quarantine 'em

OK so if you remember this thread you may also remember that Google People doesn't show up in the Google Graveyard apparently (according to a Googler) the reason for that is because the project never "died", because internally it was never considered to be "alive" (cont.)https://twitter.com/qntm/status/1164301933949128709 …

I reset my pw and logged back in to Google People for the first time in 10 (?) years just now and discovered the following: 1. 10 years of updates on my account, written by me

2. also 10 years of "updates" for every other person I knew on there! I guess they made some algorithm to simulate continued activity? current hypothesis is that this was an attempt to game their metrics after it was really unpopular

3. INCLUDING PHOTOS

4. the algorithm is startlingly good at imitating my writing style for updates at first but it wanders way off topic and starts repeating itself because, you know, it's a bot. like how predictive text challenges always get locked in a loop

(going to stop numbering these) so by the time of present-day updates it's going in psychotic circles talking for thousands of words about "metal" and "low ceilings" and it generally seems to be quite unhappy for a bot

Other current theory is that they kept this going as a semi-actual social network which they could experiment on

which is actually quite cool because Facebook had that problem where they were doing ethically dubious experiments on their users and, Google People, the users are all screaming mad bots, problem "solved"...?