Social Networks: It's worse than you think (2020)
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Social Networks: It's worse than you think (2020)
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Re: Social Networks: It's worse than you think (2020)
#2As always, it's a bad time to be an imaginary person.
It's a big leap to pretend the model reflects the real world, let alone today's real world. As far as I can tell, sharing has become largely fenced into communities (reddit subs, Facebook groups). People who still share with people they know personally appear to me to be a minority.
Don't get me wrong, the principle is sound, but the world changes fast and the described model doesn't seem very relevant nowadays.
Re: Social Networks: It's worse than you think (2020)
#3Somehow this post takes the least interesting part of the source article[0] and draws false conclusions from it.
> In the simulation, the decision whether to rebroadcast is random, rather than being driven by “virality” or cognitive bias, so the simulation is an optimistic one. > It turns out that message propagation follows a power law: the probability of a meme being shared a given number of times is roughly proportional to an inverse power of that number.
So they implement a textbook model and a textbook result comes out - surprise? There’s nothing to be drawn by this.
I may share the authors sentiment but frankly this blog post is bunk.
There’re some interesting parts in the source though once you get through all the grand-standing fluff.
[0]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/information-overl...
Re: Social Networks: It's worse than you think (2020)
#4As always, it's a bad time to be an imaginary person. It's a big leap to pretend the model reflects the real world, let alone today's real world. As far as I can tell, sharing has become largely fenced into communities (reddit subs, Facebook groups). People who still share with people they know personally appear to me to be a minority. Don't get me wrong, the principle is sound, but the world changes fast and the des…
My experience watching my older family members share memes on Facebook suggests otherwise.
Also, the entirety of Twitter, in a completely different way.
Re: Social Networks: It's worse than you think (2020)
#5Re: Social Networks: It's worse than you think (2020)
#6As always, it's a bad time to be an imaginary person. It's a big leap to pretend the model reflects the real world, let alone today's real world. As far as I can tell, sharing has become largely fenced into communities (reddit subs, Facebook groups). People who still share with people they know personally appear to me to be a minority. Don't get me wrong, the principle is sound, but the world changes fast and the des…
facebook has billions of monthly users, there’s no way you interact with even 1% of that, so anecdotal feelings are completely meaningless!
Re: Social Networks: It's worse than you think (2020)
#7Related to this, there is an intimacy of small community which makes you feel valued and a proper contributor, that social networks really seem to oppose: they want to make the network bigger, you are part of the biggest world context, everybody on TikTok is eating a habanero while watching Bob Ross, so only if I do the same nonsense do I have a chance of 100 people noticing and liking the video and maybe opting to see more of my content.
When I put it that way it feels banal, but like, you know the “fast-growing subreddits” list on Reddit? There were meetings! Someone worked on that! People literally sat in a room and said effectively, “Hey Fatimeh, what is the status of the ‘make subreddits suck faster’ feature? Management is very interested in delivering that in Q3.” Right? Like this connection from global to personal is just automatically assumed, nobody spends a waking moment thinking it could be anything but that way.
Re: Social Networks: It's worse than you think (2020)
#8This explains why the crappiest of efforts are so viral, and why things that try harder fail. When I think of the meme templates I've seen, they're all grade 2 mental level, and they don't engage your critcal faculties, but this is their point. They just pass right by. There is a kind of bias where we must think, "this is so crappy, it has to be real!" which is the complement bias to, "this looks too polished to be real." I wonder what examples of things other than memes would be the effect of that bias.
Re: Social Networks: It's worse than you think (2020)
#9This explains why the crappiest of efforts are so viral, and why things that try harder fail. When I think of the meme templates I've seen, they're all grade 2 mental level, and they don't engage your critcal faculties, but this is their point. They just pass right by. There is a kind of bias where we must think, "this is so crappy, it has to be real!" which is the complement bias to, "this looks too polished to be r…
Example: free software can't be good, we should buy SAP.
Re: Social Networks: It's worse than you think (2020)
#10As always, it's a bad time to be an imaginary person. It's a big leap to pretend the model reflects the real world, let alone today's real world. As far as I can tell, sharing has become largely fenced into communities (reddit subs, Facebook groups). People who still share with people they know personally appear to me to be a minority. Don't get me wrong, the principle is sound, but the world changes fast and the des…
Well, it's simpler than the real phenomenon it is simulating, but the fact that even that simplified model gives the same result we see in reality, is itself quite significant. It suggests that it is not some quirk of FB algorithm that is the issue, it's the very essence of what a general purpose social network IS, that's the issue. It suggests that tweaking the algorithm is unlikely to solve the problem.