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How come that the bigger the service becomes the more prone it is to manipulations like that? It's always the same story: the service is relatively new, it beco

How come that the bigger the service becomes the more prone it is to manipulations like that? It's always the same story: the service is relatively new, it becomes big, then it starts introducing algorithms that mess with the natural order of the submissions (time added, votes etc.) and then it comes to light that someone was manipulating this system in order to push their agenda. The same applies to reddit and (I think?) twitter.

ju3 10y ago
Cause Engineers understand simple neat equations. They will happily tell you they can scale their system up to a billion people, but what happens when a billion people start interacting with each other they have no idea. In other words read Jurassic Park.
mathattack 10y ago
The more that algorithms get used, the harder it is to see when manipulation is occuring. This is especially true if there is confirmation bias. If I'm an exec that leans libertarian (or left, or right, or whatever) and those are the articles that I see, I assume it's working. Moreso, if I see what's getting posted elsewehre, I just assume the rest of the world is smart like me. You have to really dig in to see that something is going wrong. This involves setting up unbiased metrics that can't be gamed (hard) and listening to data that disagrees with your preconceptions (even harder).
nailer 10y ago
> (I think?) twitter Twitter definitely: they removed Milo Yiannopolis' identity verification tick without citing a specific reason. You might not like what he has to say (I frequently don't) but there have been much worse things Twitter doesn't seem to care about at all (someone threatening to murder Donald Trump). I don't want Twitter or any other media to become an echo chamber.
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matt4077 10y ago
The obvious answer is that you're just not going to hear about something like this happening at some obscure webapp. These sites are also started by young programmers who tend to have a libertarian, naive tec-utopian bend. At some point they notice that the wisdom of crowds is usually anything but, or their girlfriend/daughter/advertiser explains to them how the 600th image with a racist, misogynistic attack on your CEO isn't just a shining beacon of free speech. Or it doesn't actually happen, and at some point you just get a few disgruntled ex-emps running to Gizmodo because they can only think of CENSORSHIP!!1! when you act on the assumption that the NYT is higher quality than Drudge.

ju3 10y ago

Cause Engineers understand simple neat equations. They will happily tell you they can scale their system up to a billion people, but what happens when a billion people start interacting with each other they have no idea. In other words read Jurassic Park.

mathattack 10y ago

The more that algorithms get used, the harder it is to see when manipulation is occuring. This is especially true if there is confirmation bias. If I'm an exec that leans libertarian (or left, or right, or whatever) and those are the articles that I see, I assume it's working. Moreso, if I see what's getting posted elsewehre, I just assume the rest of the world is smart like me. You have to really dig in to see that something is going wrong. This involves setting up unbiased metrics that can't be gamed (hard) and listening to data that disagrees with your preconceptions (even harder).

nailer 10y ago

> (I think?) twitter Twitter definitely: they removed Milo Yiannopolis' identity verification tick without citing a specific reason. You might not like what he has to say (I frequently don't) but there have been much worse things Twitter doesn't seem to care about at all (someone threatening to murder Donald Trump). I don't want Twitter or any other media to become an echo chamber.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

matt4077 10y ago

The obvious answer is that you're just not going to hear about something like this happening at some obscure webapp. These sites are also started by young programmers who tend to have a libertarian, naive tec-utopian bend. At some point they notice that the wisdom of crowds is usually anything but, or their girlfriend/daughter/advertiser explains to them how the 600th image with a racist, misogynistic attack on your CEO isn't just a shining beacon of free speech. Or it doesn't actually happen, and at some point you just get a few disgruntled ex-emps running to Gizmodo because they can only think of CENSORSHIP!!1! when you act on the assumption that the NYT is higher quality than Drudge.