[HN Gopher] And you will know us by the company we keep
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And you will know us by the company we keep
Author : jger15
Score : 171 points
Date : 2021-10-11 16:06 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.eugenewei.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.eugenewei.com)
| strogonoff wrote:
| > Western social apps also rely much more heavily on advertising
| revenue.
|
| I'm surprised this is only mentioned in passing, as it most
| certainly relates to the problem of "over-attributing how people
| behave on a social app to their innate nature".
|
| To paraphrase, perhaps the single most important influence on
| users' behavior in social media is platforms' existential
| requirement to generate ad revenue from it?
|
| The author mostly misses this factor in favor of overthinking
| what technically is its consequences. Seems blindingly obvious
| that such a business model would shape everything from high-level
| design to implementation to strategy--all that causes social
| media dynamics to be what they are.
| mooreds wrote:
| Like always, Eugene blows my mind.
|
| I don't have a lot to add in commentary, but almost every time I
| read one of his essays, I learn something.
|
| Here are some particularly insightful snippets from the article.
|
| > A higher fidelity social product would automatically nip and
| tuck our social graphs over time as they observed our interaction
| patterns.
|
| YES! I remember reading about someone advocating for an app to
| make unfollowing easy (daily, present someone on a social network
| and if you swiped right, unfollow them). But it'd be even better
| if the network did it; they have the data, after all.
|
| > Twitter favors pure play Twitter accounts that focus on one
| niche.
|
| This so much. And it's one of the reasons I struggle with
| Twitter.
|
| > First, [TikTok] runs videos through one of the most terrifying,
| vicious quality filters known to man: a panel of a few hundred
| largely Gen Z users.
|
| LOL.
|
| > TikTok is an interest graph built as an interest graph.
|
| Note that the entire article is built around the concept that
| western social media companies have used the social graph as a
| proxy for the content graph, to their detriment.
|
| > It's no surprise that many tech companies install Slack and
| then suddenly find themselves, shortly thereafter, dealing with
| employee uprisings. When you rewire the communications topology
| of any group, you alter the dynamic among the members.
|
| Shout it from the rooftops!
|
| > [On linkedin:] It turns out if you map out the professional
| graph, not just today but also across long temporal and
| organizational dimensions, recruiters will pay a lot of money to
| traverse it.
|
| A friend calls LinkedIn "a rolodex that someone else keeps up to
| date". I don't think we've seen the peak of LI's value. Such a
| smart acquisition by MS.
| toss1 wrote:
| > A higher fidelity social product would automatically nip and
| tuck our social graphs over time as they observed our
| interaction patterns.
|
| This should not be so binary - follow/unfollow. PArtly because
| lack of interaction is not necessarily a sign of lack of
| interest as much as just different phases of life.
|
| Rather, I think it should be more fine-grained and gradual,
| kind of depreciating down to lower-level follows, and
| eventually falling off after a bunch of steps. And, the ability
| to occasionally scan the depreciation levels to see if someone
| should be re-activated (oh, I've been meaning to get in
| touch...)
|
| And of course, the distinction Eugene makes between the
| Interest graph vs the Social graph is spot-on -- it make so
| much about the dysfunctional social media system so obvious.
| xmprt wrote:
| > A higher fidelity social product would automatically nip and
| tuck our social graphs over time as they observed our
| interaction patterns
|
| I feel creator driven platforms like YouTube and TikTok do
| exactly this. I'm surprised that social media platforms haven't
| tried building similar algorithms where your recommendations
| are based off of what you're currently interested in instead of
| giving a platform to the loudest voices. I wonder if maybe this
| is a much harder problem to solve with companies like Facebook
| and Twitter.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| YouTube is super explicit about this, and they even "manage
| up" in the same way that an employee might handle a manager
| who wants everything to be the first priority: by maintaining
| a priority list on the top to couple the action of promoting
| something to 1st priority to the action of demoting other
| priorities.
