button on an obscure corner of the website) and it all went back to normal for a while.
The other day I wanted to quickly post up a photo of goats. Posted it up, went to add a comment with my hashtags, and I was told that it was suspicious activity, and that I’d have to change my password. Changed my password, tried doing it in the same way, locked out again. Changed password again, tried to post the photo with the hashtags attached to it, got locked out again. I guess the bots don’t like goats?
With Permies on the other hand, I don’t think Gir Bot does anything naughty. When things are deleted or someone banned, the decisions are made by actual people, giving actual explanations behind the scenes about why something was deleted, and in the trickier cases having a discussion so that it’s a group decision with many different perspectives taken into account.
When I’ve gone on to Failbook or Instaham, it shows me a feed of whatever is high in their algorithm, often it will show the same posts again and again, and I’ll see stuff from some people heavily and nothing or very little from others. I know these and many other internet sites are censoring information on things that don’t fit whatever current corporate stuff they wish to promote. I wonder when this growing list of things will grow to include organic gardening, permaculture, raising animals, and basically everything we talk about here…
I like that when I log onto Permies on forum view, I see a list of recent topics - just the most recent by date, with no funny algorithms. I suspect a time will come when more and more people will grow tired of logging on to social media to see a tiny selection of posts, and tired of getting their posts deleted or accounts locked by bots for ridiculous things, and I wonder if more people will grow to miss old-style forums and join us on Permies.
Thank you Permies for remaining a real place to learn and share. Thank you Permies staff for keeping it spam-free without overzealous bots and other craziness!