nemild

I won't speak to censorship, but I will speak to the distribution incentives in social media algorithms.

If these attacks got less free distribution, they might be less likely to occur. Part of the incentive around horrific attacks like this is to get free marketing (aka, earned media) for a cause (as the killer makes clear in his manifesto).

And to add some data, here's my analysis of Islamic terrorism vs. homicide coverage in the NY Times (as you can imagine, the scarier or more horrific the attack, the more distribution it gets in the press):

https://www.nemil.com/s/part2-terrorism.html

And comparison of every death type by coverage:

https://www.nemil.com/s/part3-horror-films.html

And for an older take, I loved this book on the first transatlantic telegraph cable as a child:

Cyrus Field's Big Dream: The Daring Effort to Lay the First Transatlantic Telegraph Cable

This. Here's a piece that I wrote that touches on this dissonance:

What Open Source Can Learn From Slack https://www.nemil.com/musings/oss-and-slack.html

> Third, we generally overweight the importance of our personal values when developing a product — without considering how users will make their decision.

> For example, users do value privacy, but many won’t switch to a product that protects their privacy if it means losing what they have — unlike so many of those commenting in Hacker News threads.

Reupping Nadia Eghbal's excellent, Lemonade Stand: A handy guide to financial support for open source

https://github.com/nayafia/lemonade-stand

This document aims to provide an exhaustive list of all the ways that people get paid for open source work. Hopefully, projects and contributors will find this helpful in figuring out the best options for them.

Based on your article, you sound pretty bad ass by having gone through the journey. I'm doubtful you'd have that by staying. It's a pretty remarkable path, and I respect you for that!

What I find fascinating is how we can quantify this bias. Here are two examples of my research on the NY Times with terrorism coverage by region + general coverage by country:

How Media Fuels our Fear of Western Terrorism: https://www.nemil.com/s/part2-terrorism.html

Visualizing 10 years of International Coverage in The New York Times: https://www.nemil.com/s/nytimes-international-coverage.html

Ezra Taft Benson: "One must select wisely a source of news; otherwise it would be better to be uninformed than misinformed."

My own view is that you should reduce consumption dramatically, but still read some publications. And realize that in software, we have our own form of “news” that this missive applies to.

Here’s my media literacy guide:

https://github.com/nemild/hack-the-media/blob/master/README....

And one just for the tech industry (including HN):

https://github.com/nemild/hack-the-media/blob/master/softwar...

This is quite an amazing story, love the persistence and passion.

One note. Just because the patents are expiring, doesn't mean this can't still succeed. Inventors and scientists sometimes think that legal defensibility is what allows you to monetize an invention (it echoes some of the debates I've had with my father, a scientist).

Instead, well after a Chinese knockoff is in market, I could see a niche product succeed when seeding it with the right early adopter community, using just Instagram/YouTube, and having great branding.

A product category is not "done" when there's a manufacturer in the market.

Thank you for sharing all this!

Because for shareholders, the stock price only appreciates if the company grows.

In many ways, it mirrors the issues for Hacker News entrepreneurs. To get VC capital, you have to dangle promises high returns on your equity — even if a consistent cashflow business is a great outcome for an entrepreneur (these businesses are pejoratively called "lifestyle businesses").

The irony is that the current headline will perform better when shared on Facebook than a fully accurate headline.

Facebook sets the incentives for every media producer today.

One thing I'm always reminded of when I hear about an HN reader bemoaning a feature/policy: Behind every feature change (like auto plays), there's a product manager who's tested changes to show that it maximizes some short-term metric.

Users get the products they "want", not what they need — or deserve:

Make Something People Need

> We are surrounded by well engineered — and increasingly addictive — technology that shapes what we do and how we think. Especially when you work at a large tech company, how do you trade giving users what they want and your own business’s profitability, with the negative effects that this leads to?

https://www.nemil.com/musings/make-something-people-need.htm...

I think you'll enjoy the series then, I spent several months investigating and made the same point about JSON and the Javascript-like CLI (plus great Node support, plus savvy marketing). For example:

> 10gen's key contributions to databases — and to our industry — was their laser focus on four critical things: onboarding, usability, libraries and support. For startup teams, these were important factors in choosing MongoDB — and a key reason for its powerful word of mouth.

Startup Engineers and Our Mistakes with MongoDB

https://www.nemil.com/mongo/2.html

The Marketing Behind MongoDB

https://www.nemil.com/mongo/3.html

The Guardian example was heavily used by MongoDB as a case study to pitch their database to others in 2011:

https://www.mongodb.com/customers/guardian

https://www.mongodb.com/presentations/mongodb-guardian

https://www.slideshare.net/tackers/why-we-chose-mongodb-for-...

And reupping my previous, three-part series on MongoDB:

On MongoDB

NoSQL databases were the future. MongoDB was the database for "modern" web engineers and used by countless startups. What happened?

https://www.nemil.com/mongo/index.html

I actually think both programs have benefits and downsides.

A friend (a founder of a dev tool company used by most Silicon Valley companies) and I were just laughing the other day about the issues with CS grads.

His main concern with the smartest CompSci people was their bias to write code and reinvent tools, as everyting else was boring. Graduates are over focused on algorithms, and CS programs rarely teach engineering.

Just a counterpoint to “bootcamps are bad.”

I think every cohort of software engineers learns this in their own way. I wrote this three years ago.

Chasing the Shiny and New in Software

https://www.nemil.com/musings/shinyandnew.html

“I worry that some programmers (and their employers) have this attitude, namely a focus on transitioning stacks to the newest. They pick companies primarily based on the framework, aiming for the latest instead of the best tool for the job. They spend their time playing with new libraries and frameworks, instead of improving their core technical skills. Let's call them stack chasers - those pushing for new technologies (or their own favorite technologies) in a startup's stack, with limited advantages for key outputs (software capabilities that users value, development team productivity).”