| Androider wrote:
| Personally I'd like the exact opposite. The people who post
| every day, I'm not really missing much if I don't see their
| latest posts. But the friend who posts once a year? I want to
| see that post, even if it's from a while ago already and I
| haven't logged in since.
| beamatronic wrote:
| I want less of a social network and more of a time series
| database
| jaredsohn wrote:
| Agree, although this might have the effect of scaring someone
| from posting again after a long while.
| RobRivera wrote:
| i dont want my network -optimizing- my social graph, and
| facebook has done this to a point where I need to supplement my
| social graph external to their product since i simply have
| different communication profiles for different (equally
| important) nodes in my graph.
| mooreds wrote:
| Facebook optimizes the content from the social graph to try
| to make the derived interest graph better.
|
| I would love if Facebook pruned my social graph. I still have
| a ton of FB friends from 2008-2010 when I joined FB and was
| active. But most of those people don't matter to my life much
| anymore. Why does FB think they do? Because they haven't
| pruned my graph based on my interactions.
|
| So FB becomes less useful to me.
|
| That said, I think any network with a monolithic graph (or
| incentives to have one) will run into the problem you outline
| (where you need to supplement the network with external
| tools/solutions).
| nitrogen wrote:
| The "circles" idea from Google Plus was actually pretty
| useful in theory. If instead of binary in/out pruning, a
| network suggested moving people between "circles," that
| might be better than just deleting people unprompted.
| mooreds wrote:
| Agreed, circles was conceptually great, just too much
| work (IIRC) and a bit late to the social network game.
| mdoms wrote:
| So the guy favors content over relationships? No thank you.
| thomasahle wrote:
| >> It's no surprise that many tech companies install Slack and
| then suddenly find themselves, shortly thereafter, dealing with
| employee uprisings. When you rewire the communications topology
| of any group, you alter the dynamic among the members. Slack's
| public channels act as public squares within companies,
| exposing more employees to each other's thoughts. This can lead
| to an employee finding others who share what they thought were
| minority opinions, like reservations about specific company
| policies.
|
| > Shout it from the rooftops!
|
| Shout what? That employees should have a public square? Or that
| employers should keep people isolated, so reservations about
| company policies won't surface?
| speedybird wrote:
| A social network that automatically prunes friends I haven't
| talked to in years sounds benign. Except I'm quite certain that
| once they get into the habit of pruning friends without asking
| me directly, they'll start to distance and/or prune friends for
| other reasons too. 'The algorithm' deciding who is or isn't a
| positive influence for me sounds like I'm back in 6th grade and
| my mother is telling me who I may or may not be friends with.
| Except 'the algorithm' _isn 't_ my mother and I am far less
| certain that it has the good intentions for me.
| bobthechef wrote:
| "Big Mother"
| saltedonion wrote:
| This sounds stupid but is indeed as troubling as the big
| brother
| wolfram74 wrote:
| a benign version would be instead of the connection being a
| boolean, have it be a float, with interactions re-inforcing
| the connection and apathy diminishing it, then your social
| graph would develop sort of like neurons, links rarely if
| ever being snapped out right, but connected only tenuously.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > I remember reading about someone advocating for an app to
| make unfollowing easy
|
| It's not actually hard to unfollow people on most platforms,
| though.
|
| Twitter shows the Unfollow button when I hover over someone's
| name in my feed. It's one click to unfollow and I don't even
| have to leave the page to do it.
|
| I think the real problem is a type of FOMO: People are afraid
| to remove any connections they've established, lest they miss
| something important.
| bongoman37 wrote:
| It isn't just FOMO, its that when you unfollow someone it is
| seen by the other person has a rejection and people are
| loathe to reject others. Especially if the other person is
| important to you in any way, that is a problem. Muting is
| better, because it doesn't let the other person know you
| aren't following them.
| mooreds wrote:
| > I think the real problem is a type of FOMO: People are
| afraid to remove any connections they've established, lest
| they miss something important.
|
| Good point. That's why making it automated would be even
| better. Avoids the Larry David moment the author mentions.
| brazzy wrote:
| I.e. it's not _mechanically_ hard, but psychologically hard -
| or even, wait for it, _socially_.
|
| But that, too, is something which a platform's UX design can
| influence to some degree.
| angelzen wrote:
| Thus we became compulsive social connections hoarders.
