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Snap’s Drop in Active Users Could Signal a Social Media Peak

nytimes.com

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Re: Snap’s Drop in Active Users Could Signal a Social Media Peak

#131

Post by mehwoot »

mygo wrote: post #113
danepowell wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like an example of Goodhart's Law: "When a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good metric." Optimizing for something as abstruse as "engagement" seems like a great way to completely ignore everything that actually makes social networks compelling. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

they’re just optimizing for the wrong metric. If the metric was “user satisfaction” they could target it day and night and nobody would be complaining.

The reason goodharts law exists is because its hard to measure things like user satisfaction, so we're left with poor proxies like user engagement.

Re: Snap’s Drop in Active Users Could Signal a Social Media Peak

#132

Post by georgeecollins »

shawn wrote: post #77
lsalvatore wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe those "fucked" artists should invent their own characters. You know, being creative instead of copying other people's ideas.

Just like Disney did with Alice in Wonderland, right? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tk862BbjWx4 "And now you, dear filmmaker, want to come along and want to make your own version of Star Wars: A New Hope? For shame! That's like stealing food right out of George Lucas' mouth."

Good point about Disney, they shouldn't be allowed to control characters forever. But two wrongs don't make a right. Nintendo and Valve made recent pieces of intellectual property that they should be allowed to own for a reasonable period of time.

Re: Snap’s Drop in Active Users Could Signal a Social Media Peak

#133

Post by shawn »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #127
shawn wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes! This is an important point, and I completely agree that decentralization is the main driving force here, not necessarily blockchains. Blockchains are a nice fallback mechanism to enforce trust, but Bittorrent proves that you can have happy ecosystems that work just fine without it. The corollary is that I'm most interested in services that are focusing on decentralization, not merely trying to be a general purpo…

You can already put ROMs on IPFS, and if you use a JS Emulator and point it at a ROM in IPFS, well there you go.

Good idea; I tried that. Unfortunately IPFS doesn't yet seem reliable. Or at least I couldn't get it to work very well. I'll try again though.

Wanna collab? Shoot me an email and we can work it out. I'm really interested in getting this concept running. If only IPFS were low latency and easy for average gamers to upload files to, that seems a perfect fit.

I was hoping that as users play games, they would also upload the games to other people who want to play. That way there's no scarcity of server resources. You could fit ~40 n64 games into 1GB, so it's not a lot of bandwidth.

Re: Snap’s Drop in Active Users Could Signal a Social Media Peak

#134

Post by lsalvatore »

cyphar wrote: post #89
lsalvatore wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe those "fucked" artists should invent their own characters. You know, being creative instead of copying other people's ideas.

This is a ridiculous idea, that falls apart with even cursory scrutiny. For a trivial example, almost all of Shakespeare's plays were amalgamations of other people's plays or were based on other people's stories (Hamlet, for instance, was a retelling of a 16th century version of the 13th century Scandinavian legend of Amleth). Would you argue that Shakespeare was not creative? Or is it possible that stories are based…

You're not going to convince me that someone narrating over themselves play Half-Life has the same creativity as Shakespeare, because "everything is a copy". To say that no one actually owns the rights to Pokemon, that someone copying Pokemon frame-by-frame is of equal creative value as someone drawing their own monsters, well I just am deeply saddened by that.

Re: Snap’s Drop in Active Users Could Signal a Social Media Peak

#135

Post by FridgeSeal »

quotemstr wrote: post #128
florabuzzword wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bailed at the advent of forced non-chronological timelines. I would have been less insulted if Facebook hired someone to spit in my face. Easily the scummiest design decision I have ever whitnessed. Actively manipulating the structural representation of time in a communication platform is begging for chaos. Yes, of course I know the time stamps are still presented. That is not my point. Communication is sensitive;…

Chronological is just one ordering. Why are you so attached to it? Why must deviating from this one specific ranking approach lead to "chaos"? Algorithmic ranking is not evil. A tiny minority of people rail against algorithmic ranking, but the vast majority, as demonstrated by their engagement , prefer the algorithmic model. Should we let this tiny vocal minority dictate policy, data be damned?

