Fan-In

Not a response to the actual ideas presented, but I felt this to be one of the most well constructed 'discussion of non-technical problem directed at technical people' pieces that I've read in a long while. I loved how well the intro of a technical interview question lead into a discussion of a very human problem. I didn't know much of Coda before now but I suppose he can count me among the people glad to see him writing again.

As for the ideas themselves, I find it harder to respond. I've never been on the receiving end of 'Twitter scale' attention but I've always assumed that it was basically an emotional net negative for those who are. Even if the vast majority of said attention were positive, I feel like it would be hard to ignore the background noise generated by those who have found the most effective method to get attention is to cause distress for others.

This is the "15 minutes of fame for everyone" long envisioned. Only now the tech enabled this very possibility.

While it can be negative experience first few times it happens, the other dangerous side is that it's instantaneously addictive (we people crave attention). And addiction is what everyone in sales and marketing wants, as long as it's still legal. An addict is an ideal consumer.

I terminated my Twitter account about 2 years ago, after I found out that I spent huge amounts of time and psychical energy there. I generated two random UUIDs, used the first one to create one of those one-time emails, and the second to be the new password. I changed my Twitter password and email, and promptly rebooted my computer without storing these UUIDs anywhere.

It worked. Going cold turkey was incredibly hard. I wrote to Twitter support a few times so they could restore my account, but they couldn't establish my identity (just as planned!) Then, after a few months, cravings started to diminish.

Now, instead of being Twitter addict, I became Facebook and HN addict. Sigh. I can repeat my trick, but now I lack the willpower to do that. RescueTime tells me that I spend 3-4 hours every day on Facebook and HN.

Time to generate more UUIDs.

I expect the unnatural assymetry of fan-in is also what will increasingly drive wealth and income inequality in the future. The more hyperconnected everything is, the more production of goods - information goods in particular - turn into sudden lottery wins when they reach criticality.

It's always interested me that the more globally connected our media are, fewer interesting stories overall end up rising to our attention. When the sort function is global, global media all narrow in on a small handful of stories; whereas when the sort function is local, each region has its own distinct handful. This is a different kind of fan-in; the network structure supresses the feeding of stories into the fan-in from way down in the roots based on what's already upstream, and you end up with less information.

This is distinct from the problem of attention flow on social networks; hyperconnection changes all sorts of flows, and they may not all be for the better. I think it encourages a degree of monoculture, for one thing.

I think part of the issue is that our exposure to other people (and other people's opinions) has increased, but our perception of their importance hasn't decreased.

Pre-massive-interconnectedness, if you do something good, 9 people say nice things, 1 person says mean things. That gives you a good signal that you're doing something right. These days it's 90/10 or 9000/1000. The signal is still the same, it's only the scale that's different.

But we don't – maybe can't – feel that way. 1000 people calling you names feels terrible even if that's a tiny proportion of the whole. To feel otherwise would mean scaling the value of each individual opinion, each person, down to an insignificant level.

Numbers like upvote counts are pretty good for that, it's hard to picture the human life behind each click when all you see is (+200). But messages, even short ones, leave a lot of the human in there.

Of course, even if we could consistently eliminate the human importance of messages we receive, I'm not sure that would leave us better off. It's hard to believe that what internet discourse needs is less humanity.

Maybe a way to do it would be to representatively sample the messages. So you turn the 9000/1000 back into 9/1 by merely deleting 99.9% of messages as they come in. That feels a bit unjust, like your message is arbitrarily thrown away as soon as you write it, but in a de facto way that's probably similar to how messages get filtered now.

Another alternative would be to summarise each kind of message with a number attached to it indicating how many people said a similar thing. It would be possible, though not easy, to do that automatically if you designed your whole system around it. Reddit kinda sorta works this way, and I know political types use a similar process to manage constituents' opinions.

One thing seems obvious to me, though: we want massive connectedness and scale, we want everyone to feel like their individual voice is heard, and we want to not be crushed by impossibly massive waves of human noise.

I don't think we can have all three.

tl;dr: it turns out, all those search, filtering, and threading functions that usenet had were actually useful. Twitter is just a broken version of usenet and the brokenness stresses people out.

This is why Twitter fails as a discussion platform, in comparison to something like HN or Reddit: A sub-thread is in effect a social contract that somewhat limits scope to the shared understanding created by the parent comment(s). This constrains the speech a bit, but also offers the speaker a different persona to speak from... more of a small group persona than the public persona who issues each tweet.

Virality on Twitter relies upon a tweets lingering in the space where the social contract of a constrained discussion is highly unstable.

Coda is pointing out the phenomenon by which that unstable contract results in a laser of scrutiny from a horde of people who lack any kind of thoughtful context but who are now able to comment on equal footing with those who have context.

The simple phenomenon of ranking comments vertically by vote count (used by HN, Reddit) solves this problem when the goal is focused discussion.

But when the goal is to create a fray in which self-promoters can flourish in that space of deliberate misunderstanding, the normal dynamic of respect and meritorious vote-ranked commenting goes away, and the next self-promoter has an incentive to misunderstand and offer an embellished take that furthers his/her agenda (self-promotion).

So while Twitter fails as a discussion medium, it succeeds brilliantly as a broadcast medium, and Twitter's product team has created something quite clever with the semantics of mentions, stars, retweets, etc. The "what's been going on on Twitter" feature is a pure algorithmic feed which is likely a nod to the effectiveness of Facebook's algorithmic feed approach for user engagement and targeted ad placement.

I can't wait to see how all this evolves in terms of Twitter's product decisions.

Regarding the first bit of the article, is there an outline anywhere showing a smart way of handling the Twitter example given?

IMO that only happens to people with more than N followers, most of us actually would like to engage more and have someone available to discuss about random subjects...

News flash: being a public figure attracts attention and some of that attention is negative.

I just don't see what the problem is. If you don't want negative attention, don't be a public figure. I can say random stuff on Twitter because I have ~300 followers—even if every single one of them tweeted at me, it wouldn't matter.

Obviously the reason that Mallory got a bunch of repetitive responses to her tweet is because she has 64k followers.

People in the public eye have been dealing with attention for decades. If you don't want attention, get out of the public eye—being a part of the Twitter universe is not a requirement of being alive.