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gopher2

509 karma · joined October 27, 2014

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gopher2··on A Content Marketing Strategy
I thought the article was "alright"

My impression is sometimes people see a certain topic and want to talk about it and upvote. Regardless of it being high quality article or novel. Not saying that's right but it happens.

And sometimes low-quality content gets a better signal, because people want to pick it apart in the comments. Which looks engaging to the ranking rules.

gopher2··on An oral history of the 2010s
The decade tech lost its way, except TikTok

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/10/arts/TIK-TOK....

gopher2··on Thoughts on San Francisco
With or without the opening statement being true, which is a matter of opinion, it's a pretty interesting city sociologically.
gopher2··on The world needs more search engines
I'd like a better (paid) way to search for medical advice/information
gopher2··on Thousands of Facebook internal documents and emails published online
Business Insider: we haven't read these documents and are "combing through them" right now, but they're explosive!
gopher2··on Ray Dalio says the world is in a ‘great sag’ and echoes the 1930s
I’ve found Ray Dalio’s macro pontificating to be kind of useless. Remember when we were having a “beautiful deleveraging.” Now we’re in a “great sag.”

Makes more sense to me that these guys are just talking their book at a conceptual level because reflexivity.

gopher2··on Why Aren’t We Talking About LinkedIn?
For #3 you can go to their profile and block them if they're really worth it. I think you only get like 100 blocks and then you just have to suffer through the motivational inspiration-porn quotes :)
gopher2··on U.S. Designates China as Currency Manipulator
Thanks. TIL this is a real thing. Let the bilateral negotiations begin!
gopher2··on U.S. Designates China as Currency Manipulator
Now what?

Is there a legal designation or meaning to currency-manipulator I'm unaware of, or is this basically like the Chinese designating Trump a "name-caller."

gopher2··on Equifax removed the $125 claim payout option after millions submitted claims
I'll accept my payment in stock.
gopher2··on Facebook Is Dying
There's like one sentence of "because I said so" analysis in this article. The idea that Facebook is dying because MAU is growing faster than DAU is basically ... dumb. Both numbers are going up. Facebook users are growing. Feels like people just like upvoting anything anti-Facebook even if the content doesn't really make the case well or at all.
gopher2··on Tesla co-founder and CTO JB Straubel stepping down
For me it's mostly that I don't like overly-promotional liars. And the "saving the world" schtick wears thin. Hate would be a strong word though.
gopher2··on To Break Google’s Monopoly on Search, Make Its Index Public
I don't think this would help our social fabric, which the article says Google is "tearing apart." Why do we need to break Google's monopoly on search again? Which they don't actually have.
gopher2··on Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations
Of course they are! There are user researchers, people looking for spam and abuse, people tagging data, among other things who are absolutely looking at your: private messages, search queries, profiles viewed, Alexa conversations, Tinder messages, bookmarks, call history, purchase history, geolocation history... and on and on. I guess there are a lot of news stories left to write on this topic.
gopher2··on Libra, 2 Weeks In
The large price fluctuations that bitcoin has are also undesirable for some.
gopher2··on Superhuman embeds tracking pixels in user emails
I think what gets me is the juxtaposition of the brand name and this functionality. Superhuman sounds like it should be all about making the email sender more productive. And not about tracking time-stamped geotags of my actions as the receiver.
gopher2··on Bernie Sanders to unveil plan to cancel all $1.6T of student loan debt
How about everyone gets free money, and the student loan holders can use it to pay off their degrees?
gopher2··on What Happens After Amazon’s Domination Is Complete? Its Bookstore Offers Clues
Yeah, don't buy it on Amazon if you don't literally want to purchase the knock-off version.
gopher2··on Startup idea checklist
> People might say otherwise, but that’s because they’ve been largely conditioned to react that way.

