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Twitter Soars After Surprise Sales Gain, First Real Profit

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Re: Twitter Soars After Surprise Sales Gain, First Real Profit

#181

Post by CM30 »

tinymollusk wrote: post #111
aaron-lebo wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter is a digital Public Sphere, and Public Spheres are always noisy. When in human history have public spheres like Twitter existed? The public sphere up until about 50 years ago for most people was strictly local. You could not broadcast dumb narcissistic ignorance for free to millions of people. It wasn't possible. Twitter is not good at what it does. It does not elevate public discourse. It's the equivalent of…

What if the size of the sphere is the determining characteristic about the level of discourse? I just read Geoffrey West's book, "Scale", and it is interesting to think of a sub-linear relationship, with "quality of discussion" on the y-axis and "number of people participating" on the X. It's possible the current state of "bad" affairs is a natural consequence of the democratizing power of the internet itself. Reduce…

Eh, I think it may come down to Dunbarr's Number more than anything else. People can only have a certain number of truly close friends/connections at any one time, and when you get beyond that, you see clashes and the social structure breaks down. Maybe Twitter, Facebook, YouTube etc are simply too big, so people break into separate tribes rather than get along with each other.

Re: Twitter Soars After Surprise Sales Gain, First Real Profit

#182

Post by malvosenior »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #167
malvosenior wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's more to tech than companies, examples: Linux: open, distributed development, massive success Bittorrent: p2p, massive success Bitcoin: fully distributed, massive success (pending) There is nothing more centralized than the government. They have a monopoly on violence. I (and many others) want them as far away from our industry as possible. I'll take Google over government intervention any day.

Centralization isn't bad; often, it's welcome, as by its nature it's more efficient. Bitcoin is a good example of how not to do tech. Beyond that, you're under the mistaken impression that government=centralized, private=decentralized. The reality is, governments and markets are two sides of the same coin. They both strive centralize control.

> Bitcoin is a good example of how not to do tech

Bitcoin is a great example of exactly how to do tech. I'm pretty sure we probably fundamentally disagree on most things :)

> you're under the mistaken impression that government=centralized, private=decentralized

None of the technologies I listed are private enterprises.

Re: Twitter Soars After Surprise Sales Gain, First Real Profit

#184

Post by noir_lord »

bad_user wrote: post #42

I've been very active on Twitter in the past 2 years and not due to Trump or other controversies. A lot of developers I want to follow are active on Twitter. So it might be due to Trump, don't know, but I'm glad it's going well for them.

Same, I follow other programmers and chess players/chess organisations and for that its very good, I carefully curate the people I do follow to maximise the signal/minimise the noise and for that I haven't found anything better.

It's sorta like a poor mans RSS.

Re: Twitter Soars After Surprise Sales Gain, First Real Profit

#185

Post by blueblimp »

noir_lord wrote: post #184
bad_user wrote: post #42

I've been very active on Twitter in the past 2 years and not due to Trump or other controversies. A lot of developers I want to follow are active on Twitter. So it might be due to Trump, don't know, but I'm glad it's going well for them.

Same, I follow other programmers and chess players/chess organisations and for that its very good, I carefully curate the people I do follow to maximise the signal/minimise the noise and for that I haven't found anything better. It's sorta like a poor mans RSS.

Yep, this is how I use twitter and it does nicely. The trick is to aggressively unfollow anyone whose signal/noise ratio isn't great. That way almost everything in the feed is interesting.

Re: Twitter Soars After Surprise Sales Gain, First Real Profit

#186

Post by noir_lord »

blueblimp wrote: post #185
noir_lord wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same, I follow other programmers and chess players/chess organisations and for that its very good, I carefully curate the people I do follow to maximise the signal/minimise the noise and for that I haven't found anything better. It's sorta like a poor mans RSS.

Yep, this is how I use twitter and it does nicely. The trick is to aggressively unfollow anyone whose signal/noise ratio isn't great. That way almost everything in the feed is interesting.

I had a strict rule of following a max of 50 accounts, operating a 1 in 1 out, I've lifted that to 80 (for Chess stuff) but still 1 in 1 out, so I have to decide whether following this one is worth unfollowing something else.

Except for a programmer friend who died (I just can't bring myself to unfollow him) everyone is expendable.

