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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)

#31

Post by 6510 »

civilized wrote: post #15

I have no idea what the logic of this post is supposed to be. Message sharing follows a power law and so therefore... something about quality going down when messages go up? And something about filtering? What on earth is he talking about? ...Well, it turns out he's sharing the conclusions of the linked SciAm article, but the SciAm article just says "the super smart researchers plugged numbers into their simulation a…

> Are we expected to just believe that computer simulations built by credentialed scientists prove things about the real world?

We could model it...

1) each node is an imaginary scientist with a random set of in and outgoing citations, they can only read and cite a finite number of randomized publications, the publications are assumed to vary randomly in quality...

2) ?????

3) Conclusion: As the number of publications in the network rises, the quality of those which propagate falls.

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

#32

Post by Stratoscope »

stavros wrote: post #12
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…

Nitpick: There's no ñ in habanero.

And in fact that informs how to pronounce the word. It's not hah-buh-NYAIR-oh, it's hah-buh-NAIR-oh.

A similar one that I used to get wrong all the time is empanada. No ñ in that either, but I always said em-puh-NYAH-duh. Then one day I noticed it was just a regular n and it is pronouced em-puh-NAH-duh.

Now for a really embarrassing one. This was back in the day when I was working with my friend and colleague Alan Cooper (of interaction design fame) on what became Visual Basic. We were on a phone call and I said something about a zhuh-NAIR of music. Alan asked "what's that?" I explained that it was like a category or a particular style. He said "do you mean ZHAHN-ruh?"

It's funny how these embarrassing moments stick in your brain. I could tell you exactly where I was, and even which direction I was facing when we had that conversation.

But I was grateful that Alan corrected me and I won't sound like a fool any more when I talk about a genre.

I had one friend who would never gracefully accept a correction like that. One time he told me about a neighbor who "took his dog to the pond." I said "that's nice, does the dog like to go swimming?" He said "no, the POND, the place where they put dogs to sleep."

He went through his whole life mispronouncing "dog pound", and many, many other words.

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

#33

Post by smichel17 »

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.

I like browsing HN from the Android app Materialistic because (1) I can't see votes on my posts and (2) it's difficult to find replies to my posts (you can view your profile, but jumping to a post only shows its ancestors, not replies). This combination, plus the annoyance of typing on a smartphone, means I usually * only comment when I have something that adds value to the conversation; I tend to engage more with the content and less "socially".

* Of course, there are exceptions, and I actually use hnreplies.com to get emails when someone replies to me, but there's enough of a delay that I usually am able to avoid getting caught up in a back-and-forth argument. Especially since, by the time I see the replies, someone else has already clarified my position :)

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

#34

Post by stavros »

Stratoscope wrote: post #32
stavros wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nitpick: There's no ñ in habanero.

And in fact that informs how to pronounce the word. It's not hah-buh-NYAIR-oh, it's hah-buh-NAIR-oh. A similar one that I used to get wrong all the time is empanada. No ñ in that either, but I always said em-puh-NYAH-duh. Then one day I noticed it was just a regular n and it is pronouced em-puh-NAH-duh. Now for a really embarrassing one. This was back in the day when I was working with my friend and colleague Alan Co…

A Chinese colleague of mine liked to say that "there are many ways to peel a cat".

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

#35

Post by dredmorbius »

stavros wrote: post #12
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…

Nitpick: There's no ñ in habanero.

The proper form, when turned to 11, is haban̈ero.

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

#36

Post by Stratoscope »

stavros wrote: post #34
Stratoscope wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And in fact that informs how to pronounce the word. It's not hah-buh-NYAIR-oh, it's hah-buh-NAIR-oh. A similar one that I used to get wrong all the time is empanada. No ñ in that either, but I always said em-puh-NYAH-duh. Then one day I noticed it was just a regular n and it is pronouced em-puh-NAH-duh. Now for a really embarrassing one. This was back in the day when I was working with my friend and colleague Alan Co…

A Chinese colleague of mine liked to say that "there are many ways to peel a cat".

Ouch. As someone who lives with three dogs and three cats, that one hits close to home.

One of our cats thinks she is my girlfriend! When I go to bed, she immediately jumps on the bed next to me and places herself right where my hand is, so I can scratch her back and tummy.

No cat peeling here!

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

#37

Post by dredmorbius »

abnry wrote: post #27

I am trying to get into self hosting. Can anyone recommend a Twitter or Facebook self hosted app? The idea would be that it would be an invite only social network where I choose who can join.

Nextcloud is probably among your better packaged options. Free Software / OSS:

Share and collaborate on documents, send and receive email, manage your calendar and have video chats without data leaks.

https://nextcloud.com/

For a Twitter equivalent, Mastodon.

Facebook's a bit more of a challenge --- longer-form content, the ability to group contacts, and the like.

Principally there are Diaspora*, Friendica, and Hubzilla, all based on or near the ActivityPub standard.

https://joinmastodon.org/

https://friendi.ca/

https://project.hubzilla.org/

There are limits and compromises to these, though all should handle small-scale (family/community) sharing easily. Mastodon's at millions of users, the others are probably smaller.

At scale, moderation and administration of Diaspora* is a bit of a pain, though that's (slowly) improving.

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

#38

Post by dredmorbius »

Mathew's blog post is mostly just commentary on a quite excellent Scientific American article from November 2020, "Information Overload Helps Fake News Spread, and Social Media Knows It".

This is based on a simulation of social media which shows that, at least in the model (and with strong evidence that reality follows suit):

[The] winner-take-all popularity pattern of memes, in which most are barely noticed while a few spread widely, could not be explained by some of them being more catchy or somehow more valuable: the memes in this simulated world had no intrinsic quality. Virality resulted purely from the statistical consequences of information proliferation in a social network of agents with limited attention. Even when agents preferentially shared memes of higher quality, researcher Xiaoyan Qiu, then at OSoMe, observed little improvement in the overall quality of those shared the most. Our models revealed that even when we want to see and share high-quality information, our inability to view everything in our news feeds inevitably leads us to share things that are partly or completely untrue.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/information-overl...

That was discussed exctensively at the time on HN (166 comments):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25153716

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

#39

Post by bjt »

abnry wrote: post #27

I am trying to get into self hosting. Can anyone recommend a Twitter or Facebook self hosted app? The idea would be that it would be an invite only social network where I choose who can join.

Invite-only and self-hosted are different things.

Discord is invite-only but not self-hosted. Maybe that would work for you?

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