Perhaps you are the one that's been conditioned?

gopher2··on Facebook moderators break NDAs to expose working conditions
Would be interested in seeing some kind of legislation where content moderation jobs that deal with XYZ categories of content must be compensate at least some % downtime/recovery. So e.g. in an 8 hour day you can only spend 4 hours a day doing moderation, and 4 hours of 'paid mental preparation' for doing the moderation work.
gopher2··on Facebook reveals its cryptocurrency Libra
Good question. I think it will get plenty of hate, but most countries don't have the level of Facebook hate that the USA/Europe has, and lots of people don't particularly care about the crusade against Facebook. It would probably get a lot less hate if they weren't involved, but here we are? NYTimes takedown coming in hot!
gopher2··on Terry Pratchett warns Bill Gates about fake news (1995)
Fake news is a pendulum. Now we have it, we start to know what it is, we start to understand how it's created and distributed. Things can start swinging the other way. But this takes time.

If you really wanted to end fake news and had unlimited time and money, a great way to do it would be to publish as much completely fake news as possible, so that people figure out that they need to use reputable, trusted sources, or end up a fool. Out of money, out of time, and that what they believed after learning about it on a Facebook group or reddit was wrong. People learn from painful experiences the most, unfortunately. So some people have learned from Trump getting elected. Others haven't learned, some probably won't. It's very easy to be fooled.

If you think of fake news like a virus, then publishing more fake news acts kind of like an anti-virus. Distributing a version of the problem that is easier for the immune system to detect and combat and won't kill anyone - to inoculate against the real thing.

Bill Gates is right. He's just early.

gopher2··on Elizabeth Warren puts a giant tech breakup billboard in San Francisco’s face
Seriously. It's like they want 4 more years of Trump. It's mind blowing.
gopher2··on Updated Dropbox plans get more storage and improved capabilities
Pretty sure the idea is not to be Netflix and offer a family plan, it's to sell a suite of features into small businesses and corporations. E.g. They just acquired HelloSign.

You should move to iCloud if you absolutely want those features unless they say they're building them or you anticipate some form of auto-tagging and face recognition being useful for professional/business users.

gopher2··on Nancy Pelosi and Fakebook Dirty Tricks
So, what's the normative suggestion here? All content on user-generated websites should be moderated for truth and anything edited, editorialized, fictional, or not strictly representing reality should be removed?

Or is the idea that only when there is enough public pressure to take down a particularly popular and deceptive video ... then it should be removed?

It seems sort of ridiculous that we should engage in across-the-board censorship of anything mis-representing reality in any way. OTOH removing things only as they become popular enough to go viral and meet some agreed upon definition of "fake" enough seems like it would establish a permanent, weird shouting match with no clear rules.

Or is the idea that we should ban and penalize Facebook specifically? Because they're Facebook. I don't really get that, but okay. We could do that. I don't think it would solve the user-generated content problem or the fake news problem.

We could not allow any website with posts, images and comments that isn't filtered through a some sort of sacred guardian of truth/editorial board. That sounds like a pretty locked-down version internet.

As some other commenters mentioned, the fact that the President/right-wing seem into this sort of approach and that this video became popular in the first place is a separate, sad issue.

I'd love for the NYTimes to spell out what they're advocating FOR as the solution. If it's just "delete facebook" and read our comments section instead, well-played I guess.

gopher2··on Founder Books
Haha, okay then. Carry on?
gopher2··on FB CTO Now Faces the Task of Cleaning It Up. Sometimes That Brings Him to Tears
Good read. I'm glad people are working on these challenges. Facebook gets the most press coverage and is the biggest platform, but if free expression and assembly is to occur online you kinda have to figure out approaches for these kinds of problems.
gopher2··on Birds are being vacuumed up as part of olive harvesting in the Mediterranean
Actually in the real world there are plenty of people who will learn about this and change how they buy olives.
gopher2··on Walking Away from the Product I Spent a Year Building
Not that it'd be easy but I imagine that you can steal their customers by adding chat rooms and integrations slowly to some other type of software, rather than a more direct angle where you have to win at one of those two moments.
gopher2··on Free Dropbox Accounts Now Only Sync to Three Devices
I would be curious to learn/hear some of the backstory on how they picked 3, since where to draw the line with freemium seems like it's hard to get right.
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