Hacker News Reader

Comment by kough | Hacker News Reader

Omits one of the most interesting facts about BuzzFeed: it was started by a member of MIT's Media Lab [0]. It all made sense once I started viewing it as the result of research into content virality. Internally I think of it more like a "profitable social/cultural experiment" than "media company".

[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/06/business/media/at-buzzfeed...

View on HN

The whole thing about the "science of viral content" has always seemed like fluffy nonsense to me to make the stakeholders feel like they are part of something "higher brow" and more complex than just a spammy blog.

To be fair though the "science" of anything social always seems like fluffy nonsense made to make spaghetti throwing on the wall seem like methodical, analytical research.

Related: "Is Computer Science Science?" https://www.cs.mtu.edu/~john/jenning.pdf

> What is your profession?

Computer science.

> Oh? Is that a science?

Sure, it is the science of information processes and their interactions with the world.

> I’ll accept that what you do is technology; but not science. Science deals with fundamental laws of nature. Computers are manmade. Their principles come from other fields such as physics and electronics engineering.

...

Science is manmade and man is of nature.

It's true that most programmers do not do computer science but CS as a science does exist. CS is the study of data structures and algorithms. CS can be viewed as a branch of mathematics but it is much more process oriented than most math disciplines.

If aliens ever land they're going to have the exact same sorting algorithms we have. Their history of CPUs will be the same as ours.

Unless they have quantum computers or something completely different that we have not thought of. There's a good chance that our conception of computer science, or even science for that mater, is completely unique in the universe, like a snowflake. Science is merely a model humans use to understand the world around them, with limited success.

Unless they chose the ternary path. It’s closer to base e and therefore closer to optimal than binary.

If your measurements are good enough you can make a methodology out of throwing spaghetti at a wall.

Spammy blogs just wither and die. They do not produce a huge company like Buzzfeed.

I felt similarly until I saw Fletcher Heisler (TrackMaven) give the talk Analyzing social media data with Python at PyOhio '14.

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeSUUJFiHFY

Code + Jupyter Notebook: https://github.com/fheisler/pyohio2014

Yeah I always kinda wrote off BuzzFeed as listicles for people who can't take the time to actually read news (which it definitely still is in some sense) but then I saw Jonah Peretti speak [0] and I've been a lot more interested in it since then

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V82JTa3iJfk

See also http://www.datawranglers.com/negations/issues/96w/96w_perett... , note the author. Negations was a humanities journal.

Very interesting -- thanks for the pointer

Not even that profitable, as another commenter linked to:

http://nymag.com/following/2016/04/buzzfeed-halves-revenue-t...

An experiment? Hardly. At least certainly not any more.

They use data to deliver their cancerous content, just in the same way coke uses AB flavor testing to determine what the most addictive coke formula is.

Calling them "scientists" performing "experiments" seems far too dignified.

Original coke. That's the addictive one. New coke didn't work.

Huh, didn't even know this. So this is why BuzzFeed comes across as ADD in website form...

Who was also a co-founder of The Huffington Post and, most interestingly to me, is the brother of comedian Chelsea Peretti.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com