[HN Gopher] The algorithmic anti-culture of scale
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The algorithmic anti-culture of scale
Author : jsnell
Score : 37 points
Date : 2023-07-11 23:32 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.garbageday.email)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.garbageday.email)
| taeric wrote:
| I haven't tried threads, yet, but this seems an extreme amount of
| hate to level towards it. Curious why there are so many emotions
| flying on all of these places.
|
| I'm also always wary of such distinct causal threads of how we
| got the companies that we have now. Feels like things could have
| easily gone in many other directions, as well.
|
| I do agree that it seems that Twitter isn't actually going
| anywhere any time soon.
| chongli wrote:
| _Curious why there are so many emotions flying on all of these
| places_
|
| Because it marks the beginning of a full-scale war on Twitter.
| Because it represents a new threat to the fediverse in the form
| of embrace-extend-extinguish. Because both Elon Musk and Mark
| Zuckerberg are polarizing figures.
| wpietri wrote:
| And I'd add there's also a legitimate sense of loss when it
| comes to Twitter. It meant a lot to me when I was a user of
| it, but I left early on in the Elon era when it was clear
| where things were heading. (Here I would link you to my
| explanation of why I left, but Twitter is now so broken I
| apparently can't.) Twitter functioned for years in spite of
| the poor management, thriving because of the community. But
| Musk has in short order managed to ruin something a lot of
| people loved. People are still working through that anger and
| grief.
| slowhadoken wrote:
| Twitter is still going to be around, Tumblr is still around. I
| just hope Musk keeps it open to everyone. There was a DNC bias
| in its content moderation before him. I prefer to hear
| everyone's opinion and propaganda. It makes thoughts less
| inbreed.
| api wrote:
| I've wondered if censoring the Nazis and antivaxx cranks
| might have been helping them. Twitter today is a showcase for
| how dumb they are, with all their posts followed by pages of
| people laughing or debunking or gawking at them.
|
| Give them more rope?
| delecti wrote:
| DNC as in Democratic National Committee/Convention? Because
| Twitter themselves has admitted to unequal algorithmic
| boosting of right-wing accounts [1], and ignoring violations
| of right-wing accounts [2].
|
| [1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/oct/22/twitte
| r-a...
|
| [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/08/us/politics/twitter-
| congr...
| wpietri wrote:
| There's a very good chance Twitter won't be around. Even Musk
| has said so. Or it might be around in some negligible way,
| where it's a backwater that people mainly used to use, as
| with MySpace. Tumblr survived through a long era of benign
| neglect due to luck, not some inexorable law.
| slowhadoken wrote:
| That's all speculation. Something as big as Twitter doesn't
| get thrown away, it gets repurposed. I prefer the way Musk
| is running it but it has it's elitist detractors. Under
| Jack Dorsey it was a rumor mill for independent spin
| doctors, character assassins, and propagandists. A fishing
| hole for DNC PR.
| wpietri wrote:
| Yes, all discussion about the future is speculation,
| including your claims. Something as big as Twitter is
| less likely to get thrown away, sure. But it is
| shrinking, and could well shrink further.
|
| There's also a big question of who might buy it. The
| first time Tumblr got sold, it was for $1 billion. The
| second time, for $3 million. And the receiving
| organization has been putting a lot of money into it
| trying to create a viable business. It's perfectly
| possible that nobody with the money to buy and run
| Twitter would actually want it. Twitter was available for
| sale for many years, but was never purchased except by
| somebody doing it for decidedly non-economic reasons.
| Consider how Disney decided not to buy it, for example:
| https://www.vox.com/recode/2022/9/7/23339402/bob-iger-
| disney...
|
| For many organizations, Twitter is brand poison. It'd be
| a continuous source of bad PR. And with some of its key
| assets destroyed or lost, plus so much negative press,
| it's going to be at best a fixer-upper. And what would
| they get out of it? It was never a good business even
| before the Threads launch when it had no serious
| competition for its niche. I have a hard time imagining
| who would pay for it even at fire sale prices.
| slowhadoken wrote:
| If I said a traffic light will turn from red to green
| you'd be exaggerating if you called my statement
| speculation. To my knowledge the only social media sites
| that have been shutdown were the ones that never had any
| traffic. LiveJournal is still up. Disney is a massive
| corporation that buys other companies, why and why not is
| speculation.
