I remember writing a comment about invasive advertising by Instagram. Just shared some anecdotes about how a few extremely specific conversation topics soon became the topic for the ads I was seeing on Instagram, and pointed out that if they were in fact using background conversation to target ads, it would be extremely easy to automate with the voice recognition technology available at the time, so why would they ignore the opportunity if targeted ads are their main source of revenue?

It became one of my most down voted comments at the time, and I had about twice as many replies as downvotes, claiming all kinds of wild or easily disproven shit to disprove the idea that Instagram used such tactics. Was very fishy

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Please tell me that’s not the real price for what is essentially a few small blades in a cup attached to an electric motor

God I miss Tidal. Their suggestions were so far above and beyond everything else I’ve tried, I just wish it was managed and maintained competently. Their Android and desktop apps are (were? It’s been a while) so chock-full of playback bugs and annoying little quirks, and their customer support is probably not even legally considered customer support at all, considering the fact that it seems to consist entirely of a single email bot that receives support tickets, waits 3 weeks, then closes that ticket.

I was particularly irritated with the fact that albums would become “unavailable” so incredibly often, while a new, identical version of the album was made available, for no apparent reason. Since these replacement albums weren’t automatically migrated into my library, I would have to remove and and re-add the albums individually in order to play them from my library, then update all my playlist containing any songs from that “disabled” version of the album by removing and re-adding each individual song. That shit got old, FAST.

I eventually had to swap to Spotify because of an absolutely baffling bug that acted like a virus and slowly “ate” my library (more info below if anyone’s curious), and Spotify’s music suggestions are just nothing short of horrendous.

My “discover weekly” last week for example was made up of approximately 60% songs either already in my library, or songs that I’ve listened to before and not liked much from artists in my library, plus 7 (!!) 20-30+ minute soundscapes, something I have NEVER listened to before, as well as 2 new Ariana Grande singles (sponsored? I’ve had to block her, those singles were popping up everywhere), and a few songs from totally out-there genres, including a country rap song which just so happens to be the one and only song I’ve ever actually disliked back before Spotify removed and re-introduced that feature, some background music from a random indie game’s soundtrack which was mostly just cave noises, a jazz-fusion album’s interlude, and something that I can only describe as bubblegum cyberpunk black glitch-metal dancecore. A positively psychotic selection of music.

Granted, that was the worst discover weekly I think I’ve ever had, but I still just wish that tidal worked for me, because I’ve never discovered more great music from any other platform’s suggestion algorithm, and nothing since has even come close.

About the weird bug if anyone’s curious:

The bug was pretty fucked up in that it behaved basically like a virus. At random points while listening, Tidal would fail to play a song at master quality, automatically downgrade playback by one level, then apply that inability to play master-quality permanently to each subsequent song I played in that session. These songs were now “infected”. Replaying these songs at a later date would further degrade the playback quality by an additional level, and also add a delay of ~20 seconds per playback quality level it had been downgraded to, as well as infecting any other songs I played after. When a song reached 96kbps (or 160? Whatever the lowest is, I forget) and could not degrade any more, it would either play at minimum quality after a ~60 second delay (which was unskippable because Tidal was unresponsive to playing a new song during the delay), or just fail to play entirely while loading infinitely, absolutely chugging my battery-life, and overheating my phone. I could only stop it by force-closing the app, which would crash my phone, every single time. There was about a 20% chance for one of these songs to fail playback, but if it did play, that chance to fail playback was now applied to each subsequent song played, no matter the song’s “infection level”. Though that at least didn’t seem to be permanently applied like the quality degradation, but I don’t know for sure.

The weirdest part is that the bug would persist, spread, and behave exactly the same way on an old phone that had never had tidal installed before, and also with the desktop app (though without the overheating, and it would throw and error message after some time if a song failed to play). So the bug seemed somehow account-bound?

I researched unsuccessfully for weeks looking for a fix, and I tried everything I could to fix it aside from making a new tidal account, because it was a lot of trouble to migrat. And support… Well, Tidal support apparently just doesn’t exist. I had sent 3 separate support tickets, all of which went unanswered, then marked as “resolved” and closed 2-3 weeks later. Only the 2nd ticket got an automated “thanks for your ticket, staff will help soon” response before being marked resolved and closed.

Eventually, so much of my library became infected (as well as a ton of random songs that would commonly end up playing after albums) that my ability to both listen to the music I loved and discover new music in the styles/genres I loved was crippled. Which obviously rendered the entire platform effectively useless. So after being repeatedly ignored by support with no explanation, and after several software updates that didn’t fix the problem while I was trying to contact support, or even just report the bug… I had to give up and switch to Spotify.

Lots of people still think that introverts hate social interactions, or feel better without any social interactions at all, but we do need to be social. Some people get dogs or cats and that helps them a lot. But lots of introverted people will tend to find some way to mask the loneliness by distracting themselves that requires a lot of attention, or occupying themselves with something that emulates social interaction. Playing a game while watching twitch streams of that game can fill both of those roles, listening to the streamer and reading chat periodically. That can work in a pinch, but it’s not a real solution. And I don’t have a real solution, aside from “find your balance”, but I know that’s not helpful.

I can suggest something that I found to be a more effective distraction, though. And it even could lead to the first steps to a solution to introvert loneliness if you’re lucky. You can try going to a local bar/pub on a slow day. It helps if you drink alcohol, but you really don’t have to. And of course if there’s a history of alcoholism in your family, you should definitely avoid the alcohol. Make sure to sit at the bar, because a lot of bartenders will start up conversation with lone patrons in their down-time, and the same goes for drunk people getting up to buy another drink, so you don’t have to initiate if you don’t want to. You can end up having a few interesting conversations in a night (or sometimes none at all), and go home either feeling good about going out on your own free will (I.E. Not being forced into a social situation), or exhausted from any overbearing social interactions and therefore a bit more content with going back to spending time by yourself for a while.

This helped me before I made a couple of friends (who I met at the pub) while living alone in a new city, after my distractions got stale. I say it’s worth a try, but everyone is different.

It was hard to initiate that first trip to the bar though, it felt very, very weird. But halfway through my second beer, I felt mostly content with even just listening passively to background conversation. By the time I ordered the 3rd, the bartender had initiated conversation, and before I knew it that feeling of loneliness was gone. It’s important to keep moderation in mind though, I could see that being very effective in catalysing a drinking problem. I did this 2-3 times per month, and that was just enough for me.

So ymmv, but it helped me a lot.

I still remember the first phishing website I ever accidentally visited, rnyspace.com

Personally, I think “lemming” is infinitely better than “fedditor”.