Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Social Graph is Neither

blog.pinboard.in

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 61 posts

Re: The Social Graph is Neither

#51

Post by pak »

true_religion wrote: post #39
pak wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're missing his bigger insight, that is, building a social graph is a fundamentally asocial act. And that extends to creating taxonomies, even if they are localized to my concept of socializing. Nobody goes to a party to create a taxonomy. Being social is all about disorganization, spontaneity, creativity, breaking out of all the stupid taxonomies that we impose on other people and have imposed on us. Tryi…

> Being social is all about disorganization, spontaneity, creativity, breaking out of all the stupid taxonomies that we impose on other people and have imposed on us. That is a very euro-centric, post-modernist way of thinking. What are caste system if not social? What are far-flung familial relations if not social? A definition of being "social" which only applies to societies where friendship is paramount, and frie…

> That is a very euro-centric, post-modernist way of thinking.

You're right, even the way I defined "social" is too limited. But that irony only helps my point. You cannot define social, but this is precisely what the "social graph" is attempting to do. As soon as you create a definition, people react to it and oftentimes rebel against it. And then you are right back to the drawing board.

Re: The Social Graph is Neither

#52

Post by ableal »

feral wrote: post #29

Lots of good, interesting ideas in that post. A few comments: In general, what data you capture, always depends on what you want to do with the data. Any data model is an abstraction, which discards a lot of information. This simplification is what makes the data model useful. Of course, storing social relations as an undirected, graph with a single type of edge, as is done in Facebook, is a gross simplification of r…

I hope Maciej is not going soft on the trademark "brevity is for the weak" style, which I've been appreciating since idlewords.com days.

I believe he spared the spelling out of the LOAF acronym, and scanning the very interesting http://loaf.cantbedone.org/about.htm did not clear that up. "List of a friend"?

Re: The Social Graph is Neither

#54

Post by __alexs »

pak wrote: post #51
true_religion wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Being social is all about disorganization, spontaneity, creativity, breaking out of all the stupid taxonomies that we impose on other people and have imposed on us. That is a very euro-centric, post-modernist way of thinking. What are caste system if not social? What are far-flung familial relations if not social? A definition of being "social" which only applies to societies where friendship is paramount, and frie…

> That is a very euro-centric, post-modernist way of thinking. You're right, even the way I defined "social" is too limited. But that irony only helps my point. You cannot define social, but this is precisely what the "social graph" is attempting to do. As soon as you create a definition, people react to it and oftentimes rebel against it. And then you are right back to the drawing board.

I agree with you but that doesn't make the creation of social graphs a waste of time right? It just means the market has a lot of niches for different types of graph that each provide limited and specific value.

It's not about creating perfect Platonic models. It's about making cool things that people find useful. If you are trying to design a system that scaled to every single possible interaction from scratch then you've already failed, you can't compete with reality at that one.

Re: The Social Graph is Neither

#55

Post by anigbrowl »

PaulHoule wrote: post #2

rdf technology is coming on strong in late 2011; the tools are getting better fast -- we will be able to represent the social graph in more detail, and correlate it with the 'semantic graph' that shared human experience is coded in. yes, RDF has taken a while to mature, but look at the time lag between Codd's paper and the commercial release of Oracle. 1000 flowers have been blooming for years and we know a lot about…

rdf technology is coming on strong in late 2011; the tools are getting better fast

Can you expand on this? I'm very interested in RDF but have been frustrated by how little interest in Semantic Web tech there seems to be in the US. I'm interested in highly specified networks rather than slippery ones from the consumer marketplace, and in visualization/manipulation tools rather than the underlying DB technology. If you have any suggestions I'd be grateful, I feel like I've been plowing a lonely row with this stuff.

Re: The Social Graph is Neither

#57

Post by wiscoDude »

araneae wrote: post #48

Ugh, I hate titles like these. It's not a graph? Of COURSE it's a graph. It's just a very complex one. Just because you could make many such graphs representing the same relationships doesn't mean it's not a graph. And it's not social because you're missing someone's crush? Uh, no. It's still social, just incomplete. A better title for this would have been "The Social Graph is incomplete and complex."

Yes, it's like he wanted to complain about Facebook, came up with a really awesome title, and then had to backfill content.

Which utterly failed, wait, didn't even attempt to support the title of his post.

I wrote a rebuttal titled The Social Graph is Both http://lesspostmoreget.com/2011/11/09/it-is-a-graph-and-it-i...

Re: The Social Graph is Neither

#58

Post by wiscoDude »

nroman wrote: post #14

One of the main points in this article is that any social graph found in a service such as Facebook, Twitter, or G+ can't possible model all of the nuance of real life relationships. That's obvious. However, the author takes it a step further. Suggesting that because of this these services have no value. That's pretty big logical leap. An imperfect approximation of the social graph still has a lot of value.

Exactly, I mean, just ask the citizens of Egypt.

"This revolution started on Facebook." - Wael Ghonim

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/11/egypt-facebook-revo...

Re: The Social Graph is Neither

#59

Post by billswift »

wiscoDude wrote: post #56

I put my thoughts on this article in a blog post. Too long for a comment. "The Social Graph is Both" http://lesspostmoreget.com/2011/11/09/it-is-a-graph-and-it-i...

Good essay, thanks.

>They are useful graphs with deficiencies.

This describes all graphs representing real-world, as opposed to purely mathematical, objects and relationships.

Re: The Social Graph is Neither

#60

Post by mtraven »

3pt14159 wrote: post #8
redemade wrote: post #4

> Asking computer nerds to design social software is a little bit like hiring a Mormon bartender. exactly.

This is bullshit. "Computer nerds" have plenty of friends. I know factory workers that have very high depression levels due to not having enough social contact or friendship in their lives. Sure, when I was 9 I was beat the fuck up over and over but when you are friendly, smart and successful people like you. They want to be your friend. Let's play devils advocate for a second. Take the most popular person in high sc…

It's not a question of whether they have friends or not, it's whether they are nerdy enough to imagine that the idea of friendship can be captured by a simpleminded data structure. (And yeah, not all nerds would actually believe this).

It's the same thing that drives (some) nerds towards libertarianism, a fascination with formal models and rules over the messy complexity of reality, especially social reality.

Post reply on HN