191–200 of 265 posts
Repeat after me, social media is not reality. Social media is the new tabloid salacious media. Yes it can be fun, entertaining, informative and educational, it can also be propaganda, misinformation, astroturfing, and a big high school like popularity contest where people are fake and narcissistic but probably insecure. The truth is the internet is teaching the biggest lesson ever in critical thinking and getting you…
3500 accounts? single bot will make those in several weeks
> Facebook said it had found 10 networks, some of which it had previously identified publicly. I think this is the more important bit, I don't know how they prevent abuse by the same network again. These guys can just manufacture new identities.
Repeat after me, social media is not reality. Social media is the new tabloid salacious media. Yes it can be fun, entertaining, informative and educational, it can also be propaganda, misinformation, astroturfing, and a big high school like popularity contest where people are fake and narcissistic but probably insecure. The truth is the internet is teaching the biggest lesson ever in critical thinking and getting you…
> Let's hope that people see it as a lesson and not somewhere they can bask in their confirmation bias all day, or make decisions based on fear, in those cases the populace is easy to manipulate.
I find a tinge of irony in this: HN being a form a social media in itself, and this statement also reflecting a general mistrust of social media within HN.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would love to know the true scope of “inorganic” content on these platforms. It is surely appalling. At some point users will realize that they are wasting their life staring into a screen that presents them with mostly engineered information.
You mean like how every 'reputable' news outlet uncritically repeated the US's Iraq war propaganda for months and fired journalists who criticized it? Or do you mean people you don't like saying things on social media?
When it comes to social media I think it is sprawling. Even a topic as pedestrian as lawn care is completely overrun by inorganic material.
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Healthy skepticism is not only easy to teach but easy to drill, and yet I remember no time in my early education that it was even a topic in class, except maybe tangentially - a short story theme, a blurb about a famous scientist or inventor. I doubt that has changed.
In California at least, skeptical analysis is in the curriculum from sixth grade onwards. I was under the impression it was there in all states, although I could be mistaken.
How long since this curriculum was adopted state-wide in California? And what's it officially called? I couldn't find any information about it when I searched for "skeptical analysis" on the California Dept of Education website.
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Do you believe the same to be true for Facebook as well? Why is Twitter encouraging outrage-engagement via the (somewhat filtered) Trending section? Why aren't you actively trying to decrease political engagement if it's a net negative?
> Do you believe the same to be true for Facebook as well? I have no idea about Facebook. I barely even use it so all my information is second-hand. > Why is Twitter encouraging outrage-engagement via the (somewhat filtered) Trending section? We're not, at least not intentionally. Do you think we are? If so, why? The Trending section is still biased towards things that are being talked about frequently. Unfortunately…
Can you talk more about this? On its face, this seems like an explicitly anti-leftist position. Some philosophers even claim that the role of the political Left is the organization of societal rage. For instance, if Twitter had its way in the domestication of political speech on its platform, then it might have suppressed conversations about BLM and prevented it from having a chance to become mainstream.
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Those enlightened people never conceived of a world where a lie could be spread to millions of people by anyone at the click of a button or spewed in volume by bots posing as people.
Maybe they did conceive of it and they don't care. This type of action satisfies the objective of enforcing the orthodoxy by chilling any speech or action that could be remotely construed as being antagonistic, which is perhaps the true goal.
Disinformation content works because it drives huge engagement. Huge engagement pays the bills for FB and twitter. If we expect change we need an analog to a carbon or pollution tax for social. “Show me the incentives and I will show you the outcome.”- Charlie Munger
This is a popular sentiment on HN, but it oversimplifies the situation. Engagement, in the aggregate, does not pay the bills. Advertisers paying us to sponsor tweets does. Advertisers will only do that if paying to sponsor tweets results in either improving brand image or converting sales. Advertisers won't pay for ads that don't get clicked on. Political pissing matches and disinformation campaigns don't bring the k…
> I'd like to know from this camp why you think that way.
