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When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines

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Re: When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines

#171

Post by scarface_74 »

darknavi wrote: post #99
PaulHoule wrote: post #85

An airline reservation system has to be perfect (no slack in today's skies), a hotel reservation can be 98% perfect so long as there is some slack and you don't mind putting somebody up in a better room than they paid for from time to time. A social media system doesn't need to be perfect at all. It was clear to me from the beginning that Bluesky's feeds aren't very fast, not like they are crazy slow, but if it saves…

It's funny because from my experience airline systems are very imperfect (timing wise). I (unwisely) tried to purchase an Icelandair ticket via the Chase travel portal. I would get a reservation number, go buy seats on Icelandair's website, and a few days later the entire reservation would vanish into the ether. Rinse and repeat 3x. I can't remember the exact verbiage, but basically tickets can be "reserved" and "boo…

(Replying to both you and the parent poster)

Airlines are far from perfect. They overbook flights and sometimes have to ask people leave and pay them for the inconvenience. My wife and I once got $1000 a piece and a hotel and food voucher to volunteer to take a flight the next day on a layover in Atlanta.

As far as your particular situation, the number one rule of using a third party portal to book flights or hotels is - don’t.

I understand that Iceland Air is not a transfer partner of Chase. But even in that case, I would just wait to use my points until I could use a transfer partner.

On the earning side if paying cash, the difference between 2x/3x points when booking directly and 5x when going through the portal just isn’t worth the risk.

Re: When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines

#172

Post by VWWHFSfQ »

spoaceman7777 wrote: post #170

Hmm. Twitter/X appears to do this at quite a low number, as the "Following" tab is incredibly lossy (some users are permanently missing) at only 1,200 followed people. It's insanely frustrating. Hopefully you're adjusting the lossy-ness weighting and cut-off by whether a user is active at any particular time? Because, otherwise, applying this rule, if the cap is set too low, is a very bad UX in my experience x_x

> It's _insanely_ frustrating.

> at only 1,200 followed people.

I follow like, 50 people on bluesky. Who is following 1,200 people? What kind of value do you even get out of your feed?

Re: When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines

#173

Post by JustExAWS »

tdb7893 wrote: post #58
gkoberger wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely agree with this... but without profit, people can't get paid, and they'll stop building. I do hate this incredibly need for growth, of course, but financial growth is necessary to pay people and give them raises and allow them to have upward mobility at the company. I hope Bluesky is able to find a model that works for them AND for consumers. (I do know it's an open protocol, so it'll live on without Blu…

It's semantics but I like to separate money from profits. You need money to pay people and to survive but you don't need to be raking in endlessly growing piles of it. This is something that was really demoralizing about working for a big company, they could be making like 50000000000 a year in just profits but still be ruthless in getting more. Like I just want to make a product I'm proud of and I'm happy living a s…

Once you take on investors, that’s not an option. VCs expect rapid growth and an exit - statistically through acquisition, but occasionally an IPO.

Once you go public, then you have investor pressure and can be subject to activist investors unless the founder has controlling interests like in the case of Meta and Google.

Re: When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines

#174

Post by dullcrisp »

listenallyall wrote: post #165
danielheath wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... or perhaps they prioritize ensuring their consultants feel like they're being looked after - replacing them when they find another job is very expensive.

What part of my comment suggests consultants aren't "looked after?" The idea that the consultants' personal time is so low on the scale of priorities that the company prefers to pay 3x or 4x for plane tickets to ensure they are available to spend extra time with clients, rather than their families, suggests that the company is specifically NOT looking after the consultants' well-being.

Yeah, replace consultants with clients in that comment and you’ll have the right of it.

Re: When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines

#175

Post by VWWHFSfQ »

pornel wrote: post #146

I wonder why timelines aren't implemented as a hybrid gather-scatter choosing strategy depending on account popularity (a combination of fan-out to followers and a lazy fetch of popular followed accounts when follower's timeline is served). When you have a celebrity account, instead of fanning out every message to millions of followers' timelines, it would be cheaper to do nothing when the celebrity posts, and later…

At some point they'll end up just doing the Bieber rack [1]. It's when a shard becomes so hot that it just has to be its own thing entirely.

[1] - https://www.themarysue.com/twitter-justin-bieber-servers/

@bluesky devs, don't feel ashamed for doing this. It's exactly how to scale these kinds of extreme cases.

