Eventually, there’s going to be a February when they don’t send a bill at all.

If you use internet discussions as training data, you can expect to find all sorts of crazy biases. Completely unfiltered data should produce a chatbot that exaggerates many human traits which completely burying others.

For example, on Reddit and Lemmy, you’ll find lots of clever puns. On Mastodon, you’ll find all sorts of LGBT advocates or otherwise queer people. On Xitter, you’ll find all the racists and white supremacists. There are also old school forums that amplify things even further.

If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys. If you’re training your AI with free labor, expect to get trolls.

Pretty much, yeah. The biggest difference is that the feed contains only the kind of stuff that should be there. Reddit likes to mix on some random trash that has nothing to do with anything besides engagement and ad revenue.

If you believe the points matter, they will, but only to some extent. If you couldn’t care less, you can also safely ignore the them completely.

Most people play Minecraft to build stuff. Other people just fill a village with TNT.

I guess those people also treat social media as a game of sorts. Instead of playing it the normal way, they try to find the most unorthodox ways to play it, and that results in a massive torrent of downvotes.

Yes they do, but the text response doesn’t really reflect the actual one.

We all know that decorating your in-game character with cosmetics is the true endgame.

see also: Off-by-one error & Fencepost error

Lots of things have suffered the same fate. Just think of LOL, 😂, or 🤣 for example.

To me, voting is mostly a sorting tool.

I may upvote to make sure a great comment is higher than the good comments around it. I may even disagree with the comment to some extent, but I’m still going to upvote, because I think it adds something important to the conversation and more people should read it. However, there are also situations when I upvote to show my approval.

There are also trolls who constantly say controversial things. Looking at the downvote counter tells you something.

There are also people who… I don’t really know what’s going in the head of a person who intentionally insult everyone they come across. Did a nefarious little brother hijack that account or is that person really trying get some achievement about maxing out the downvote counter? Some people are a complete mystery. Either way, the downvote counter serves as a red flag.

Dr. Integer Overflow.

My guess is, you’ll need 4 294 967 296 votes to start the boss fight.

Some of that could be karma grinding, but for the most part, that is probably just people having fun. Many come to social media platforms for recreational purposes.

Must confess, those points do seem to wield some strange power over my mind. Kinda scary actually. Some people have disabled those numbers entirely, and I’m beginning to see why.

I thought about that too. If they were completely meaningless then why would they be used for sorting purposes. Turns out, they do mean something and they can be used for something.

What happens to the ultra trolls who have a negative total?

You have many.

Haven’t been able to pay my bills with fake or real internet points yet. I can give you something equally worthless in return though. How about an AI drawing of a capybara?

Ooh, so they can also be invisible internet points.