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Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again

franzoni.eu

61–70 of 241 posts

Re: Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again

#61

Great point about Twitter and FB not having the "I've seen this" flag (although they probably have this info for their "engagement metrics"), it keeps people addicted and returning. I remember being glued to Twitter during the Mumbai terror attack, but the way it was designed, it was an endless stream of the same info, repeated. And spam, since bots add trending hashtags to their junk messages. I guess it's like cabl…

Someone should greasemonkey this ftw

Re: Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again

#62
Medium is quickly becoming the central place for programming articles, and it's ridiculous they don't offer an API.

Check it out: https://github.com/Medium/medium-api-docs/issues/91

More of these website are just becoming data silos and not sharing their data. Unfortunately I don't know of a better place to write programming content. https://sergiotapia.me

If you're a developer and you care about this, like I do, where would you recommend we write articles sans-self hosting?

Re: Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again

#63

Don't worry. I'm in the process of solving this. The solution was in front of us all this time. It's the semantic web. What was missing is an accessible client, and it will be available soon. Imagine one giant unified semantic decentralized database of everything. Add smart contracts, quantified self, intent inferring, and binary input (à la Tinder or Akinator). Organize this on a timeline, so that your OS becomes a…

The Semantic Web is going to solve all these problems very soon. There are just a few details to be worked out.

This will be as true ten years from now as it was ten years ago.

Re: Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again

#64
Frankly I think what is missing is an understanding of statistics.

Even having “1000 friends”, which sounds amazing, is statistically insignificant when we are talking about populations of millions or billions. Think about the last “really long thread” you read on Reddit or something, and think about when you tuned out: was it a few dozen comments, maybe a few hundred? Still statistically insignificant, or at the very least severely biased.

People are regularly exposed to, and worse respond to, statistically biased samples. This is a really, really bad thing. What we need is a way to almost forcibly blend samples from many different populations so that the number of comments you can “stand” is a more representative sample. That way, when you get up in arms about “what people think”, it might actually represent what “people” think instead of “my friends” or whatever other biased sample is out there.

Re: Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again

#66
post #45

Did we get to this point of fragmentation due to smart phones and their walled garden philosophy? People stopped making applications for the sake of interoperability. ... if RealAudio™ was founded today it'd be king. Or is facebook to blame? John Gilmore famously said "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." -- he was wrong, censorship just has to wait for the right monopoly to appear. And with…

Amazon and Facebook, to me, are symptoms of a deeper problem: Technology is still hard. We're building complex large-scale products because the non-technical consumers can't use the simple small-scale products.

We're here because it's convenient, not because it's good.

I always felt that Google should have created simple tools for web publishing and creating personal walled-gardens - make the web personal for 7 billion non-technical humans, and the brands they consume. Surely there must be something in between Facebook and Jekyll/Hugo.

G+ copied Facebook when they should have studied why people were using Facebook instead of the open web. Don't make the problem worse, fixed those problems; take the role of guardian of the internet. Create or support standard APIs, release relevant IP/research, and bankroll SV startups that build the tools to publish or consume through the open web.

Google is still an ad/search company that relies on the open web. They need to protect it and drive further innovation. What happens after the coming adpocalypse - micropayments? Subscription bundles? Who knows? Or, perhaps we'll be chained to ads forever because we'll be locked into walled-garden apps... what a hell that would be.

Are there any companies working in this space? Closest I've seen is Squarespace, and even then... not really...

Re: Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again

#67
post #47

Great point about Twitter and FB not having the "I've seen this" flag (although they probably have this info for their "engagement metrics"), it keeps people addicted and returning. I remember being glued to Twitter during the Mumbai terror attack, but the way it was designed, it was an endless stream of the same info, repeated. And spam, since bots add trending hashtags to their junk messages. I guess it's like cabl…

With Facebook I scroll down until I see something I've seen before, then I stop. Doesn't seem very hard, and I imagine its what most people do. If I want to revisit older things then I keep scrolling, but that's almost never the case.

I was under the impression that each scroll through Facebook could show different content in arbitrary orderings.

Re: Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again

#68

Frankly I think what is missing is an understanding of statistics. Even having “1000 friends”, which sounds amazing, is statistically insignificant when we are talking about populations of millions or billions. Think about the last “really long thread” you read on Reddit or something, and think about when you tuned out: was it a few dozen comments, maybe a few hundred? Still statistically insignificant, or at the ver…

I'd like to see better moderation systems. Moderation done by people who are actually good at it rather than just upvoting or downvoting comments depending on whether they agree with them or not (moderating the moderators). Ways to mark comments as duplicates so they are all grouped into one bundle. A way to avoid the "first posts" effect, where the earlier posts are likely to be the highest rated regardless of their merits.

Aggregators like Hacker News are already part of a solution; putting interesting articles in one place so that we don't have to subscribe to 10^8 personal blogs and fringe tech sites.

Re: Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again

#69
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With Facebook I scroll down until I see something I've seen before, then I stop. Doesn't seem very hard, and I imagine its what most people do. If I want to revisit older things then I keep scrolling, but that's almost never the case.

I was under the impression that each scroll through Facebook could show different content in arbitrary orderings.

For vosper's technique to work, you have to select the Most Recent ordering for your news feed.

Re: Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again

#70

Medium is quickly becoming the central place for programming articles, and it's ridiculous they don't offer an API. Check it out: https://github.com/Medium/medium-api-docs/issues/91 More of these website are just becoming data silos and not sharing their data. Unfortunately I don't know of a better place to write programming content. https://sergiotapia.me If you're a developer and you care about this, like I do, whe…

You could just push your stuff to github.io...
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