Cool, hi.
> Engagement, in the aggregate, does not pay the bills. Advertisers paying us to sponsor tweets does.
half-truth; engagement in the aggregate does not pay the bills alone, but advertisers pay for people to see sponsored tweets, and more people see the sponsored tweets if more people are online for more time, and more people are online for more time if engagement is higher, so... engagement in the aggregate does in fact pay the bills.
> Advertisers will only do that if paying to sponsor tweets results in either improving brand image or converting sales.
false; this is a nice rosy image of advertisers as rational actors operating with perfect information that is not at all realistic.
If an advertisement performs poorly, who is to blame: twitter? the ad copywriter? a graphic designer? the product's dev team? A product owner? The marketer who made a buy on some specific targeting segment? Their manager? The guy who hired those two? The CMO? The CEO? Marketing teams get fired constantly, almost annually, but very few firms are ever going to all-out stop advertising on social media platforms on the basis of poor conversion on their ads, because they cannot know for certain that it's not their fault, and they have to keep playing the game even if it is rigged.
The thinking here is easy to comprehend: "Walmart is still doing it... so we must be doing it wrong."
> Advertisers won't pay for ads that don't get clicked on.
again, false. Advertisers do this all the time, because they're cargo-cult following buffoons and there's money sloshing around fucking everywhere.
Advertising money gets laundered, advertising money greases wheels, advertising money gets used by incompetents and people's nephews and rapacious over-confident investors who are running their own little schemes, and a billion other things, and it even occasionally gets used by savvy nerds who come to suspect it isn't actually working, but I assert: most advertisers will repeatedly pay for a lot of dumb shit that does not work at all. Always has been.
> Political pissing matches and disinformation campaigns don't bring the kind of engagement that results in clicking on ads and buying things, or of making positive brand associations.
This is an interesting academic distinction and I'm sure you know more about specific content -> behaviour readouts than I do, but the theory is simple: more time online results in more impressions and more impressions yields more conversions. Not a higher rate, mind you: just. more.
It does not really matter why or when or how we see the words "coca cola". All that matters is that we see those words more. Every day, more times per day, more places, more people. We need to be thinking about them always.
That is what they're paying for, and it doesn't even have to make sense! That might not even get them anything, but they have more money than they can possibly spend, so they may as well spend it on trying to get us to look at and think about them.
Can it be more optimal? Could you squeeze blood from this stone? Sure, probably, but whether I'm on twitter reading great video-game recommendations or reading flame wars is a pittance compared to whether I'm online or not at all.
I wouldn't be surprised to find out that the optimal situation is to make users cycle in and out of the outrage content: get me mad so I stick around a bit longer, cool me down with something funny/sweet, then show me an ad, then get me mad again. Repeat.
> Engagement costs us money. It increases system load and the resources required to actually run the platform.
this is absurd. It's absurd! It really makes me question your intent and good faith.
The platform is designed to be used, by definition! What, are you telling us twitter does not want its users online? You're saying that engagement is "expensive", is twitter running some kind of other service? Something outside of users looking at and posting tweets? This is nonsensical to the point of being upsetting.
It is like Philip Morris fretting over all the tobacco they're going to have to pay to harvest so that people can keep smoking. If only they didn't have to! You made an advertising platform and people must be present on it to be advertised to. End of story.
Now, of course, there are costs to be optimized. A dumb example: if you know you can't show me an ad between now and when I will naturally end my session, you should maybe try to get me offline right now, before I download any more video data, but that stuff is just sand on the beach for the difference it makes.
Maybe you think this matters because it is the work you do, or it's work you know does get done, but it does not matter in the big picture.
Side-rant: Twitter could fire 95% of its employees tomorrow and probably be more profitable than it is today in the long term, but it won't, again because of cargo cults and social wisdom.