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=compulsive+hoarding&tbm=isch
| anejrcc wrote:
| HN doesnt build a social graph or an interest graph but its still
| interesting to me. Now if they can just do something about
| comments. Like just randomly cull a chuck every hour or so and it
| will be a nice energy generating space to hang out.
| burnished wrote:
| What is a chuck?
| AutumnCurtain wrote:
| I assume he meant "chunk"
| ChefboyOG wrote:
| Alternatively, we delete comments by whichever user's
| screen name reminds us most of the name "Chuck"
| burnished wrote:
| That makes way more sense. I thought it was something rude
| but I couldn't figure it out.
| 1270018080 wrote:
| What does cull a chunk mean?
| burnished wrote:
| If it does mean chunk, I think it means randomly removing
| clusters on the network graph. I'm guessing the idea is
| that it would promote healthier networks because you'd
| periodically be removing portions and only the parts you
| thought were really worthwhile would get reconnected?
| Invictus0 wrote:
| Great essay, very insightful, very smart--but zoom out a bit and
| we get the old adage: The brightest minds of our generation are
| working on getting us addicted to social media.
| bobthechef wrote:
| BigTech can use the social graph combined with additional
| knowledge they are collecting on you to shape social outcomes in
| subtle, but controlled ways. For example, if you begin to be seen
| as unfavorable by certain people or by some algorithm, the
| information you see might quietly begin to change: the jobs you
| see posted, the health care will be offered, the schools you
| apply to. These would not result in some massively obvious
| punishment for certain behaviors, but in a way that might be
| viewed as a marriage between shadowbanning and bias in ML models,
| which is to say that the bias would be fully controlled and
| quietly implemented in a continuous way.
|
| Now, LinkedIn and Facebook can track social milieus, but are they
| using that knowledge to direct social phenomena, so to speak? For
| example, if a group of people in opposition to BigTech begins to
| coalesce, are they using social media to discourage, shape, and
| manage the discourse in a way that diminishes the likelihood that
| such a group can mount a cohesive threat to BigTech (for example,
| by increasing fragmentation or cooling by increasing the amount
| of conflicting information different people in that group
| receive, or impeding the spread of certain kinds of information
| within that group)?
| bdangubic wrote:
| I think social media companies need to build two graphs:
|
| 1. interest graph 2. s(he) spends money on graph
|
| There are A LOT of things that I am interested in that social
| media companies cannot monetize on. But there is also A TON of
| things they can. While number of companies are fairly great at
| #1, absolutely not a single on is even remotely decent at the #2.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| How do you expect successful implementation of #2 to look like?
| I'd expect it to be pretty similar to the state of Amazon
| product recommendations.
|
| The problem is that users and platforms have a very different
| definition of what a good use of a graph is. This comes from
| their business model - advertising. For #1, you want to see
| things that are interesting to you, but the platforms want
| things that will keep you "engaged" the most (maximizing your
| exposure to advertising, which they sell as a service). The
| result is, you get content that, while related to your
| interest, is mostly a bottom-feeding, lowest-common-denominator
| material geared towards pushing your emotional buttons.
|
| So with #2, again, the platforms may know perfectly well what
| you're spending money on, but what they'll show you won't be
| the perfect deals for you - they'll be the worst deals for you,
| from customers of theirs who spent most money on getting their
| offers in front of people.