Re: Twitter Soars After Surprise Sales Gain, First Real Profit

#187

Post by lopmotr »

beachy wrote: post #172
lopmotr wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found HN aggravatingly hostile to freedom of thinking and open discussion. There are several hypocrisies/arbitrary taboos about what ideas you're allowed to mention on here. Even some anti-science taboos. Usually agreeing with everyone else is good and disagreeing with the majority will get you downvoted or shadowbanned. People are very afraid of specific political ideas so even getting accidentally misidentified a…

> Usually agreeing with everyone else is good and disagreeing with the majority will get you downvoted or shadowbanned. Isn't this the inherent nature of a fact-based platform? And most HN posters are probably quite rational and fact-based? I wouldn't come to HN if it was a place where people could air stupid, non-fact based opinions and have them treated without criticism or derision. people can hang out in their Fa…

Surely fact-based and conforming to group belief are pretty opposite concepts aren't they? I'm not talking about false facts, but ideas that are outside the fairly clearly delineated (as I found by testing various boundaries and seeing others do so), but arbitrary scope of what's acceptable on HN.

Re: Twitter Soars After Surprise Sales Gain, First Real Profit

#188

Post by opportune »

IgorPartola wrote: post #146
tyrust wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit is fine if you subscribe to small [0] or heavily moderated [1]. Default and large subreddits have practically always been as you describe. >requirement of quality comments Ha. You won't have shitposts or rehashed jokes, but you also won't always have quality. I'll refer to a past comment of mine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16154688 [0] - Usually niche interest or specific geographic [1] - e.g. /r/ask…

Reddit is insta-community. Here's how I use Reddit: I pick up a new hobby, say knitting. I go to reddit.com/r/knitting and suddenly I have a bunch of experts there who I can ask questions, exchange ideas with, or brag to about my accomplishments. There is an instant community already existing on Reddit for pretty much every activity I can think of. Where this gets dicey is politics. If you are suddenly a black libret…

I don't think reddit does a good job of dealing with academic subjects or discussions either. Any /r/{academic_topic} is usually filled with undergraduate-level discussion. I think that is a direct consequence of reddit being an insta-community though - it prevents the development of actual-expert communities.

There are some good expert communities like /r/askhistorians, and their model certainly works for something like history, but I don't think the same format would really work for something like machine learning or mathematics.

Re: Twitter Soars After Surprise Sales Gain, First Real Profit

#189

Post by sanderjd »

wickawic wrote: post #132
mywittyname wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But that was why it was popular -- because most people's lives, most of the times, are not filled with drama. A lot of the story arcs involved situations that people loved to gossip about. Like the woman who wouldn't wear a bra, or the whole "regifter" episode.

Put another way; Seinfield was about how people react to a breakdown in social conventions, and really small ones at that. The types of things that happen in Seinfield were the types of things you would go home and talk to your spouse about. "Someone at work today was standing really close to me!" "I was driving through an exit ramp and two cars tried to merge into the same space!" etc.

This is such a good way of putting it, and despite having watched every episode two or three times, I had never quite thought of it this way. I think this is best captured by the moment (which I think about all the time) is when George gets so mad at the person hogging the phone at a Chinese restaurant and yells, "you know we're living in a SOCIETY!". After reading your comment, I realize that complaint could be applied to most of the story lines in the show.

Re: Twitter Soars After Surprise Sales Gain, First Real Profit

#190

Post by aaron-lebo »

beachy wrote: post #172
lopmotr wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found HN aggravatingly hostile to freedom of thinking and open discussion. There are several hypocrisies/arbitrary taboos about what ideas you're allowed to mention on here. Even some anti-science taboos. Usually agreeing with everyone else is good and disagreeing with the majority will get you downvoted or shadowbanned. People are very afraid of specific political ideas so even getting accidentally misidentified a…

> Usually agreeing with everyone else is good and disagreeing with the majority will get you downvoted or shadowbanned. Isn't this the inherent nature of a fact-based platform? And most HN posters are probably quite rational and fact-based? I wouldn't come to HN if it was a place where people could air stupid, non-fact based opinions and have them treated without criticism or derision. people can hang out in their Fa…

The thing is people can be very rational and fact based and still be out of their league in various topics or have strong biases that they do or don't realize.

Here's a thread where someone is getting downvoted for asking a question because people don't like the implication of that question, it doesn't fit the biases of the audience. That's not rational and fact based, its suppressing views we don't like.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16337180

There are many examples like that, and one of the dangers of "rational" communities is we assume we're rational and can't mess it up, when really we aren't any different.

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