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Comment by Y_Y | Hacker News Reader

This article irritatingly mixes up the ß (eszett, or ss ligature), the italic version of the same ligature and the greek letter beta (or it's math-unicode alternative).

[edit: Originally I falsely accused the author of doing this, but the equation was actually originally written in terms of eszett. This is silly.]

Also I imagine if everyone started blocking real retweets like this people would just go back to the oldskool copy-paste method.

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> Also I imagine if everyone started blocking real retweets like this people would just go back to the oldskool copy-paste method.

Yet, other networks where retweeting (reposting) requires copy-paste has a much lower percentage of this. Anecdotally, almost nobody in my instagram feed are reposting other people's photos or text. There are applications to do so, or one could just copy-paste a screenshot. Yet, most people post only their own photos. On twitter, almost half of the posts I see on the first page are reposted retweets. How does it look for you?

Also, Raising the bar very little would make a huge impact due to the amplification of the network effect.

I agree with this, on Twitter and Facebook I will very often repost stuff, but on Instagram I never do. However, I do think it's hard to get noticed on Instagram (if that's what you want), due to the lack of native sharing, likes are on someone else's feed and often don't even get a follow from a popular share.

It may be related to the target platform for Instagram and Snapchat being mobile devices. Copy-pasting on mobile tends to be more cumbersome, and the slightest impediment to the UX can have a significant effect on how many times it occurs.

Even some networks with retweeting don't suffer this as much.

Most of my mastodon feed is posts, a retweet(boost) is probably one in 50 on a normal day, spiking to maybe one in 10.

It might be a cultural problem on twitter (maybe some mastodon communities have similar problems...)

No, the are no Greek letters in this article. There's only ß (U+00DF LATIN SMALL LETTER SHARP S).

What do you mean "nο"? The mix up here is that the equation given uses a symbol which is visually similar to a different symbol, in a confusing manner. In all my experience I don't think I've ever seen someone use ß (not beta) as a variable name, whereas it would be totally idiomatic to use beta there. There's no rule against it, but it looks like a mistake, or deliberate confusion. Did you notice that the word "no" in the first line used a lowercase omicron?

I checked the source [0] and that does indeed use ß, so I was wrong to blame the author of the piece. I now blame Jonah Peretti.

[0] https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/1158576/pages/uf-...

> What do you mean "nο"?

"No, the article doesn't mix up anything", perhaps?

As tome says, no the article isn't mixing anything up. So why are you insisting that it is?

You seem annoyed that the original creator of the formula used a symbol that you wouldn't have expected. So that's your beef. Not with this article, or any assumptions of "mixing up."

As for why the original creator used "ß", I don't know, but perhaps it related to the "S" in sharability. Or he's not a mathematician and he liked the look.

I think what the grandparent wanted to say is that every sharp S (ß) in the article should actually be Beta (β). The article probably refers to a certain slide[0] Jonah Peretti's presentation[1] "Mormons, Mullets and Maniacs" which actually uses a sharp S in italics. Seems to me like it should be a Beta indeed, especially since using a sharp S in this context would be rather unusual as far as I can tell.

[0]https://amp.businessinsider.com/images/4c655d457f8b9a711c7d0...

[1]http://www.businessinsider.com/jonah-perettis-awesome-viral-...

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