[HN Gopher] Social Networks: It's worse than you think (2020)
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Social Networks: It's worse than you think (2020)
Author : ColinWright
Score : 56 points
Date : 2021-09-11 20:57 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (meta.ath0.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (meta.ath0.com)
| BarryMilo wrote:
| As always, it's a bad time to be an imaginary person.
|
| It's a big leap to pretend the model reflects the real world, let
| alone today's real world. As far as I can tell, sharing has
| become largely fenced into communities (reddit subs, Facebook
| groups). People who still share with people they know personally
| appear to me to be a minority.
|
| Don't get me wrong, the principle is sound, but the world changes
| fast and the described model doesn't seem very relevant nowadays.
| swivelmaster wrote:
| My experience watching my older family members share memes on
| Facebook suggests otherwise.
|
| Also, the entirety of Twitter, in a completely different way.
| arglebarglegar wrote:
| facebook has billions of monthly users, there's no way you
| interact with even 1% of that, so anecdotal feelings are
| completely meaningless!
| 3np wrote:
| 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 proportional
| to an inverse power of that number.
|
| So they implement a textbook model and a textbook result comes
| out - surprise? There's nothing to be drawn by this.
|
| I may share the authors sentiment but frankly this blog post is
| bunk.
|
| There're some interesting parts in the source though once you get
| through all the grand-standing fluff.
|
| [0]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/information-
| overl...
| ctoth wrote:
| https://archive.ph/dwpPS
| crdrost wrote:
| 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 see more of my content.
|
| When I put it that way it feels banal, but like, you know the
| "fast-growing subreddits" list on Reddit? There were meetings!
| Someone worked on that! People literally sat in a room and said
| effectively, "Hey Fatimeh, what is the status of the 'make
| subreddits suck faster' feature? Management is _very_ interested
| in delivering that in Q3." Right? Like this connection from
| global to personal is just automatically _assumed_ , nobody
| spends a waking moment thinking it could be anything _but_ that
| way.
| motohagiography wrote:
| This explains why the crappiest of efforts are so viral, and why
| things that try harder fail. When I think of the meme templates
| I've seen, they're all grade 2 mental level, and they don't
| engage your critcal faculties, but this is their point. They just
| pass right by. There is a kind of bias where we must think, "this
| is so crappy, it has to be real!" which is the complement bias
| to, "this looks too polished to be real." I wonder what examples
| of things other than memes would be the effect of that bias.
| edoceo wrote:
| Example: free software can't be good, we should buy SAP.
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