no
Please read the paper before you comment
211–220 of 341 posts
Re: Please read the paper before you comment
#212Some years ago, Ars Technica ran a story on guns. https://arstechnica.com/science/2011/04/guns-in-the-home-lot... About halfway through a one-page article was this quote. "If you have read this far, please mention Bananas in your comment below. We're pretty sure 90% of the respondants to this story won't even read it first." Sure enough, there were about 3 pages of comments before someone mentioned bananas. Read the…
Ha, brilliant. Kind of the equivalent of how sometimes students put in random sentences in essays submitted for classes, to demonstrate that their teachers don't fully read their work. Or how surveys can have nonsense questions/answer options to weed out people not reading the questions.
I put swearwords in an assessment once, just to see if anyone noticed. I presume they didn't, because nobody commented - but maybe they did, and didn't care enough to comment.
Re: Please read the paper before you comment
#213Recently there was a brouhaha on the Twitters about 2+2=5 that went viral and, unfortunately, political. The argument is that post-modernists are trying to tear down mathematics as a "white supremacist social construct" and trying to say that "2+2=5" is as valid an answer as "2+2=4". Which sounds pretty bad, so I looked into it. The original Tweet thread was a math nerd who jokingly, and not incorrectly, illustrated…
Twitter is poison. It amplifies meaningless shit into the stratosphere with its trending algorithms, aided by the fact that the largest userbase on twitter seems to be political extremists of both left & right. It's created an environment where making a comment like "mathematics is merely a white supremacist social construct" is now somehow acceptable to the left. The platform literally exists to make things look lik…
>[Twitter] amplifies meaningless shit into the stratosphere with its trending algorithms
Doubtful, given how popular it is among people and ogranisations that carefully measure the RoI of their marketing & outreach operations, and constantly adjust balance of their efforts among 2, 3, 4 different communication channels (YT, Insta, mail, in-person events, topical forums, old style media, etc.).
A more fitting hypothesis would be, "Twitter opened up a couple new paradigms of influencing people". The paradigms are complex, opaque, and subtly inter-related; quite hard to grasp for people that aren't fully "in the loop". That's why there appearance of chaos and, at the same time, we see highly organized action emerges from this chaos.
Re: Please read the paper before you comment
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, I mean https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24269124 Automattic made its fortune by developing and hosting Wordpress for people who are not tech savvy and wanted to have its place to write.
Apologies, I literally can't see that comment - it shows as [Dead]. I agree, there's a market for something that plugs the gap. But if it's not as easy as social media, it won't get the adoption these days.
Dead, really? Maybe it was the lmgtfy link that tripped the modbot.
> if it's not as easy as social media, it won't get the adoption these days.
I think that is backwards. Starting a blog is as easy as starting a Facebook account. The problem is that a blog does not give you the "engagement" of a social network and therefore can not compete for your attention against the very fine-tuned engagement machines of Facebook et al.
At the end of the day, content production in social networks follow a Pareto distribution. A small percentage produces the majority of the content and the rest is just there to share or produce noise. If you remove the tools that produce noise, you remove any reason for the majority to join. If you remove the strings that pull the noisy majority, you don't have a "social network". This is why my feeling is that "a social network with no engagement" is an oxymoron.
Re: Please read the paper before you comment
#215Recently there was a brouhaha on the Twitters about 2+2=5 that went viral and, unfortunately, political. The argument is that post-modernists are trying to tear down mathematics as a "white supremacist social construct" and trying to say that "2+2=5" is as valid an answer as "2+2=4". Which sounds pretty bad, so I looked into it. The original Tweet thread was a math nerd who jokingly, and not incorrectly, illustrated…
Lesson is don’t joke or use sarcasm or hyperbole on the internet because you are begging to be maliciously misunderstood.
Comedians have a tough enough time doing jokes with face-to-face communication and body language as it's been done for thousands of years.
So most of the people on Twitter are already behind them, but then they want to try and do jokes on a brand new human medium that lacks a lot of information from face-to-face communication.
And then they get upset that someone didn't get their joke.
Re: Please read the paper before you comment
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair, I'd make it a point to comment and not mention bananas if I saw such a request. Why? don't look for reason while analyzing the behaviour of the average internet user:-)
I guess that would make you one of the 4% to whom the lizardman's constant applies. https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and...
No. What he described is not a poll.
Re: Please read the paper before you comment
#217Recently there was a brouhaha on the Twitters about 2+2=5 that went viral and, unfortunately, political. The argument is that post-modernists are trying to tear down mathematics as a "white supremacist social construct" and trying to say that "2+2=5" is as valid an answer as "2+2=4". Which sounds pretty bad, so I looked into it. The original Tweet thread was a math nerd who jokingly, and not incorrectly, illustrated…
I learned a while back that twitter is a sludge fest in the abscess of the internet. Any meaningful commentary is drowned out by a deluge of downright bafoonery and willingful ignorance.
Re: Please read the paper before you comment
#218Some years ago, Ars Technica ran a story on guns. https://arstechnica.com/science/2011/04/guns-in-the-home-lot... About halfway through a one-page article was this quote. "If you have read this far, please mention Bananas in your comment below. We're pretty sure 90% of the respondants to this story won't even read it first." Sure enough, there were about 3 pages of comments before someone mentioned bananas. Read the…
I have done several experiments in Reddit. I post a link with a plausible title and credible looking 404 to credible domain with made up url.
In a big subreddit you easily get 30 top level comments before first comment says that link does not work or is fake. Discussion goes on and on without pause. People treat the title as a writing prompt. One of the best writing prompts is pseudo-philosophical techno-bro life or business advice. Anything with quantum physics in the title works too.
Re: Please read the paper before you comment
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It amplifies meaningless shit into the stratosphere with its trending algorithms, aided by the fact that the largest userbase on twitter seems to be political extremists of both left & right. It's created an environment where making a comment like "mathematics is merely a white supremacist social construct" is now somehow acceptable to the left. It is like unleashing a neural net that amplifies whatever it sees in…
It scares me how much people on twitter believe that what they see trending on there from the news and other sources is being seen and blown up worldwide when it's not. It's being blown up worldwide ON TWITTER. The vast majority of the world never sees or hears any of it. It causes delusions of grandeur across the userbase.
> It scares me how much people on twitter believe that what they see trending on there from the news and other sources is being seen and blown up worldwide when it's not. It's being blown up worldwide ON TWITTER.
Unfortunately, "Twitter users react to..." is an entire genre of news article these days, even on otherwise-reasonable sources like the BBC.
Re: Please read the paper before you comment
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
Twitter is poison. It amplifies meaningless shit into the stratosphere with its trending algorithms, aided by the fact that the largest userbase on twitter seems to be political extremists of both left & right. It's created an environment where making a comment like "mathematics is merely a white supremacist social construct" is now somehow acceptable to the left. The platform literally exists to make things look lik…
>[Twitter] amplifies meaningless shit into the stratosphere with its trending algorithms Doubtful, given how popular it is among people and ogranisations that carefully measure the RoI of their marketing & outreach operations, and constantly adjust balance of their efforts among 2, 3, 4 different communication channels (YT, Insta, mail, in-person events, topical forums, old style media, etc.). A more fitting hypothes…
That's fair - I wasn't trying to make the point that it can't be weaponized. In fact it's quite the opposite.
I guess my main point with that quote is that it amplifies things (sometimes organically viral, sometimes engineered) and then places them all on the same level. So the userbase starts to believe that something that trended on twitter is just as globally important/well known as the genuine world news story that trended beside it, because it's all in one pot.
That's dangerous.