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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)

#21

Post by smegger001 »

dylan604 wrote: post #14
crdrost wrote: post #7

Related 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 s…

>When I put it that way it feels banal, It is banal, at least the largest portion of social media is. Originally, I could see the usefulness of FB with connecting with friends near & far, sharing, planning, etc. All sounds useful, but then FB turned it creepy with their method of monetizing their products and algos to pull the strings to make it as addicting as possible. Insta, TikTok, etc has pretty much fully embra…

>Originally, I could see the usefulness of FB with connecting with friends near & far, sharing, planning,

honestly I would love social networks that was just that but as it is now i actively avoid most social media outside of small niche communities (certain subreddits that relate to fairly narrow interest fan communities for a couple of authors that sort of thing [i don't fallow any default subs], hacker news, and a couple of small discord servers for open source projects and small podcasts)

but everything for talking to friends and family and keeping up on there lives is either been turned into a politically toxic battleground or monetized into unusability.

Re: Social Networks: It's worse than you think (2020)

#22

Post by sneak »

You can't promote certain content to the front without demoting other content downward.

The algorithmic filtering/ordering of items in a feed is really just censorship of the items that don't benefit Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/YouTube.

These tools serve their owners, not the society they ostensibly serve to connect.

It's censorship on a huge scale, and it's terribly damaging.

Re: Social Networks: It's worse than you think (2020)

#23

Post by blondin »

crdrost wrote: post #7

Related 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 s…

wonderful remark.

i have this nagging feeling that nothing good ever comes out when there is a large group of people involved. and that the most successful communities, teams or groups are small. i have seen small communities ruined when they got big or niche communities wrecked when they went mainstream. time and again. but we keep pushing for larger groups, larger teams, more networking, more friends, etc...

Re: Social Networks: It's worse than you think (2020)

#25

Post by ummwhat »

3np wrote: post #3

Somehow 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 propor…

If it's the paper I'm thinking of then I read the original and that's not really a fair representation of what they did.

What they actually did was they started with some data on things which had gone viral but could only see how many were "infected" (number of views over time). They didn't have direct access to the granular information of who had seen what and who they shared or didn't share with. They decided to work backwards and model virality for some assumed network properties and contagiousness properties and then see which of their models had the similar statistics to actual viral posts.

Network topology: iirc they tested the case of a gaussian distribution of connections meaning on average 95% of nodes had n connections +- 2sigma and they tested a power law type distribution meaning some thin minority of "influencers" had connections to nearly everyone".

Contagious property: they tested the case where different content had a different virality property r0 with more or less contagious content all competing at the same time. They also tested the case of sheer randomness wherein all content is equally likely to be shared and which goes viral basically depends on the luck of who's eye it catches.

The end result was that a power law and random contagiousness best fit the real world statistics.

Re: Social Networks: It's worse than you think (2020)

#26

Post by kQq9oHeAz6wLLS »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #20
crdrost wrote: post #7

Related 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 s…

Could you imagine if hypothetically, HN suddenly became the world's most popular social network? It would be unusable for it's current purpose and no amount of moderating could ever fix that. This sounds harsh but not everyone deserves to be heard all of the time- myself included.

To quote David Duchovney:

"I think when I was younger I wanted to tell everybody everything, because I thought I was so damn interesting. Then I heard the snoring."

Re: Social Networks: It's worse than you think (2020)

#29

Post by BeefWellington »

blondin wrote: post #23
crdrost wrote: post #7

Related 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 s…

wonderful remark. i have this nagging feeling that nothing good ever comes out when there is a large group of people involved. and that the most successful communities, teams or groups are small. i have seen small communities ruined when they got big or niche communities wrecked when they went mainstream. time and again. but we keep pushing for larger groups, larger teams, more networking, more friends, etc...

> i have this nagging feeling that nothing good ever comes out when there is a large group of people involved. and that the most successful communities, teams or groups are small. i have seen small communities ruined when they got big or niche communities wrecked when they went mainstream. time and again. but we keep pushing for larger groups, larger teams, more networking, more friends,

This made me think of the quote from Men in Black:

> A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.

I think there's some major exceptions but they require heavy-handed moderation. Notable among these is the AskHistorians subreddit. You could argue though they're the exception that proves the rule.

I will say though, I'm a frequent participant in a few topic-specific forum, and I think if anything the concentration to places like Reddit, Facebook groups, and Discord has helped these places quite a bit in the exact way you suggest. They've been insulated because they're too obscure now and that has allowed them all to largely have reasonable organic growth, rather than explosive "hug of death" style sudden growth. I just hope that lasts.

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