| bdangubic wrote:
| I do not believe for one second (I could be dead wrong of
| course!) that platforms know what I am spending money on. It
| is not that I am not getting perfect deals fed to me in ads,
| it is that I am getting fed things I do not have a slight
| interest in and would absolutely never purchase. I play
| tennis and if I was getting fed ads for racquets that cost
| $500 or tennis ball machines that cost $3k that would be one
| thing (not a very good deal and I would never spend that much
| money) but what I am getting are ads for hoola hoops which I
| would not buy even if someone was selling them for $1.
| hbarka wrote:
| I wish I can ride onto an interest graph without having to wait
| for the algorithm to decide it for me by inference of who I (have
| to) follow.
| thatoneguy wrote:
| Google patented a social graph that decays based on level of
| interactions awhile ago:
|
| https://patents.google.com/patent/US9020965B1/
| Grimm1 wrote:
| The fact I had that thought at little earlier in this thread
| before reading your comment leads me to believe two things, one
| it's a somewhat trivial idea to arrive upon and that two our
| patent system is broken that something like that could be
| patented when it's really not a hard thought to arrive at.
| renewiltord wrote:
| YouTube is another company that builds an interest graph without
| a social graph. I think I would often like to edit my interest
| graph myself.
|
| It's not that I don't like being targeted. I just want to help
| them do it right.
| laurent92 wrote:
| I've always wondered whether annoying videos (or rather,
| thumbnails) were necessary as part of making us notice the
| upsides.
| swamp40 wrote:
| _" But what if there was a way to build an interest graph for you
| without you having to follow anyone? What if you could skip the
| long and painstaking intermediate step of assembling a social
| graph and just jump directly to the interest graph?...And what if
| the algorithm that pulled this off could also adjust to your
| evolving tastes in near real-time, without you having to actively
| tune it?"_
|
| I have to say, Facebook has this working well for me. Their
| "Suggested for you" posts are 99% interesting to me. I have no
| idea how they do it.
| dkarl wrote:
| Facebook never worked that way for me, and I always assumed the
| explanation given by the article is the reason. The social
| connections I had on Facebook (family, old classmates, wife's
| friends, etc.) had virtually no overlapping interests with me.
| On Twitter I choose whom to follow, and on YouTube I choose
| which channels to subscribe to. The problem with Facebook for
| me was that it was too warped by social obligations. An old
| friend from high school sends me a friend request, and his
| parents have been talking with my parents about how he isn't
| doing great, eh, easiest to accept it. Oh, shit, they weren't
| kidding about him not doing great, and he's consoling himself
| with some weird ideas.
|
| Twitter for me is 98% non-personal. YouTube is completely
| impersonal. No social interaction == much better fit to my
| interests.
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| As expected, another amazing post by Eugene. This might be the
| best sentence:
|
| > One of my favorite heuristics for spotting flaws in a system is
| to look at those trying to break it.
|
| I use this "technique" quite often and I kind of think of it as a
| secret mini-weapon, and I loved seeing it mentioned here.
| shoto_io wrote:
| Can you elaborate on your secret? ;-) maybe give an example?
| Jemaclus wrote:
| One example might be influencers buying followers. If simply
| paying money for bots (or people?) to follow you is enough to
| create "influence," then that may be a flaw in the system.
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| I thought it was quite clear: look at people trying to break
| a system, it highlights flaws in the system.
| dapids wrote:
| So basically "you spot flaws in systems by watching people
| break them". Uh -- duh! Some revelation ... I don't think
| something that is common knowledge is a secret weapon, but to
| each their own I guess.
| Tomorrw wrote:
| Is Reeds law holding up?
|
| Whats the latest on that? Thought the Dunbar number prevents
| exponential scaling.
| xmprt wrote:
| The Dunbar number is about individual connections. The
| exponential scaling comes from the number of possible
| subgroups. I might have 5 close friends but each pair of
| friends has a different interest. From 5 friends, we have 15
| interests. With 10 friends, we can have 90 interests.