|
| Twitter's brand under Dorsey was "brand poison", that's
| how it attracted so many post-progressive lunatics. A lot
| of those lunatics are now fleeing and/or attacking the
| site. CNN and FOX News have good reason to hate Musk's
| approach. Mainstream media has lost almost all
| credibility, if we could see a return to something
| approximating journalism that could hurt them.
| thriftwy wrote:
| I remember a decade ago, mail.ru has released a new and fresh
| social network just like Threads.
|
| At first there was chaos but it was fun - you could write
| something unusual and get strangers see it and respond, and see
| yourself somewhere in global reach rankings. In a week, though,
| you would only see accounts posting the same kind of content over
| and over again (be it jokes or kittens) and in two weeks it died
| because nobody cared to visit it anymore.
| thriftwy wrote:
| A semi-successful thing was Yandex Zen, designed to be an anti-
| social network where you do not have to subscribe to anything
| since it will show random stuff to you and see how you would
| react. What was great is that it was long tailish, such as you
| could find yourself reading about train spotting, airplanes and
| that dude working kitchen in a restaurant. No celebrities
| unless you really clicked that stuff yourself.
|
| Has Yandex not badly mismanaged it at least three times, it
| could still be relevant by now.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| > Our tastes change. We move on. And then suddenly we can't
| imagine ever going back.
|
| Bingo. I can't relate to any of this stuff. It actually is quite
| alienating when you experience it repeatedly.
|
| Plus, the suggested content in Threads is so bad.
|
| Half of it is random whining about "when she likes u then nvr
| replies" or brands trying way too hard by writing in that same,
| too-self-aware sarcastic lowercase tone. You always feel like
| you're missing a small piece of context when reading it because
| decoding it correctly is a considered a shibboleth.
|
| In short, it's clearly the domain of the excessively online, just
| like Twitter.
| ea550ff70a wrote:
| >My verdict: Threads sucks shit. It has no purpose. It is for no
| one. It launched as a content graveyard and will assuredly only
| become more of one over time.
|
| The writer's is clearly mad at life here. Threads is fine. The
| content is fine. The design is fine. The algorithm is also fine.
| Not everyone is into whatever nonsense is happening in the
| twitterworld.
| wpietri wrote:
| One of my big rules is to mostly listen to product feedback
| from actual users. Are you using it on a daily basis? What
| makes it especially good for you?
|
| Because "fine" generally doesn't cut it. There are things I use
| because I love them, or at least I'm addicted to them. For me,
| Twitter was like that. There are things I use because I have
| to. Like LinkedIn. But a nonessential product being seen as
| "fine" by people who don't use it? That sounds like the kiss of
| death to me.
| warkdarrior wrote:
| The writer also did not give any hints to the Threads algorithm
| about what he likes or prefers (he did not follow, he barely
| clicked on things, etc.). It's like going to Netflix and just
| browsing without watching any movies, and then complaining that
| Netflix "has no purpose" and "is for no one."
| anonymoushn wrote:
| Most of the article makes no sense, but Threads won't really be
| usable as "a Twitter" until there's a feed of people you
| follow.
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| or the ability to discover content rather than people
| jxramos wrote:
| that's an interesting distinction, can you elaborate, I'd
| like to hear more about this.
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| Currently, the search function only searches for users
| and not posts. There are no hashtags, so if I was
| interested in (for example) Anime art, then I would have
| no way of finding posts about anime art. I can only find
| other users who may or may not post anime art, and that
| search is based a fuzzy search of their name and not
| their bio
| jxramos wrote:
| ah yah I heard about that feature anemic MVP rollout.
| Presumably they'll expand the search mechanism. Seems
| like a gaping omission for a debut MVP though, wonder
| what the rush was exactly.
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| I think they wanted to launch while Twitter was still
| rate limiting usage
| BSEdlMMldESB wrote:
| > My verdict: Threads sucks shit. It has no purpose. It is for no
| one
|
| wrong. it has a purpose, and it serves someone, just not its
| users.
|
| they're looking for a way to shove more advertisement and other
| sorts of manipulation right at you; after all, that is their
| product.
| zerodensity wrote:
| So not having used twitter how does that algorithm differ from
| this one? I mean he did not follow anything... Does Twitter have
| some magic sauce that unguided gives you exactly what you want or
| something?
| BSEdlMMldESB wrote:
| I learned from stratechery's analisis on twitter and threads
| that twitter did used to have (or has had at some point?) a
| very particular kind of 'magic sauce'
|
| the point as I understood it: that twitter by relying on who
| you followed to make your feed AND sorting it just by time; did
| manage to create something of a niche in the social media
| space.
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