Almost none of the feature work that has been done by twitter in the last 8+ years has materially mattered: the product is done, and you're mostly paid to arrange deck chairs on a ship that's sailing along smoothly and to look pretty. Employee headcount, profit, ad impressions: at the end of the day, all of this is just disembodied marketing metrics for investors to speculate on and to try to extract cash from before the whole thing tanks out someday.
> Raising engagement for the sake of raising engagement is a net negative in the long run, because it results in too much engagement that doesn't sell products (and thus ads).
This recap of your argument is just a rehash, but it restates the basic flawed premise in full:
"Advertisers are rational and have perfect information and will pay only for the optimal conversion strategy up to the optimal point of cost/benefit, so if we ever over or under-shoot at all, we'd lose money and we'd go right out of business!"
So, let me recap as well:
- Twitter is an advertisement platform.
- Twitter relies on dollars spent by advertisers. We agree so far, I think.
- Advertisers pay both per impression and per click.
- Advertisers have bad information, and act on social wisdom as much as or more than anything else. They cannot evaluate your performance by how well their advertisements do on your platform. This right here is the secret sauce!
- Engagement (i.e. time spent paying attention to the platform) may not raise conversion rates, (i.e. clicks per impression), but higher engagement is strongly correlated with more conversion overall. People gotta be online.
- Engagement is the core metric of your business.
To put this all very simply: if I am on twitter all day, it's a hell of a lot more time for me to run into and to think about Harry's Razors than if I never went on there at all.
That is the product you are selling to advertisers, and they will pay for it for a long time, even if it doesn't really make any sense or money.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'd also argue that what's left of the corporate media is rapidly losing credibility, highly partisan and rarely objective. How so, exactly? This is kind of an odd moment, where the US president is deeply incompetent and a shameless liar, and some seem to think it's biased for the mainstream media to even point those facts out. There are definitely some aspects of the traditional media that fit your description (al…
@ardy42 I think you just proved my point. To presume to know anything about what goes on in the rarified power struggles at an intercontinental/global levels requires free speech and giving serious researchers/writers a viewable voice. There are plenty of wonderful investigative reporters (Whitney Webb is a stellar example right now for example) but the editorial employees of oligarch owned media have marching orders…
I spent about a half hour scanning some of her stuff, and I'm getting a strong conspiracy-theorist vibe from that person:
https://unlimitedhangout.com/2020/09/investigative-reports/b...:
> [Rosa Brooks] was also previously the general counsel to the President of the Open Society Institute, part of the Open Society Foundations (OSF), a controversial organization funded by billionaire George Soros. Zoe Hudson, who is TIP’s director, is also a former top figure at OSF, serving assenior policy analyst and liaison between the foundations and the U.S. government for 11 years.
> OSF ties to the TIP are a red flag for a number of reasons, namely due to the fact that OSF and other Soros-funded organizations played a critical role in fomenting so-called “color revolutions” to overthrow non-aligned governments, particularly during the Obama administration. Examples of OSF’s ties to these manufactured “revolutions” include Ukraine in 2014 and the “Arab Spring,” which began in 2011 and saw several governments in the Middle East and North Africa that were troublesome to Western interests conveniently removed from power.
The Soros stuff is a bit of a red flag. Also, Ukraine wasn't non-aligned, but aligned towards Russia. Anecdotally, the Ukrainians I know weren't fond of Yanukovych and were happy to see him go, both times.
https://twitter.com/_whitneywebb/status/1312730357175902209:
> Good ole sheep herder Bernard!
Referring to people as "sheep"?
https://twitter.com/_whitneywebb/status/1312430264870674438:
> My opinion:
> This is about ramping up fear and distracting everyone from the VERY DISTURBING revelations in just the past few days on something the creepiest part of the military you've never heard of is up to. Stay tuned!
The "this" she's referring to is Trump getting Covid-19. Apparently she thinks it's part of some kind of coverup rather than the very obvious end-result of the choices he's made for himself and his staff.