[HN Gopher] Information Camouflage
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       Information Camouflage
        
       Author : Tomte
       Score  : 11 points
       Date   : 2022-07-26 17:13 UTC (5 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (buttondown.email)
 (TXT) w3m dump (buttondown.email)
        
       | winternett wrote:
       | This is the curse in using unstructured data, and in sites like
       | reddit banning self promotion.
       | 
       | Unstructured data is often always transformed (ETL) and with that
       | method, things get lost in translation. As automation and SEO is
       | twisted to fit expectations for results, you get an index of
       | spaghetti that is damn near impossible to untangle as it grows,
       | because the data sources are also constantly changing. I read an
       | article about how people change the entire name and purpose of
       | Facebook groups after they develop huge amounts of followers (To
       | new and totally unrelated things) And that's how user bases are
       | often grown now on many social apps...
       | 
       | Unforeseen trickery like that reeks havoc on unstructured query
       | resources for very specific things. This is why structured and
       | curated data resources worked with a lot less stress and more
       | accuracy in the past.
       | 
       | No matter how much a concept is thought out, there will always be
       | hackers that gamify it. It is harder to get away with hacking
       | data in a structured data resource because it is easier to
       | identify data anomalies and abnormalities in structured data.
       | 
       | Secondly, by the new wave ideal that self promotion is a bad
       | thing, we're putting second hand information in the spotlight,
       | and giving it the primary regard and credit... Many of the people
       | posting things and responding to related questions for comment
       | posted often have nothing to do with the authoring of the
       | original content... They are also often the first and only ones
       | to reap the financial rewards of ideas and things they didn't
       | create. It's a pretty toxic rule to prevent people from promoting
       | their own ideas online on any credible resource, but somehow it's
       | been pushed as a reasonable practice for the past few years by
       | possibly the same people that post information and stolen or
       | copied ideas second hand. Content and idea theft is surging
       | because of TikTok and other social platforms alone.
       | 
       | These things lead to a world where everything is posted without
       | proper context and credit, and of course it allows people to
       | operate without accountability for deception, harmful words, and
       | for putting the profit in places where it will inspire more ideas
       | from people who have proven track records and give them proper
       | credit.
       | 
       | The world keeps screwing things up just to make a buck.
        
       | jollyllama wrote:
       | re: pay someone. I forget the name but in the early 2000s there
       | was a site where you could submit a question and someone would
       | search it for you. They were paid a small amount for each answer.
       | Does anyone remember this?
        
         | hwayne wrote:
         | Google answers?
        
       | mdavis6890 wrote:
       | I wish people would take this into consideration when naming
       | their company/product/etc. At least drop a vowel or add a silent
       | 'h' or something...
        
         | TheJoeMan wrote:
         | Really huge companies can just name their product "Disney+" and
         | break Google, and instead of never being discovered instead
         | force the search engines to adapt.
        
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       (page generated 2022-07-26 23:02 UTC)