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Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again

franzoni.eu

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

#71

Post by incompatible »

vosper wrote: post #47
netsharc wrote: post #11

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.

That's what I do, but I also have to change the ordering from "Top Stories" to "Most Recent" fairly frequently. That usually puts out different stuff (Facebook seems incapable of remembering the setting. I assume it's deliberate design at this point, since such a blatant bug would have been fixed by now).

I suspect it's only a workable strategy if you either have few friends, or stop following all the ones with a low signal to noise ratio, or if you use Facebook somewhat frequently. Otherwise, there'd just be too many updates to finish scrolling through them in a reasonable amount of time.

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

#72

Post by incompatible »

hellbanner wrote: post #55
plaguuuuuu wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Internet is decentralized. It doesn't matter that all the 13 year olds are congregating on Club Penguin or whatever; we can set up our own communities. That's why HN is great (and other small communities). It's intrinsically hostile to the wider internet simply by virtue of the subject and the format of its content.

Yes, but there have been an increasing trend in "reddit style" comments on news.ycombinator.com . Myself and other users have noticed, called people out, downvoted etc for the lousy comments. But the realities of the threading style & upvote democracy is that lowest common denominator spreads easily. Related discussion in same thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14699133

It always sucks to have your insightful (in your own eyes at least) comments downvoted, just because there's a group of people who disagree with it. It's a downvote democracy, but not a true democracy because it only takes a minority to vote that way. I don't even have access to this downvote feature, I guess I don't have enough karma.

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

#73

Post by ben_jones »

incompatible wrote: post #68
makecheck wrote: post #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 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…

Begs the question: what are the best moderation systems in software? Are there any?

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

#74

Post by willhackett »

I'm very much for this. I have five messaging apps, two email clients, three file storage apps and a news reader all on my iPhone - just to stay in touch. It's hard to stay organised when businesses use different technologies across different platforms and there's no single place just for "Messages".

I don't care how the message is sent, I just want to make sure it gets to the right person.

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

#76

Post by jkmcf »

incompatible wrote: post #71
vosper wrote: 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.

That's what I do, but I also have to change the ordering from "Top Stories" to "Most Recent" fairly frequently. That usually puts out different stuff (Facebook seems incapable of remembering the setting. I assume it's deliberate design at this point, since such a blatant bug would have been fixed by now). I suspect it's only a workable strategy if you either have few friends, or stop following all the ones with a low…

"Most Recent" is most recently updated by comments, which is mostly useless for me. I just stopped using FB as much, checking in just to see how people are doing every few days.

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

#77

Post by 0xffff2 »

chongli wrote: post #60
gavinpc wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The name I've heard for this is "Eternal September": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

Yeah, that was posted elsewhere in the thread. I thought of it as a name specific to Usenet, as Network Decay is specific to television networks. I was hoping for a general term.

I don't think the term is specific to Usenet at all. It's genesis is in Usenet, but I've heard it used many, many times to refer to the general phenomenon that the original Eternal September was a specific instance of.

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

#78

Post by elviejo »

grogenaut wrote: post #50

As someone who remembers being uber frustrated at having to use trillian to talk to all of my friend, I disagree, there was major fragmentation back then as well. Also for which BBS you were on, which friends were on AOL or other nerfed internet.

It was possible to use and create trillian. Now I need to have slack, Hangouts and WhatsApp web open independently

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

#79

Post by Animats »

cyphunk wrote: 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…

Actually, that's a misquote from an incident at Stanford involving USENET in the early 1980s. There was an administration attempt to censor alt.humor.funny over some forgotten PC issue. The group was blocked at the main Stanford USENET gateway.

It didn't work. USENET nodes, when they connect, automatically exchange any messages in any group common to both that the other node hasn't seen. There were a few other USENET low-bandwidth nodes on campus that connected to the outside world, and as long as there was at least one, the missing posts in "alt.humor.funny" would be re-inserted. USENET really did route around censorship automatically.

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

#80

Post by balladeer »

Whenever I come across a new Twitter handle I think of following I first run it through http://www.tweetstats.com. I check one simple data there:

     Number of tweets per day (tpd); and also maybe tweets per month (tpm)
If the handle is churning out more than ~10 tweets per day I tend to stay away. Because if even a couple of hanldes I follow crosses 30 tpd or so my feed will pretty much become pointless unless I am glued to my feed all the time and I would miss a lot of good content.

Another big problem is repeated content as the article suggests - I follow a quite some literary Twitter handles and longform handles. Everyday I come across just too many tweets that link to the same article. What is worse sometimes the same handles tweet about the same articles repeatedly (to get more views I reckon) with different texts. I usually end up unfollowing many of those handles and that means I actually going to miss a lot of content that I would have otherwise liked but in a moderate dose, at a slower pace.

I request my friends/family members to remove me form there WhatsApp broadcast lists and after sometime I simply tell them if they don't stop with that daily "Good Morning/Evening" forwards and all that crap I am simple gonna block them. I wish WhatsApp let me remove myself from all the broadcast lists I am added to or let me choose that I don't want to receive broadcast messagegs at all (if they can't/won't make it granular).

I've completed given up on Facebook. Sometimes it shows me posts that I've marked hide like five times. It never keeps my friends photos, self written text posts on top but all those video and silly article shares, those annoying and mostly unfunny memes. In fact they have a limit I guess (haven't really used them in a while) and the personal posts get drowned in the mass market noise.

Maybe the problem is we talk of Internet being decentralised but we are all try to find that decentralized Internet at any one place or vert few places - be it Twitter, or Facebook, Google. We are adopting the social networks, content sources wrong... maybe.

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