One of the most annoying hashtags I have ever had the misfortune to encounter is the above. It’s tantamount to the assumption that we are all being dishonest all of the time unless we say we aren’t. The use of filters on social media makes us all depressed, and when I say filter I mean it more widely than just on images.

My initial response to this was to want to use Lynx to access FB and Twitter in order not to be swayed or annoyed by people’s selfies and misleading images.

I thought at first that the way to remedy this would be to have an app which simply allowed no filters, but the obvious problems with this are that it only deals with images, letting the user edit first and that it fails to deal with other kinds of post. It also still lets the user select images from their life and make it look shinier than it really is.

Therefore, I suggest a standalone application which accesses the camera at arbitrary times in order to capture the everyday humdrum and tedium of our lives and submit them. Speech to text would also enable us to submit our quotidian inanities without an inanity filter. Particularly dark images would not be submitted in order to circumvent sticking something over the lens or keeping the phone in your handbag, and tone of voice would be detected for particularly monotonous intonation patterns.

This way we could all see the vacuuming, washing up, visits to the bathroom, traffic jams, supermarket trollies and the like which make up our real lives, plus boring conversations about whose turn it is to do the laundry, bringing people tea too early or leaving things to pile up beside the bed.

This would be good for everyone’s mental health because we would all get to experience that most of us are not in fact beautiful people leading a wonderfully exciting life.

Funded by selling content to the CIA, naturally.
-- nineteenthly, Oct 14 2018

I watched a film about this recently - I forget the title, it wasn't great, but did raise the issue that all the big tech companies want us to embrace this open, sharing and transparent lifestyle, where our lives are broadcast for the benefit of anyone wishing to dip in a toe (and then feel entitled to post sarcastic comments below) but when the CEOs of the same companies were encouraged to behave in the same way, making their board meetings, strategy and details of interested parties equally transparent, they very quickly found that...problematic.

We're the generation who lived through the wild west of the internet, saw it explode into what was, for a while, a truly free and genuine expression of human experience. I think that time has very much passed now - sadly. And I don't know/see a time when it will come back.

The bad guys saw all the exploitable gaps, and that's where they are today, monetising the content we generate.

I agree that all these things are bad for our collective mental health - but I don't think more transparency is the answer - it might mean people feel the need to live parts of their lives in super-sanitised, super-shiny annexes that are "up-to-scratch" with the Jones'. It only takes one Jones, and before you know it, everyone catches the virus.

My answer would be to eradicate any internet content over 256KB in size. This way all glossy images would be rendered too blocky for any kind of glamour to exist in any form whatsoever other than perhaps in magazines.

We'd need a way to democratise these of course, and a nationalised magazine service or NMS might be created to serve that purpose, publishing bi-monthly all of the lifestyle nonsense and fluff that is of such great importance (at least in terms of Jones-familiarisation) to humans now, as it has ever been.
-- zen_tom, Oct 14 2018


I think the key question this idea raises is - what is this concept of "bringing people tea too early"? It almost suggests there is an inappropriate time for a nice cup of tea.
-- hippo, Oct 16 2018


Variant: Take the pictures and record the audio as described, but don't post it. Let users post whatever they want. Then automatically compare what they post to what's observed at random moments in their life. More similar (less filtering) -> higher score -> more visibility to other users.
-- notexactly, Nov 07 2018



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