Increased engagement because it takes more clicks and scrolling to get to what you want != increased engagement because I want to be on the platform.

Re: Snap’s Drop in Active Users Could Signal a Social Media Peak

#137

Post by ChristianBundy »

quotemstr wrote: post #128
florabuzzword wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bailed at the advent of forced non-chronological timelines. I would have been less insulted if Facebook hired someone to spit in my face. Easily the scummiest design decision I have ever whitnessed. Actively manipulating the structural representation of time in a communication platform is begging for chaos. Yes, of course I know the time stamps are still presented. That is not my point. Communication is sensitive;…

Chronological is just one ordering. Why are you so attached to it? Why must deviating from this one specific ranking approach lead to "chaos"? Algorithmic ranking is not evil. A tiny minority of people rail against algorithmic ranking, but the vast majority, as demonstrated by their engagement , prefer the algorithmic model. Should we let this tiny vocal minority dictate policy, data be damned?

I can't speak for GP, but most people who don't like the switch from non-chronological timelines because their replacements are usually opaque algorithms that are optimized for maximum shareholder profit. That's a downgrade.

On the other hand, non-chronological timelines are celebrated in communities like Scuttlebutt, but it's because we have control and you can choose the UX that works best for you without sacrificing connectivity.

Diagnosis: https://staltz.com/the-web-began-dying-in-2014-heres-how.htm... First round of treatment: https://staltz.com/a-plan-to-rescue-the-web-from-the-interne...

Re: Snap’s Drop in Active Users Could Signal a Social Media Peak

#138

Post by Karrot_Kream »

shawn wrote: post #133
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can already put ROMs on IPFS, and if you use a JS Emulator and point it at a ROM in IPFS, well there you go.

Good idea; I tried that. Unfortunately IPFS doesn't yet seem reliable. Or at least I couldn't get it to work very well. I'll try again though. Wanna collab? Shoot me an email and we can work it out. I'm really interested in getting this concept running. If only IPFS were low latency and easy for average gamers to upload files to, that seems a perfect fit. I was hoping that as users play games, they would also upload…

IPFS definitely has high latency, but you might be able to combine this with the Web Storage API [1] to compress and then store the ROM data for local use. I'd be interested in a collab, is your email in your profile?

1: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Storage

Re: Snap’s Drop in Active Users Could Signal a Social Media Peak

#139

Post by King-Aaron »

robjan wrote: post #125
King-Aaron wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found it interesting when visiting south-east asia that many government style posters - such as reporting vandalism or unclean bathrooms - all had a WeChat number to contact as opposed to any sort of traditional telephone number.

Which countries in SE Asia? Most of them don't have a particularly strong WeChat penetration.

Mainly through Malaysia that I noticed it

Re: Snap’s Drop in Active Users Could Signal a Social Media Peak

#140

Post by beefield »

quotemstr wrote: post #128
florabuzzword wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bailed at the advent of forced non-chronological timelines. I would have been less insulted if Facebook hired someone to spit in my face. Easily the scummiest design decision I have ever whitnessed. Actively manipulating the structural representation of time in a communication platform is begging for chaos. Yes, of course I know the time stamps are still presented. That is not my point. Communication is sensitive;…

Chronological is just one ordering. Why are you so attached to it? Why must deviating from this one specific ranking approach lead to "chaos"? Algorithmic ranking is not evil. A tiny minority of people rail against algorithmic ranking, but the vast majority, as demonstrated by their engagement , prefer the algorithmic model. Should we let this tiny vocal minority dictate policy, data be damned?

> Algorithmic ranking is not evil.

If you give no other option than algorithmic ranking that is not designed to maximize my utility but your revenue, that is as close to evil as you can get in my books.

(Edit: as close to evil in the context of social media content sorting. There obviously are more evil things than that...)

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