Things that I think will be important in the next decade • Hacker News Board

Re: Things that I think will be important in the next decade

#351

Post by dredmorbius » Sat, Jan 11, 2020, 12:52 AM UTC

dang wrote: post #213

vl wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s degenerating in multiple aspects: Fewer constructive discussions due to aggressive downvoting based not on the quality of argument, but on the opinion expressed. More junk on the front page, this is general trend in attention economy, so somewhat unavoidable. One of the telling things is structure of the titles. Few years ago titles where more informative, now more clickbaity on average.

The problem is that these perceptions are very much in the eye of the beholder. As the saying goes, things have always been getting worse. If anyone can come up with an objective measure for any of this, I'd be interested. As far as I can tell, though, these perceptions are strongly affected by the fact that the things that we dislike make a much stronger impression than the rest of what we see. From my perspective,…

Conversational quality metrics are difficult to come by. Most tend to be expensive to calculate, especially in the absence of clearly parseable engagement information (e.g., likes, re-shares, comments). I've played with this concept in a few cases, most recently when trying to make assessments of activity / genuine community in Google+ Communities, prior to their shutdown.

Some of the more interesting research I'm aware of was based on Usenet, looking at thread dynamics, out of Microsoft Research, in the early/mid aughts. I think it was Marc A. Smith, see for example:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/picturi...

https://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240051972/MIcrosoft-Res...

(There were more detailed discussions I've seen in the past, I don't have references handy.)

In particularly, post/response dynamics seemed to fit a number of distinct categories:

- Single post, many responses, no follow-up: question with a single obvious answer provided by many.

- Single post, extended discussion, "conversation-killing" response: hard question, with unclear answer, eventually obviously provided.

- Long descending "right-shifted" thread between two parties: personality conflict / flame thread.

- Post, much response, multiple parties: successful trolling.

I've played a bit with the notion of indicators of significant vs. insignificant discussion, based on sentinal keywords: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/trackin...

I know HN has an API and have considered looking at it though as yet haven't explored this.

Any ideas as to what would indicate desirable or undesirable trends, threads, and/or posts?

Re: Things that I think will be important in the next decade

#352

Post by dredmorbius » Sat, Jan 11, 2020, 1:05 AM UTC

vl wrote: post #224

dang wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that these perceptions are very much in the eye of the beholder. As the saying goes, things have always been getting worse. If anyone can come up with an objective measure for any of this, I'd be interested. As far as I can tell, though, these perceptions are strongly affected by the fact that the things that we dislike make a much stronger impression than the rest of what we see. From my perspective,…

All perceptions are in the eye of the beholder. Anyway, my unobjective measure is number of interesting articles and discussions I want to read after scanning the front page. It’s declining over the years. It’s not really surprising since there are two contributing trends: Online communities generally degrade as they increase in size. Attention economy brings “heat death” of internet: amount of produced content is hi…

Perceptions need not be strictly subjective.

There's the notion of where good conversations are found, or what sources are referenced by external sources, or what links where will result in more traffic (or conversions) to linked sites / services.

There's metrics such as MAU and user time-on-site.

As dang noted in another recent comment, one of HN's scarcest commodities is its front-page slots. As with attention and time/day, that's an absolutely rivalrous good, and one which decreases comparatively as the site increases in size and volume -- more users means more competition for the 30 front-page slots per user.

And if more stories rotate through those slots, there will be either less time per story, or a restricted exposure (e.g., stories presented to only a subset of readers), or both. (I'm not sure what HN's specific mechanics are here, though I believe it's a mix of both.)

All media tend to fall in quality with size. See Dwight MacDonald's 1953 classic "A Theory of Mass Culture" (https://is.muni.cz/el/1421/jaro2008/ESB032/um/5136660/MacDon...).

(Also apparently "Masscult and Midcult", which I've only just run across and have not yet read: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~DRBR/macdonald.pdf)

Re: Things that I think will be important in the next decade

#353

Post by Zhenya » Sat, Jan 11, 2020, 3:42 AM UTC

jedberg wrote: post #139

root_axis wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. It is worth the sacrifice. Tell your friends to send you an SMS invite to birthdays.

Hah. Like that would ever happen. I have a friend who refuses to use Facebook. About twice a year I remember to send her updates. Then when I see her I have to go over all the updates everyone else already saw on Facebook. I literally pull out my phone and show her my feed. It’s really frustrating and inefficient. I only do it because she’s a really good friend.

Oh no. You have to talk to your friends and give them personal accounts of your experiences! What a travesty.

/S

Re: Things that I think will be important in the next decade

#354

Post by Thorrez » Sat, Jan 11, 2020, 4:32 AM UTC

eeZah7Ux wrote: post #297

Thorrez wrote: post #144

The section titles are pretty funny. It's almost as if they were chosen to specifically disappoint cypherpunks. > A New Private Social Platform Cypherpunk: Signal! Tor! Riot! Mark: Small groups of people who know each other. > Decentralizing Opportunity Cypherpunk: Bitcoin! Peertube! IPFS! Mastadon! Namecoin! Scuttlebutt! Mark: Products for small businesses. > The Next Computing Platform Cypherpunk: Ethereum! Urbit!…

> cypherpunks That's not what you think it means. The crowds behind the names you dropped are very different and have very little overlap.

I agree somewhat. I was having a hard time thinking of a good term, but cypherpunk was the best I could come up with (better than crypto-anarchist, crypto-utopian, hacker, geek, nerd, cryptographer, crypto-enthusiast). I did intentionally include variety even though I know it weakens the overlap. There were a bunch of things I could have included instead that would have been more similar, but I thought that was a bit boring.