| himaraya wrote:
| Eugene could really use an editor for his top-notch insights.
| icelancer wrote:
| He has one. Perhaps it's not enough.
| himaraya wrote:
| His writing needs more aggressive editing, for sure.
| bawolff wrote:
| It's a bit rambly, but that seems more like a stylistic choice
| than a flaw.
| mdoms wrote:
| I got about a third of the way through the article and gave up.
| If there's anything "top notch" in that mess it's certainly not
| in that portion of the piece.
| themark wrote:
| Shout out to https://www.trailofdead.com/
| Jemaclus wrote:
| My wife and I were discussing Facebook vs Instagram vs TikTok the
| other day. Neither of us use Facebook. My wife pointed out that
| our friends aren't interesting. Their posts are often their kids
| or their families or politics or something that just isn't that
| interesting to us. They're still _friends_ , but they just aren't
| interesting to follow on social media.
|
| On the flip side, I love TikTok. It's full of strangers! New,
| exciting strangers doing wild, strange things in trendy and funny
| and smart and annoying and cringe-filled ways! TikTok is an
| entire world of social media that could never exist on Facebook.
| (Or maybe it did back when it started? I can't remember.)
|
| Instagram is the more interesting one for me. I observed over the
| course of this conversation that if you look at my feed, it's
| boring stuff I don't care about. I follow my friends and they
| post pictures of their kids and blah blah blah.
|
| But if you click the "Discover" tab, it's almost entirely three
| of my biggest interests: horses, fitness, and D&D.
|
| To Eugene's point, my feed is my social graph, but my Discover
| tab is my interest graph.
|
| Like Eugene, one of the things I like about TikTok is that it's
| an interest graph and I happen to be connected to a few of my
| friends. But since I spend most of my time on the For You Page, I
| never see my friend's stuff. That's totally fine with me!
|
| I'd love more social media apps to understand that connecting
| with my friends doesn't mean I want to know everything they're
| doing, and instead I want to meet at the intersection of my
| social graph and my interests. Those two things don't often
| overlap, but when they do, it's a recipe for fun and engagement.
|
| FWIW, despite having dramatically increased the number of ads
| they display, I still maintain that Instagram's ads are far and
| away better than Facebook's, TikTok's, Twitter's, and even
| Google's. I see an ad on IG and I very often say, "huh, that
| looks cool" whereas I would just gloss over it on other
| platforms.
| wenc wrote:
| > My wife pointed out that our friends aren't interesting.
| Their posts are often their kids or their families or politics
| or something that just isn't that interesting to us. They're
| still friends, but they just aren't interesting to follow on
| social media.
|
| This is an fascinating insight. Facebook is optimized for in
| groups whereas platforms like Instagram and TikTok are
| platforms for creators. Naturally the latter is going to be
| more interesting especially if your peer group is pretty
| stable.
|
| I guess I'm unusual in that I move around a lot (different
| countries, different parts of the country) and my peer group is
| freshened (or gets reshuffled) every few years. I often get to
| know people who have very little in common with my previous
| social groups so Facebook continues to be interesting for me.
| There's also something to be said about continually upgrading
| or changing one's peer group.
| da39a3ee wrote:
| Only read first third but seems like a very good essay, even
| though not everyone wants to read 10k words on Western social
| media.
|
| I recently tried to use Twitter and came to the same conclusion -
| I followed some people cos they are interesting on computer
| science, but why the fuck would i want to see their nature photos
| from their weekend walk?
| skmurphy wrote:
| I think there is a significant opportunity for an app or platform
| that allows me to make helpful introductions in the right
| context. I am not aware of any that allow me to curate my network
| and suggest who to connect (and provide a context for the
| suggested conversation). Please leave a comment if you are aware
| of one or working on it or contact me via my profile.
| Lammy wrote:
| I've never seen anyone use the phrase "social capital subsidy"
| before but really like it.
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