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Social Networks: It's worse than you think (2020)

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Re: Social Networks: It's worse than you think (2020)

#41

Post by masswerk »

ummwhat wrote: post #25
3np wrote: post #3

Somehow this post takes the least interesting part of the source article[0] and draws false conclusions from it. > In the simulation, the decision whether to rebroadcast is random, rather than being driven by “virality” or cognitive bias, so the simulation is an optimistic one. > It turns out that message propagation follows a power law: the probability of a meme being shared a given number of times is roughly propor…

If it's the paper I'm thinking of then I read the original and that's not really a fair representation of what they did. What they actually did was they started with some data on things which had gone viral but could only see how many were "infected" (number of views over time). They didn't have direct access to the granular information of who had seen what and who they shared or didn't share with. They decided to wo…

Also mind that any sharing process randomly selects a few winners. There's the famous example of "What happens, if 100 persons in a room are given $100 each and give away a Dollar to one randomly chosen person in this room each tick of the clock?" [1] Distributions become even more articulated, as we introduce any kind of market to this basic model, and wins are soon off the scale. Now start to promote those winners by algorithm…

The only means of counter-acting is human oversight/criticism/regulation, but, as the study shows, this reaches only that far.

[1] A simple simulation may be found here: https://www.masswerk.at/misc/wealth/

Re: Social Networks: It's worse than you think (2020)

#42

Post by BeFlatXIII »

sneak wrote: post #22

You can't promote certain content to the front without demoting other content downward. The algorithmic filtering/ordering of items in a feed is really just censorship of the items that don't benefit Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/YouTube. These tools serve their owners, not the society they ostensibly serve to connect. It's censorship on a huge scale, and it's terribly damaging.

What realistic alternatives are there to an algorithmic feed that don't immediately devolve into high-volume posters drowning out the one status a month club?

Re: Social Networks: It's worse than you think (2020)

#43

Post by abnry »

bjt wrote: post #39
abnry wrote: post #27

I am trying to get into self hosting. Can anyone recommend a Twitter or Facebook self hosted app? The idea would be that it would be an invite only social network where I choose who can join.

Invite-only and self-hosted are different things. Discord is invite-only but not self-hosted. Maybe that would work for you?

I want both. Basically I want something federated but not connected to the "fediverse" as in Mastedon. Perhaps I need to look into Mastedon.

Re: Social Networks: It's worse than you think (2020)

#46

Post by tobbykop »

> as the number of messages in the network rises, the quality of those which propagate falls

... if you assume people don`t read the message at all, but use a coin flip to decide if they should reshape it.

I cannot for the life of me fathom how anyone could make a model that completely ignores content quality in respect to distribution and then use that model to make a statement about average quality of content that gets distributed.

This really is the “sperical cow in a vacuum”equivalent of modeling social networks.

Re: Social Networks: It's worse than you think (2020)

#47

Post by [deleted] »

crdrost wrote: post #7

Related to this, there is an intimacy of small community which makes you feel valued and a proper contributor, that social networks really seem to oppose: they want to make the network bigger, you are part of the biggest world context, everybody on TikTok is eating a habanero while watching Bob Ross, so only if I do the same nonsense do I have a chance of 100 people noticing and liking the video and maybe opting to s…

[deleted]

Re: Social Networks: It's worse than you think (2020)

#48

Post by bickeringyokel »

In reference to the mentioned article

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/information-overl...

I can't determine what this article means by "quality", is it gauged by validity or some subjective notion? If it's the latter, I'm not sure how any of this is useful.

Re: Social Networks: It's worse than you think (2020)

#49

Post by karaterobot »

You will not find someone who dislikes social media and its effects more than I do, but:

> In the simulation, the decision whether to rebroadcast is random, rather than being driven by “virality” or cognitive bias, so the simulation is an optimistic one.

Why not model the decision to rebroadcast based on something other than a simple dice roll? Why not drive it by virality? Why not drive it by quality? Why not model tribal affiliation? These things seem significant when talking about the "information hellscape" we've created.

Re: Social Networks: It's worse than you think (2020)

#50

Post by kentm »

dylan604 wrote: post #14
crdrost wrote: post #7

Related to this, there is an intimacy of small community which makes you feel valued and a proper contributor, that social networks really seem to oppose: they want to make the network bigger, you are part of the biggest world context, everybody on TikTok is eating a habanero while watching Bob Ross, so only if I do the same nonsense do I have a chance of 100 people noticing and liking the video and maybe opting to s…

>When I put it that way it feels banal, It is banal, at least the largest portion of social media is. Originally, I could see the usefulness of FB with connecting with friends near & far, sharing, planning, etc. All sounds useful, but then FB turned it creepy with their method of monetizing their products and algos to pull the strings to make it as addicting as possible. Insta, TikTok, etc has pretty much fully embra…

Anything online funded by primarily by advertising will necessarily turn creepy or exploitive. Advertising always demands more engagement so there will be teams of people trying to game you for that engagement.
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