41–50 of 67 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe you are confusing "effective" with "ugly" There is only one thing that could improve HN interface, and that is an NNTP mirror feed, so you could use any NNTP client you like.
I mean, the upvote buttons could be bigger on mobile.
Isn't this model a bit outdated with prevalence of likes and retweets? Users on modern social platforms optimize output to maximize favorable responses, thereby gratification. There are not really ceilings, barrier to entry, or way around the system, so it's resistant to spams and manipulations. Classical BBS systems did have this problem. It was said that a community beegins with interesting people posting interesti…
This is nonsense; there are people gaming the system constantly who have to be actively fought. There are whole industries of gaming the feedback. And the feedback process itself distorts the content: it gave us "clickbait" and "youtube face".
I've been watching evaporative cooling of Twitter happen since the takeover and my move to Bluesky, where new users appear in waves every time some new stupid feature is inflicted on the remaining Twitter users.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe you are confusing "effective" with "ugly" There is only one thing that could improve HN interface, and that is an NNTP mirror feed, so you could use any NNTP client you like.
I mean, the upvote buttons could be bigger on mobile.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I feel like we must be using different internets. I can't shake off the thought that this statement might be more truthful than it deserves to be. Some of social media accounts are closer to what you have described, some are more like what I have. The Dead Internet Syndrome must be not spreading uniformly, but there must be significant disparity across fields and bubbles, deepening divides between common folks with…
Reddit you have control over your timeline. The comments can be good to. Just stick to your interests. Twitter turned into garbage when Elon decided to make it pay-to-play. Giving Blue Checks ranking boosts and extra power when they block others ruined every reply section. On any even vaguely political tweet you now have to scroll forever through a bunch of illustrated profile pics hurling insults before you can get…
Twitter is o-kay. They seem to have largely gave up investments on African-Indian spammer program and it's on its way out. Gratification mechanisms outside of the feedback loop such as paid boosts and reward cash are clearly detrimental to creator performance, so they were destined to be filtered out. Pushing blue check contents is like pushing AI clips in style of Tarkovsky to TikTok junkies, it never works.
I think Twitter users by this point as a collective consciousness must have learned that weaponizing Bluesky/Mastodon transition to trivialize corporate influence is a viable short term strategy, considering how slow and tame changes on the platform has lately been. Twitter had always had such mutually toxic and manipulative relationship between the company and its users.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, the upvote buttons could be bigger on mobile.
HN being almost unusable on mobile is probably another kind of gatekeeping feature that has a slight positive effect on quality.
I think I've only accidentally flagged about posts by mistake...
Hi, I'm the author of the original piece which was originally penned to warn Quora that their social software design seemed purposely designed to drive evaporative cooling. With the benefit of 15 years of hindsight, Quora has thoroughly evaporatively cooled to an extent beyond even my imagining.
2) shalmanese, how would you relate this back to platforms like Reddit that are driven both by community members as well as volunteer janitors?
I have voiced this feature request many times. Why don't social networks provide recommendation profile transfer. Sort of like stepping into someone else's shoes. E.g. I would like to view how twitter looks like to Simon Willison. This would also make it easier for people to break through filter bubbles.
Obviously you don't see private journals someone is reading, still a good way to discover new things.
[username].dreamwidth.org/read
Isn't this model a bit outdated with prevalence of likes and retweets? Users on modern social platforms optimize output to maximize favorable responses, thereby gratification. There are not really ceilings, barrier to entry, or way around the system, so it's resistant to spams and manipulations. Classical BBS systems did have this problem. It was said that a community beegins with interesting people posting interesti…
> Users on modern social platforms optimize output to maximize favorable responses, thereby gratification. There are not really ceilings, barrier to entry, or way around the system, so it's resistant to spams and manipulations. This is nonsense; there are people gaming the system constantly who have to be actively fought. There are whole industries of gaming the feedback. And the feedback process itself distorts the…
Twitter has gone past that point years ago, possibly more than a decade ago. It's a warzone of drug resistant attention gamers and wannabes with cash to burn for as long as I remember. Maybe it wasn't as much as it is now during 2007-2008.
IMO, clickbaits and even wooow faces can be considered improvements so long that judgement criteria with presenters and audiences are aligned. Ragebaits are bad, open mouth brainrot thumbnails are disgusting, but a clear and content representative thumbnails would be good - the differences are not in levels of amplification relative to unmodified baseline, but in directions(is the "Inception braaam" bad? I love it and I think it's same thing as clickbaits.)
Evaporative effect as laid out in the article is a situation where "players" of social media as a videogame exhausts motives to play it. The game must continuously supply dopamine release to creators, whether by rewarding ever sillier thumbnails stronger or more insightful comments better, to retain useful players for content supply to continue. Again IMO, Twitter had achieved a near steady state cycle of gratification and content drop by architectural design, careful userbase formation, and useful set-in-stone precedents, relatively resistant to sabotaging and/or manipulation.
Is that entire thing a major net negative to this planet? Maybe. One could just say it and few would differ. It's supercharging scholarly experts across various fields and enabling invasive cultural pressures, so it seems neutral to positive to me.