251–260 of 341 posts
Some 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…
Good luck with that. For the record, I did read the article, but my life is not significantly richer (or poorer) for having done so. A classic technique for reading scientific papers, is to read the abstract, then the conclusion. If they motivate us to read the rest, then we do so. What I often do here, is first check the comments, and see if I want to go and read the OP. If I do that, I’ll generally read it all; unl…
Earlier 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…
> 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.).
I'm not sure why you think that the two are incompatible, or opposed.
I don't mean to suggest that marketing is entirely meaningless, but surely the ROI of any particular marketing effort is largely independent of its meaningfulness?
The key to cleaning up my Twitter feed was to unfollow people who were too good at Twitter. That is: People who are working to maximize engagement, follower count, retweets, and likes. In my feed, the highest signal to noise ratio comes from people who aren't commenting on any and every trending topic. Instead, they're busy doing real work, away from Twitter, only occasionally checking in to share something. Likewise…
> The key to cleaning up my Twitter feed was to unfollow people who were too good at Twitter. That is: People who are working to maximize engagement, follower count, retweets, and likes. Interesting. Do you have some specific heuristic for identifying those people?
Some 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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Readers think of Reddit title as discussion prompts. The combination of subreddit theme and post title can easily start a discussion on “close enough” topic. One of the suggestion for increasing engagement is to disable link posts and only allow text posts.
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If you don’t have the patience to digest the article, what give you the authority to write on the topic?
> If you don’t have the patience to digest the article, what give you the authority to write on the topic? ... your common sense, your sense of logic, your spidey sense to detect BS trained since long time ago, your previous experience, or the fact that you are yet a expert in the topic. Or just your curiosity and desire to participate in the conversation, that is the correct motivation. To take a chance to improve y…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you don’t have the patience to digest the article, what give you the authority to write on the topic? ... your common sense, your sense of logic, your spidey sense to detect BS trained since long time ago, your previous experience, or the fact that you are yet a expert in the topic. Or just your curiosity and desire to participate in the conversation, that is the correct motivation. To take a chance to improve y…
>your common sense, your sense of logic, your spidy[sic] sense Consider how accurate the senses of a person that speaks without observing are. Existing is not license to proliferate otherwise there would be no notion of a cancerous cell, these would simply be another part of the organism. Uninformed opinions are the cancer of public discourse. Uncontrolled growth of irresponsible and subjective thought.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Some 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…