Re: When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines

#176

Post by JustExAWS »

jarjoura wrote: post #84
bbor wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I totally get/relate to your perspective, but to be the annoying leftie in your ear: A) Sustainable revenue is a requirement for any company, yes, but the unlimited (above-inflation) growth demanded by most large corporations is absolutely not. Lots and lots of companies operate for a long time without expecting massive growth, raises n' all. MBAs pejoratively call such companies "lifestyle businesses"--as in "just p…

All of the big tech companies today are the result of 100s of smaller, well intentioned tech companies that got acquired into these behemoths. I always look at how WhatsApp played out as the company. They were the good guys, and didn't want to get acquired. Zuckerberg, almost bankrupt FB at the time giving into all of the ridiculous demands WhatsApp made. No one at WhatsApp thought it was going to happen, until it di…

WhatsApp was acquired for $20 billion in cash and stock. Facebook was worth $170 billion at the time. The stock part of the acquisition wouldn’t have any real financial impact on Facebook.

Re: When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines

#177

Post by detuur »

crabbone wrote: post #141

Anecdotally, I ran into a similar solution "by chance". Long ago, I worked for a dating site. Our CTO at the time was a "guest of honor" who was brought in by a family friend who was working in the marketing at the time. The CTO was a university professor who took on a job as a courtesy (he didn't need the money nor fame, he had enough of both, and actually liked teaching). But he instituted a lot of experimental pra…

The answer to that reply is you don't need to explain it to your users. People are used to fuzzy/best-effort sort of matching, especially when it's specifically presented as a "matching algorithm" instead of a "filter".

Re: When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines

#178

Post by peoplepostphew »

VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #172
spoaceman7777 wrote: post #170

Hmm. Twitter/X appears to do this at quite a low number, as the "Following" tab is incredibly lossy (some users are permanently missing) at only 1,200 followed people. It's insanely frustrating. Hopefully you're adjusting the lossy-ness weighting and cut-off by whether a user is active at any particular time? Because, otherwise, applying this rule, if the cap is set too low, is a very bad UX in my experience x_x

> It's _insanely_ frustrating. > at only 1,200 followed people. I follow like, 50 people on bluesky. Who is following 1,200 people? What kind of value do you even get out of your feed?

1200 people is really nothing, specially if you have a job tangentially related to social media (for example journalists). It's really simple, you are not the same type of user. You have 50 "acquaintances", they have 1200 "sources".

The article is talking about people who have following/follower counts in the millions. Those are dozens of writes per second in one feed and a fannout of potentially millions. Someone with 1200 followers, if everyone actually posts once a day (most people do not) gets... a rate of 0.138 writes per second.

They should be background noise, irrelevant to the discussion. That level of work is within reasonable expectation. What they're pointing out is that Twitter is aggressively anti-perfectionist for no good technical reason - so there must be a business reason for it.

Re: When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines

#179

Post by imrehg »

jadbox wrote: post #167

So, let's say I follow 4k people in the example and have a 50% drop rate. It seems a bit weird that if all (4k - 1) accounts I follow end up posting nothing in a day, that I STILL have a 50% chance that I won't see the 1 account that posts in a day. It seems to me that the algorithm should consider my feed's age (or the post freshness of my followers). Am I overthinking?

This feels like an edge case.

The "reasonable limit" is likely set based on experimentation, and thus on how much people post on average and the load it generates (so the real number is unlikely to be exactly "2000", IMHO).

If you follow a lot of people, how likely it is that their posting pattern is so different from the average? The more people you follow, the less likely that is.

So while you can end up in such situation in theory, it would need to be a very unusual (and rare) case.

Re: When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines

#180

Post by VWWHFSfQ »

peoplepostphew wrote: post #178
VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's _insanely_ frustrating. > at only 1,200 followed people. I follow like, 50 people on bluesky. Who is following 1,200 people? What kind of value do you even get out of your feed?

1200 people is really nothing, specially if you have a job tangentially related to social media (for example journalists). It's really simple, you are not the same type of user. You have 50 "acquaintances", they have 1200 "sources". The article is talking about people who have following/follower counts in the millions. Those are dozens of writes per second in one feed and a fannout of potentially millions. Someone wi…

Why are you following 1,200 people? What is the point of your home feed? What are you trying to see?
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