The Facebook bubble just popped • Hacker News Board

Re: The Facebook bubble just popped

#221

Post by sid-kap » Fri, Nov 11, 2016, 3:19 AM UTC

misterbowfinger wrote: post #36

We're all definitely in an echo chamber. Hacker News is an echo chamber. So is Reddit, FB, Twitter, etc. This is what happens when, as an industry, we move towards "personalization". All of our "personalized" feeds allow businesses to increase their ad revenue, but it siphons us away from the rest of the world. 30 years ago, we were beholden to the large media outlets, which is also bad, but I believe we've overcorre…

Is social media really more of an echo chamber than traditional newspapers/TV stations?

* Most of the liberal stuff in my FB/Twitter feeds are from NYT or Washington Post

* Back in the day, consumers of traditional media probably zoned out of TV bits/skimmed over newspaper articles that they didn't agree with

The whole "echo chamber" thing seems like a meme to me. "In the olden days, we used to go to ye olde coffee store and have intellectual conversations with randos with different political beliefs."

Re: The Facebook bubble just popped

#222

Post by Nadya » Fri, Nov 11, 2016, 4:04 AM UTC

zzalpha wrote: post #219

Nadya wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All right, here we go. Each reference is to an individual in case they have multiples. [0] Bio. https://twitter.com/plankysmith [1] https://twitter.com/crazypastor/status/778740809013137408 , https://twitter.com/crazypastor/status/654843889468231680 [2] https://twitter.com/mholzschlag/status/776017986209492992 [3] #ProudSJW (SJW is not an insult) https://twitter.com/SofaMan/status/791580903021563904 , https://twitter…

Riiiight. So because the n-word and the f-word have been reclaimed by their communities, I shouldn't assume that folks not in those communities aren't still using the term in a derogatory fashion? Please. Go back and read the original post. SJW was not being used with a positive connotation in context, and to suggest otherwise is just being willfully stubborn simply to make a point.

Are you really comparing "nigger" to "SJW"? One started off as derogatory and still is except within it's own community. The other started off as positive and became derogatory only within a few, niche communities. A more apples to apples comparison would be "Tea Partier". It became a political slur to call someone a "Tea Partier". Do you not think people use "Tea Partier" without the negative connotation when referring to someone in the Tea Party?

A Google search for `site:news.ycombinator.com sickbeard + SJW` only results in this comment thread. It was their first usage of the word on this site. Which means they have no historical basis to judge how they used the word. They even gave you the description: "To me it it means you believe in something and you're going to stand up for it."

I did not read it with a negative connotation, otherwise I would not have responded to you.

Re: The Facebook bubble just popped

#223

Post by acobster » Fri, Nov 11, 2016, 7:52 AM UTC

herbst wrote: post #82

acobster wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an American and former FB user I must admit that before I gave it up entirely, it was my primary channel for finding news. This is still true of many of my friends and, I suspect, no small number of Americans. But yeah.

this is really strange to me honestly. From what i can tell (i avoid facebook as much as possbile) "News" on my feed are mostly just uplifting news style. Everything relevant and political has no place on facebook within my environment. And i dont consider myself sheltered.

Typically how it went for me was I would see an emotionally charged headline in my feed from a website or blog with a palpable agenda, and then I would seek out a couple other, more fact-based articles covering the same story. But what I found was that initial "encounter" still set the tone for me, and also served as the prime metric of my engagement with Facebook. So its algorithms learned pretty quickly that I "liked" stories like that, and that drew more people of like mind, but whom I didn't really talk to face-to-face, into my circle.

Not sure how characteristic that is for folks, but that's how I found myself consuming news eventually, and a big part of why I quit it.

Oh, it was strange all right.

Re: The Facebook bubble just popped

#224

Post by 75j » Fri, Nov 11, 2016, 5:29 PM UTC

Nadya wrote: post #213

75j wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The exact opposite of not being politically engaged and having the few times you've seen the term be in a positive usage... Not sure what you're trying to say here. I honestly don't care that much about any of this. I know that there are people like you who hate "SJWs", but really what a weird thing to get riled up over. My political engagement has been entirely contrary to the war-profiteering, plundering, pro-cor…

>Not sure what you're trying to say here. My apologies. People who are not politically active (eg: casual Facebook browsers) will never, ever come across the term "SJW". They may have seen it a few times. If they're college-aged maybe they have a friend in college who describes themselves as a "SJW" in a positive light. 1-2 interactions with SJW's using "SJW" as a positive term is enough for them to see the term in a…

> History has a historically thin line between "these people are bad" and "these people are bad and we should round them up and kill them". When people actively use the rhetoric of the latter, I listen and grow concerned...

This makes sense. Sorry for being overly confrontational in my last post. I do agree that the language and tactics used by the far-left (which I'm very much a part of) can be silly or even slimy at times. I certainly took issue with the language that liberals used to describe conservatives in this most recent election.

Overall though, knowing quite a few people from college who are stereotypical SJWs, they are mostly harmless. A lot of them really do have a rough past, and aren't the privileged "special snowflakes" that the alt-right makes them out to be. Many people like the idea of a trigger warning, for example, because they really did experience something deeply traumatic, but you'll never discover that about them by hurling insults. And also many of these people tend to be socially awkward, and when I see people lashing out online about "tumblrinas" or whatever, it just feels like a continuation of the bullying that these people probably faced in childhood.

Re: The Facebook bubble just popped

#225

Post by xapata » Sat, Nov 12, 2016, 8:33 AM UTC

jtsnow wrote: post #208

xapata wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does one accurately account for uncertainty? If you're talking about Taleb's "black swan" style uncertainty, that's specifically the kind that cannot be taken into account. If you're talking about events being correlated instead of independent, that's what set 538 apart from other poll-aggregators: Nate gave Trump a relatively high chance of winning, because a polling error in one state would likely indicate the…

As I understand it, FiveThirtyEight's models reflect current and past uncertainty, but do not properly take into account future uncertainty. This greatly undermine's their models for use as a prediction, a probability, or a forecast. At one point, FiveThirtyEight was forecasting/predicting that Clinton had a 66% chance of winning the election. If there were infinite parallel universes that veered off from that moment…

Eh? Taleb was criticizing the variability of 538's estimates and said they should not have been making such drastic changes to their estimates. Taleb waffles between Bayesian and Frequentist and in this case he's being Bayesian.

He didn't criticize them for underestimating uncertainty, but for being too uncertain.