I find three key underlying factors:

1. Using marketing (including Hacker News posts), to make tech choices

2. Not having the historical context to realize how ephemeral so many current tools are

3. Software training programs stress DSLs and frameworks because they help you get jobs the fastest (same with job posts)

For practical advice, I always loved Dan McKinley’s concept of a fixed budget of innovation tokens:

Choose Boring Technology http://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology

A NY Times journalist explains why some wars are less covered in the US (by comparing Syria coverage to Yemen coverage in the US):

"Conflicts gain sustained American attention only when they provide a compelling story line that appeals to both the public and political actors, and for reasons beyond the human toll. That often requires some combination of immediate relevance to American interests, resonance with American political debates or cultural issues, and, perhaps most of all, an emotionally engaging frame of clearly identifiable good guys and bad guys."

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/02/world/why-some-wars-like-...

A small quib: filter bubbles don’t require using personal data. But they are about giving readers what they want.

In a very different context, I ran an analysis of terrorism coverage in the NY Times to measure what a geographic filter bubble looks like:

How Media Fuels Our Fear of Western Terrorism

https://www.nemil.com/s/part2-terrorism.html

I also ran the same analysis for all the articles over a decade by geography (and compared to population, GDP, etc):

Visualizing 10 years of International Coverage in the NY Times

https://www.nemil.com/s/nytimes-international-coverage.html

While filter bubbles are more pervasive in digital media (where we can segment each user, including with personal information), they’ve also always existed.

Max Planck:

“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

Or more succinctly, science advances one funeral at a time.

I don't agree. Facebook has to make changes given the risk of regulation, reputational risk, recruiting challenges, and the mismatch in their own self-professed mission.

We can debate if the change will be substantial enough to truly change things (I'm doubtful), but they have already made changes due to this media coverage (hiring more content moderators as just one example).

Throughout history, media has always had to weigh the tradeoffs of informing people vs engaging people. Yellow journalism in the US was an example of when the engagement imperative overwhelmed the informing imperative, and the issues did lead to changes in media. Facebook is going through this same journey (though painfully and slowly).

> This explanation serves to protect Zuckerberg and Sandberg from additional blame, even as Sandberg strives to show she’s not passing the buck by noting “I want to be clear that I oversee our Comms team and take full responsibility for their work and the PR firms who work with us.”

> Schrage’s defense of his bosses provides additional cover for Zuckerberg’s comments from a CNN interview that ran tonight in which he said he won’t step down as Facebook’s chairman and hopes to continue working alongside Sandberg for decades to come. The memo could have been aimed at quieting internal unrest about Facebook’s chief lobbyist Joel Kaplan. His ties to the GOP, support for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and involvement with Facebook’s latest PR troubles had led some employees to question his employment. Now Facebook has someone else to take the heat.

> Schrage is effectively jumping on the grenade here.

https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/20/schrage-definers/

For those interested, I did my own reflection into Facebook.

Inside the Bubble at Facebook: https://www.nemil.com/tdf/part1-employees.html

That's the one I'd read as well!

My dad (now data science/stats professor) was at the 1986 version of this talk at Bellcore (where he spent almost two decades working). He speaks glowingly of it.

Original transcript and previous HN discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4626349

EDIT: I can have my dad respond on this thread, if anyone has questions about Hamming — or the Bell Labs culture.

Any chance you know the pieces where he most focuses on this?

I loved this quote:

> “Employees are wising up to the fact that you can have a mission statement on your website, but when you’re looking at how the company creates new products or makes decisions, the correlation between the two is not so tightly aligned,” said David Chie, the head of Palo Alto Staffing, a tech job placement service in Silicon Valley. “Everyone’s having this conversation.”

I call these anodyne mission statements, false mission. Mission that feels good, but that doesn't have teeth in incentives — or selectively ignores inconvenient facts.

Beware False Mission

https://www.nemil.com/snippets/beware-false-mission.html

I spent the last two years reflecting on FB (was an early employee in social media), and put some reflections on the bubble at Facebook:

https://www.nemil.com/tdf/part1-employees.html

Management will laud what employees do, show them selective facts that justify their views, and hire/promote those who behave similarly to them. Employees in isolated teams with training in a single function may not realize the broad, unintended effects of their company's work. They'll assume the best of their friends and coworkers, without inquiring into the larger effects they're having.

I hope not. I’d be curious who’s telling you to treat them as sainted inviduals.

Here’s my media literacy guide that catalogs all the biases (contributions welcome):

https://github.com/nemild/hack-the-media/blob/master/README....

In that vein, I'm looking for contributors to my financial media literacy guide:

https://github.com/nemild/hack-the-media/blob/master/financi...

It's a new version of my broader software eng media literacy guide:

https://github.com/nemild/hack-the-media/blob/master/softwar...

And more:

https://consensys.github.io/smart-contract-best-practices/

http://dasp.co

Disclaimer: I contributed to the first link.

Also, I wrote this a while back for any experienced engineers that want to learn Solidity:

https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/solidity/

I disagree. Both sides can have issues, and it's not primarily the fault of "managers." You can see some issues that I list elsewhere in this thread.

The part I do agree with is that responsibility to address the issues often is in management.

I do wonder if every tribe thinks they're good, and it's the other side at fault? ... I think about this a lot in my media literacy work, where I explore the empathy gap:

https://www.nemil.com/s/part2-terrorism.html

https://github.com/nemild/hack-the-media/blob/master/README....