The Wikipedia page for cypherpunk mentions Tor, Bitcoin, and Signal. So some of them are definitely cypherpunk. The 2 things I think are the least similar are RISC-V and homomorphic encryption. Both of those are mentioned in at least a couple threads on cpunks.org . In fact everything listed is mentioned on cpunks.org except Riot, Peertube, Dfinity, and Blockstack (although a different thing called Blockstack is mentioned). Riot is mentioned in /r/cypherpunk . There are articles linking Blockstack[1] and Dfinity[2] to cypherpunks.

I guess the only one that really stands out then is Peertube. It has a slight link due to a cypherpunk-themed instance[3] and the @cypherpunk@mastodon.social account boosting toots about Peertube.

There is one place where all those things are discussed: Hacker News. So I could have said "Hacker News user", but HN users have a reputation of being cynical, whereas I wanted a more optimistic term, and thought cypherpunk fit that.

[1] https://www.coindesk.com/cypherpunk-dream-blockstream-develo...

[2] https://fortune.com/2018/10/23/dfinity-blockchain-assassinat...

[3] https://watching.cypherpunk.observer

Re: Things that I think will be important in the next decade

#355

Post by anoncake » Sat, Jan 11, 2020, 11:48 AM UTC

maxerickson wrote: post #76

Cookingboy wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly don't think privacy legislation would make much headway, simply for the reason that vast majority of people outside of the HackerNews crowd don't care about it. When people say they care about privacy, most of the time they mean they care about anonymity, as in privacy from people who knows them personally. They don't want their internet search history to be known by friends or family or coworkers, but the…

GDPR and CCPA are law. People regularly complain about the GDPR here (US sites comply by region blocking GDPR covered users).

> (US sites comply by region blocking GDPR covered users).

The only thing they comply with is their own paranoia. The GDPR doesn't even apply to US companies if they don't specifically target EU users.

I wouldn't be surprised if many sites were only violating the GDPR because they show those "cookie notices" which completely miss the point and don't help with compliance but could be considered catering to EU users.

Re: Things that I think will be important in the next decade

#356

Post by Ensorceled » Sat, Jan 11, 2020, 6:17 PM UTC

mistermann wrote: post #348

Ensorceled wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You missed my point, I deliberately swapped so you could see how that word doesn't work. Clearly we are talking by each other on this.

I agree, we're clearly not understanding each other perfectly, I think this phenomenon is all too common and it's worth some mild effort to investigate where things have gone wrong. The original comment: > Citations to your references would be appreciated . It's the first step to overcoming the state of internet disinformation , as well as helping society overcome the fear of missing out just because someone doesn't…

Yes, you are assuming I have a much more extreme view than I actually have. When I used the word required that didn’t mean I thought the original poster was ordering/demanding there be citations. When I tried to clarify that, you again misinterpreted my intent. And again now. At three misinterpretations it’s time to let it go. L

Re: Things that I think will be important in the next decade

#357

Post by mistermann » Sat, Jan 11, 2020, 6:35 PM UTC

Ensorceled wrote: post #356

mistermann wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, we're clearly not understanding each other perfectly, I think this phenomenon is all too common and it's worth some mild effort to investigate where things have gone wrong. The original comment: > Citations to your references would be appreciated . It's the first step to overcoming the state of internet disinformation , as well as helping society overcome the fear of missing out just because someone doesn't…

Yes, you are assuming I have a much more extreme view than I actually have. When I used the word required that didn’t mean I thought the original poster was ordering/demanding there be citations. When I tried to clarify that, you again misinterpreted my intent. And again now. At three misinterpretations it’s time to let it go. L

> you again misinterpreted my intent. And again now

Words have distinct (non-interchangeable) and broadly accepted meanings, independent of either intent or personal preferences for what the meaning should be. I have merely interpreted your words according to the broadly accepted meanings, have I not?

Re: Things that I think will be important in the next decade

#358

Post by nickbauman » Sat, Jan 11, 2020, 11:00 PM UTC

bla3 wrote: post #279

nickbauman wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Full of himself"? Way too mild an indictment. In the last 24 hours Facebook bought a story in a publication, pretended it wasn’t sponsored, their COO posted it, then when they got caught, they denied knowing anything about it. And what was that ad/story about? Their commitment to stopping disinformation. All the while we've learned that they have utterly sold the company to international electioneers.

I don't disagree with your overall point, but this specific episode likely was just the usual big-company problem: https://twitter.com/felixsalmon/status/1215092889090392064

Too many concurrent problems of this sort for it to be just a big-co problem.

Re: Things that I think will be important in the next decade

#359

Post by eclipxe » Sat, Jan 11, 2020, 11:36 PM UTC

feanaro wrote: post #227

eclipxe wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I can't wait for that future. It looks amazing. Not being sarcastic either, I want this future.

I'm confused... Have you watched the video?

Yes, I have watched the video, all the way to the reset in the end.

Re: Things that I think will be important in the next decade

#360

Post by heavenlyblue » Sat, Jan 11, 2020, 11:43 PM UTC

CaptArmchair wrote: post #225

onion2k wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the case of Zuckerberg specifically he's actually more likely to be right on this by virtue of being in a position to influence it. If Zuck persuades the board of Facebook that AR is the future then thousands of FB engineers could be tasked with building AR apps and libraries, and Facebook could invest billions in AR acquisitions. Those sorts of actions steer the future. When a billionaire claims to predict the fu…

Zuck is "not just making a prediction", he's not making any relevant statement about the future at all. All he does is telling what he plans to invest in. But given his privileged position, that's almost as irrelevant as what he is going to have for dinner tonight, if his plans for the next decade do not address the urgent and burning issues that keep the rest of humanity awake at night in earnest. I'm sure AR "is th…

Let’s all hope that in 200 years all institutions are 100% controlled by millenials.

That would also solve the problem of death for humanity.