Un pesce fuor d'acqua
Since computers and internet existed, every engineer had a side project that they were working on. Today with the rise of AI everyone is building, and they are all hoping to become the next billion dollars unicorn.
I am building too, honestly I would be just happy to build something that pays me off my mortgage.
The moment is absolute peak, but this is not easy for me. I quit social media about 7-8 years ago but I had already stopped using them for some years. And I don't know how to promote my apps or get users feedbacks.
I thought it could be a good idea to "come back" online, so that I can somehow promote my projects. I tried a few social network and well, it didn't go as planned. I felt completely out of touch with basically everything I have seen today, like a fish out of water, un pesce fuor d'acqua as we say in Italian, which sounds more romantic.
Here is a quick recap of my experience:
I lasted one week, most of it spent trying to fix the privacy settings while also trying to setup a meta business account for ads and promote 2 pages. Meanwhile Facebook thinks it's ok to show me promoted pages about fascism, hate and controversial posts that I could not give a damn.
I lasted 2 weeks more or less. This is just an OnlyFans funnel, nothing else. I don't know if the models are AI or real, but the amount of women willing to show their body to thousands of perverts (I read the comments) for some likes is astonishing. I am pretty sure they make money out of it. There are nice real videos, but turns out most of them are from TikTok.
Cringe is the right word for LinkedIn. I never deleted my account, I simply switched my location to Papua New Guinea to skip spam. But this app is cringe, like everyone has some employees who are either too old, too good, too fired, whatever. Then there is someone who writes a post clearly written by AI on how they cracked the code to use Claude Code and make trillions and the only thing you have to do is to comment "Claude" on their post. I am still wrapping my mind around this, I just don't get it. I also deleted a few posts that I wrote to promote the apps, they felt cringe too.
TikTok
People that don't know how to dance, are dancing in front of a phone, no reason given, they call their followers "fans". A bit of the Instagram vibe here too, just that ... the age ... is lower ... and is kinda creepy. I am now terrified of eating alone in a restaurant, someone might make a black and white of me and post it there.
With TikTok it's pretty easy to trick the algorithm so I kept the app because now I can re-watch all South Park, Family Guy and Tom and Jerry sketches, which I love.
All of the above, plus a bit of trumpy touch. Everyone shouts and demeans others, everyone is building AI wrappers, everyone is spamming their new app (some built some incredibly good bots for it). I asked in an official GitHub forum if I could get some feedback, without posting a link of the app, and got banned.
Back to my cave
It's basically impossible for me to use again social media, be active on it, and not to feel weird. So I decided to go back to my cave. I started blogging again because why not, I am already an old fashioned engineer who wears a coppola, drives an old 1971 Vespa Special R. and watches Sergio Leone's movies. Blogging fits right in.