Twitter Acquires Magic Pony • Hacker News Board

Re: Twitter Acquires Magic Pony

#41

Post by true_religion » Mon, Jun 20, 2016, 5:05 PM UTC

sdegutis wrote: post #32

grok2 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I was reading your comment, I was thinking - "Why not? Why shouldn't advertisers figure out how to advertise in ways that comes somewhat close to what you are suggesting, but make you want to buy before you know you want something?" ;-)... Sometimes I think we are in a difficult dichotomy -- we like Twitter and we consume it voraciously and love that it is free, but we don't want them to use advertising as a sourc…

For sure, we're a greedy, selfish, and short-sighted species. But that doesn't make the advertisers right for doing what people are implicitly asking them to.

People say 'the advertisers', but don't most people in the world work for a company that uses ads?

It seems that there's a mentality of compartmentalization, where people believe there to be 'evil ad companies' that somehow do nothing but make ads and don't actually sell products, nor employ people in the creative industry.

Re: Twitter Acquires Magic Pony

#42

Post by debaserab2 » Mon, Jun 20, 2016, 5:09 PM UTC

GrumpyYoungMan wrote: post #37

fizx wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads." The best minds of the previous generation were thinking about how to kill Russians. I'd say it's an upgrade.

>The best minds of the previous generation were thinking about how to kill Russians. I'd say it's an upgrade. At least the results of the previous generations research went (largely) unused, whereas the results of ad clicking research is targeted against and used on people on a daily basis, to their considerable detriment. An upgrade? If so, it seems kind of dubious at best.

Only on HN would someone compare starting a nuclear war to click advertising.

Re: Twitter Acquires Magic Pony

#43

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jun 20, 2016, 5:17 PM UTC

Zephyr314 wrote: post #15

niftich wrote: post #7

Machine learning on your images and videos to "enhance our strength in live and video and opens up a whole lot of exciting creative possibilities for Twitter"! As ironically stated here [1], "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads." Though Twitter has a good record of open-sourcing internal infrastructure projects, I think it's it's safe not to expect any substantive amount of…

> "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads." There is a strong argument that as long as they continue to publish and produce open source (which they have been doing) then you could think of ads as just a source of funding and tons of data to continue to push the state of the art. It can also be a stepping stone to other ventures [1]. [1]: http://www.wsj.com/articles/where-would…

[deleted]

Re: Twitter Acquires Magic Pony

#44

Post by tsunamifury » Mon, Jun 20, 2016, 5:19 PM UTC

tlrobinson wrote: post #3

I know nothing about Magic Pony, but I'm starting to wonder how much of this craze is a form of "keeping up with the Joneses", except with tech giants and ML/AI startups instead of suburban families and their cars, etc.

Its not, its a fundamental shift in how you power your applications. Not acquiring and building this talent at a major firm would be the equivalent of sticking to steam power in the face of oil.

Re: Twitter Acquires Magic Pony

#45

Post by swang » Mon, Jun 20, 2016, 5:21 PM UTC

Twitter should spend some of the money getting someone to actually improve their web ui. Click a link to an individual tweet and read it. Now you click out of it to read the person's timeline. Here comes the janky timeline refresh. I mean shouldn't someone spend some time so it doesn't look like they had to pull the user's timeline?

I still get errors sometimes where I see, "1 new tweet" and it's the top tweet in my timeline, except here it is again.

Re: Twitter Acquires Magic Pony

#46

Post by sdegutis » Mon, Jun 20, 2016, 5:23 PM UTC

true_religion wrote: post #41

sdegutis wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For sure, we're a greedy, selfish, and short-sighted species. But that doesn't make the advertisers right for doing what people are implicitly asking them to.

People say 'the advertisers', but don't most people in the world work for a company that uses ads? It seems that there's a mentality of compartmentalization, where people believe there to be 'evil ad companies' that somehow do nothing but make ads and don't actually sell products, nor employ people in the creative industry.

Just a crazy idea, but what if instead of TV/radio commercials and billboards and internet popup ads, products advertised themselves in the places they are sold (e.g. the sign next to a restaurant, or the side of a shampoo bottle on a shelf in the store), to explain very briefly why they're better than the competition? Most of the time, people will come across it organically, and that's healthy and good. But if discoverability is needed too, they can advertise in appropriate places, like restaurant listings, etc.

Re: Twitter Acquires Magic Pony

#47

Post by blahi » Mon, Jun 20, 2016, 5:24 PM UTC

true_religion wrote: post #41

sdegutis wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For sure, we're a greedy, selfish, and short-sighted species. But that doesn't make the advertisers right for doing what people are implicitly asking them to.

People say 'the advertisers', but don't most people in the world work for a company that uses ads? It seems that there's a mentality of compartmentalization, where people believe there to be 'evil ad companies' that somehow do nothing but make ads and don't actually sell products, nor employ people in the creative industry.

People like to feel righteous and superior. Whether they deserve to feel this way is an entirely different story.

Re: Twitter Acquires Magic Pony

#48

Post by ben_jones » Mon, Jun 20, 2016, 5:32 PM UTC

debaserab2 wrote: post #42

GrumpyYoungMan wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The best minds of the previous generation were thinking about how to kill Russians. I'd say it's an upgrade. At least the results of the previous generations research went (largely) unused, whereas the results of ad clicking research is targeted against and used on people on a daily basis, to their considerable detriment. An upgrade? If so, it seems kind of dubious at best.

Only on HN would someone compare starting a nuclear war to click advertising.

Well only one of those two things actually happened (thankfully).

Re: Twitter Acquires Magic Pony

#49

Post by ben_jones » Mon, Jun 20, 2016, 5:33 PM UTC

rqebmm wrote: post #34

Zephyr314 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads." There is a strong argument that as long as they continue to publish and produce open source (which they have been doing) then you could think of ads as just a source of funding and tons of data to continue to push the state of the art. It can also be a stepping stone to other ventures [1]. [1]: http://www.wsj.com/articles/where-would…

Since the last few generations used weapons research to fund scientific advancements, I guess this is progress after all!

Don't mind the huge military-industrial complex that has helped derail education, health care, retirement-funding, ...

Re: Twitter Acquires Magic Pony

#50

Post by niftich » Mon, Jun 20, 2016, 5:36 PM UTC

sdegutis wrote: post #46

true_religion wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People say 'the advertisers', but don't most people in the world work for a company that uses ads? It seems that there's a mentality of compartmentalization, where people believe there to be 'evil ad companies' that somehow do nothing but make ads and don't actually sell products, nor employ people in the creative industry.

Just a crazy idea, but what if instead of TV/radio commercials and billboards and internet popup ads, products advertised themselves in the places they are sold (e.g. the sign next to a restaurant, or the side of a shampoo bottle on a shelf in the store), to explain very briefly why they're better than the competition? Most of the time, people will come across it organically, and that's healthy and good. But if disco…

There's a difference between advertising and branding, although sometimes they blur together.

In brief, advertising is trying to get you to buy a specific product, whereas branding is about mindshare. When Coca-Cola runs TV commercials, you're seeing branding, and you're associating Coca-Cola with energetic, smiling people living life to the fullest and all that good stuff.

Advertising, however, has a clearer call-to-action. In the US, car commercials seamlessly combine the two where they show people like actor Matthew McConaughey driving a Lincoln, and you think 'wow, successful people drive Lincolns' -- branding -- and at the end, they show current offers for leasing the car for 36 months -- advertising. What you propose actually happens in grocery stores today: sales. The rotating sales are a way to gauge market loyalty to a particular brand not currently on sale, vs. the other brand currently on sale.