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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)

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the same with Linux. If it would be super popular and mainstream, the corporations would destroy everything that's fun with it in order to sell you things and track your data.

They already do. Not everything even in the server segment is unicorns and rainbows; a lot of corporate “fauxpen source” is SDKs for proprietary hosted services, and paid staff working on those “OSS” offerings is more about “building a vibrant community” (read: extracting free labor) and making sure the only contributions accepted are those that narrowly match their internal roadmaps (which reinforces my previous poi…

TIL:

> fauxpen source

> Etymology: a term invented by Phil Marsosudiro at a dinner party in North Carolina

> Date: 2 May 2009

> A description of software that claims to be open source, but lacks the full freedoms required by the Open Source Definition. http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php

> synonyms: see open core, neo-proprietary

> antonyms: see Linux kernel, Apache, OpenNMS

https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/open-vs-fauxpen (2009)

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

#132
post #40

I don't get it. If quality is random and decision to rebroadcast is also random - and independent of quality - then why is the result more low-quality messages?

Because quality is rare.

I'm talking about the simulation, not the real thing - and there, "low quality"/"high quality" are just markers that were assigned randomly.

Did they write anywhere that they tag posts "low quality" with higher probability than "high quality"?

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

#133
> As soon as your news feed becomes too big for you to read all of it and then decide whether to repost anything, the quality of information you propagate is going to fall because of that filtering process.

So, curation is needed. Yet the curated groups do not have sufficient cross pollination of ideas. Why is that?

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

#134
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 especially hate the trend of people deliberately saying something controversial, to get more comments/likes/publicity. One recent example is Piers Morgan in the UK, who randomly decided to criticise Emma Raducanu, a rather likeable British teenager, who just won the US open without dropping a set (including in qualifying rounds)! I can't understand why he would do that, other than to stir up some controversy, and g…

And now that you've shared it here, you've contributed to the success of the marketing campaign.

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

#135
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I especially hate the trend of people deliberately saying something controversial, to get more comments/likes/publicity. One recent example is Piers Morgan in the UK, who randomly decided to criticise Emma Raducanu, a rather likeable British teenager, who just won the US open without dropping a set (including in qualifying rounds)! I can't understand why he would do that, other than to stir up some controversy, and g…

And now that you've shared it here, you've contributed to the success of the marketing campaign.

Kind of! I know who I’ll be ignoring now

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

#136

> as the number of messages in the network rises, the quality of those which propagate falls ... if you assume people don`t read the message at all, but use a coin flip to decide if they should reshape it. I cannot for the life of me fathom how anyone could make a model that completely ignores content quality in respect to distribution and then use that model to make a statement about average quality of content that…

Garbage in garbage out. The conclusions necessarily follow from the assumptions they used. It's astounding that anyone is paying attention to this.

"Simulation shows that coinflip leads to 50/50 outcome." Genius.

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

#137
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.

How does hackaday do it? I think it is the focus on details, the absence of popularity metrics that tend to skew in favor of distracting comedies.

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

#138
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 especially hate the trend of people deliberately saying something controversial, to get more comments/likes/publicity. One recent example is Piers Morgan in the UK, who randomly decided to criticise Emma Raducanu, a rather likeable British teenager, who just won the US open without dropping a set (including in qualifying rounds)! I can't understand why he would do that, other than to stir up some controversy, and g…

I generally have more respect for journalists than athletes, because the former group contributes more to society. But in this case, yuck.

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

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How does hackaday do it? I think it is the focus on details, the absence of popularity metrics that tend to skew in favor of distracting comedies.

Perhaps it's the light text on black background, a colorscheme that would suit a site called hacker news also.

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

#140
post #111

The lies and conspiracy theories were always there. The difference now is that there are lies and conspiracies in different directions rather than a consensus of lies and conspiracy theories. Of course it remains to be seen if it's possible to create a consensus of a nation without centralized media like we had until now. If it's not, we will have to get used to the population fragmenting into different groups with d…

> The difference now is that there are lies and conspiracies in different directions rather than a consensus of lies and conspiracy theories. Quite the opposite, the once-thriving ecosystem of conspiracy theories is gutted now. Social networks did to it what industrial farming did to agriculture. It's one huge monoculture spanning nations, generations, languages and cultures. Even across the professed political align…

I think there is still a whole ecosystem of conspiracies, the only reason they look more homogeneous now is because 50% of the population of america is basically "out" now, there's no narrative that integrates them into the country, so they instead coalesce around a set of simplified so called conspiracy theories. The simplifications for the masses will always look more ridiculous and basic.

I like the analysis saying that america has collapsed in the last years from a "Two-Story State" to a "One-Story State", so everybody that is left out of that story is now a traitor to the country.

https://americanmind.org/salvo/the-clear-pill-part-1-of-5-th...

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