Facebook and the Silent Bob Effect (2019)
battlepenguin.com
battlepenguin.com
However if you're like Silent Bob and send out very few emails from your own self hosted server, you always get treated as though you're the next source of a major spam attack, despite having the same server and same email send rate for a decade.
As a dev I understand how this happens: it's all too easy to filter out the statistically insignificant. But we shouldn't.
I haven't found this to be true at all. Talking too little means your words don't get much weight in my experience.
This is not true for Silent Bob and the example band director because they have roles that command some amount of attention to begin with -- you're paying some attention to them when they're not talking.
In normal social interactions, in my experience, if you're very quiet then people just don't pay a lot of attention to you, and when you speak up it's not actually that jarring or novel. You haven't earned extra attention by not participating as a peer, you've earned less.
And if what you have to say is not something they already agree with they can easily go back to not spending their attention on you as soon as you stop talking.
Also I think it may explain why people like me don't spend much time on social media. Too much BS. It's like watching too much TV; it dulls the mind.
When people spend most of their time expressing their ideas instead of forming and researching their ideas, their ideas are just not as good.
That's an interesting interpretation. I guess it depends on the social milieu. In mine, people are attentive to what Silent Bobs say. Very often it's an interesting piece of information because it tends to be different from the usual chatter.
It's like, at some point, you leave your noisy/opinionated uncle speak in his corner at the family gathering. You don't mind him anymore.
Facebook went that route to me: what started to show up more and more from family and friends bored me away more and more, to the point I left. I prefer to pay the price to have no noisy-news and lose some "relatives" to only get the meaningful stuff when it matters. Left 2 years ago. No regret.
Twitter went the same route, about the time when the platform gained more public interest around 2015. Removed from my phone. Barely checking it now.
I tried Instagram alternatively. It's a pure marketing platform. Vaguely interesting as a pinterest-like journal.
It gets me back to blogs. Things that take more time (to setup/write, but also to find and read), bear more fruit.
Anyone want to build it with me?
At the core, I would do this by building a network graph of users who I've upvoted and users they've upvoted, and so on maybe a few levels deep. If anyone in that group of users has upvoted a comment, I want it on top - sorted by how many degrees of separation there are between me and the upvoter.
The very simplistic, single-faceted comment rankings that most places implement right now is, including Hacker News, is simply brain-dead IMO. I've brought this up before and 100% of the time, one of the responses I get is "sounds like a good way to build an echo chamber". It's not a bad thing actually. I think it more accurately models real life where we don't hang around with a bunch of people that we find disagreeable, even if they are in the majority and even if they're "right". With a system like the one I propose, everybody can feel comfortable, say what they want and things will most likely be way, way easier to moderate if they don't just moderate themselves.
er may be because of ... markets,democracy :). The majority have been trained to believe that the majority view is good.
If your users' needs are important to you, then your users need to be your customers - i.e. they need to be paying you.
If someone else is your customer, then their opinions and needs become more important than your users' opinions and needs.
The problem with Facebook is that advertisers are their customers and therefore they're the people that Facebook needs to keep happy. Providing a great experience for their users is secondary.
As users we get annoyed by this, but we're stuck with it until Facebook starts giving us the option to pay for our FB accounts. Which Zuck promised he'd never do.
So for your new shiny social network, the important question, as always, is: who's going to pay for it?
A protocol by itself indeed doesn't need a business model but clients for the protocol do need one.
They still don't need one, there can be many. Even if most people still end up with the gmail model, it's meaningfully different, because the switching cost is lower. You don't have to convince everybody you know to switch too.
Now suppose you're trying to solve the original problem. You've got feeds from a hundred users and you want a way to filter them yourself. If any service exists that provides this, using any business model, you can use it even if hardly anybody else does. You can also develop your own client that does this or commission someone to add the feature to an existing client.
More than that, if this is a feature many people want, now the ad-supported providers will need it too, because now they have to compete for users with the providers who are treating you as the customer instead of being insulated from competition by the network effect when they own the entire network.
And that's not going to be the norm. Most people don't want to self-host their email server, or even pay for it. They're happy trading their privacy for free gmail, and most don't even realise that this is a problem.
So as Nextgrid pointed out: that shifts the problem one step down the ladder. A commercial social client requires someone to pay for it.
Feeds in social media are severely limited for when you need to filter the content you want. What if you let people program their own filters and gave them enough flexibility.
There could be some way to share and reuse those filters maybe built on top of existing social networks as well so you won't miss out anything.
I would be able to switch to patio's feed for a week then someone else and check what they are reading.
Could work as a subscription model. Content creators or influencers can sell their feed filter as a service. What they see from twitter, reddit or hn, you can see it too.
I think it'd be pretty cool to have a curation algorithm that the user can control.
Currently I built a few simple aggregators:
But I am thinking of adding features to filter and surface, high signal/quality content.
I add, move, & remove frequently.
Another interesting dynamic on services permitting blocking is that, over time, the set of variously blocked accounts builds. This can go either way (submitter blocks follower, vice versa), but tends to result in interesting graph partitions over time.
Edit: Found it! https://fraidyc.at/
From the author:
> Fraidycat (https://fraidyc.at/) is a delightful browser extension for following people on the interwebs. It's an easy-to-use yet hackable, FOSS, privacy-respecting, and experimental next-generation feed aggregator and reader. Not every platform offers RSS, so Fraidycat tries to build those bridges for you, scraping and packaging it up for you automagically. It aims to enable you to tailor your own feeds, priorities, and timelines from across the web in your browser.
> Instead of being beholden to cycling through endless applications and platforms to follow people: use Fraidycat to simplify, defragment, and take ownership of your window into the lives of others on the web. Fraidycat is afraid of what the web has become (and is becoming), and it's savagely fighting back.
> I want to bypass the treadmills and middlemen which aim to commodify my attention span and the pipelines between me and others. I don't want my browser to become just some surveilled thin-client dehumanizingly displaying a walled-garden web engineered by whatever an oligarchy of corporations chooses for me. Fraidycat allows me to more independently use my resources to track and represent people on the web for me. I'm convinced it gives the power of surfing and taking the pulse of the web back to the user.
> You own the aggregation process with Fraidycat because it runs in your browser. Political and technological autonomy requires turnkey tooling for users to actively shape the algorithms which pick out what they find salient on their own terms and devices. We have to shape our own filter-bubbles and how we feed ourselves information. Fraidycat is the kind of a lens-crafting tool we need.
(I still believe that FB is cancer)(only came to read for Silent Bob!!!)
Now it would be awesome if FB lets me filter my news Excel Data Filter style.
There needs to be a revolution in curation of content. Music suffers the same fate until we find a solution.
NewsBlur has a nice feature called "infrequent site stories" that holds items like this. It's so much more useful to me than popularity-based measures.