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I don't think it's social media itself. Social media merely amplifies who people are. How one handles this amplification determines the utility one derives from

by wenc 9y ago

I don't think it's social media itself. Social media merely amplifies who people are. How one handles this amplification determines the utility one derives from social media. The HN crowd tends to be dismissive of social media (a lot of "get off my lawn types" around here), but I came from the world of BBSes, and to me social media is simply an evolution of what BBSes were. For years I tried to figure out how to reproduce the sense of community that BBSes brought about, but never found the right niche. Then I realized Facebook was actually a evolved version of a BBS. I am friends on social media with complex people (who understand nuance) who tend to use social media carefully. They use it to share events, describe experiences (in pictures and words), and once in a while write insightful status messages. They usually don't have extreme views, and tend to debate issues in an even-handed way. I find being on social media with these folks to be enriching because I get to learn a thing or two. If you follow the right folks on Twitter, you'll get to overhear a lot of conversations about the important issues in Python, R, or what have you, and gain a context that eludes most people who learn programming languages from books. Social media is good for that. Less complex people tend to share on whatever they found on Reddit, their favorite political website or whatever trashy site that supports their preconceived notions. They tend not to write a lot of prose, and when they do it's not very well-thought out. Many of our older less tech-savvy relatives tend to fall into this category. We tolerate these people because we're related to them, but they are the ones who use social media in a somewhat unhelpful fashion. And before social media they found entertainment in forwarding fake news emails without verifying them on Snopes. But we mostly dismiss them because their believability factor is low anyway. In the middle are the really dangerous folks, the really intelligent but extremely partisan folks. I won't name names, but if you follow certain celebrities in the AI world, they will often share partisan and unexamined articles that reveal their political bias. You would think the more intelligent someone is, the more of a critical thinker they would be, but it turns out that most people who are good at one thing aren't usually good at everything.

659087 9y ago
BBSes weren't collecting psychological profiles, facial recognition data, credit card transaction histories, public records, etc.. to build profiles with which to manipulate their users on a mass scale. BBSes didn't encourage users to share information about their friends and family who weren't on those BBSes with them. BBSes didn't follow their users around on other BBSes and document everything they did or said on them. BBSes didn't track their users' physical locations 24/7. They also didn't have psychologists on staff helping them to figure out how to make their services as addictive as possible by exploiting various flaws in human psychology. Nobody ever said "if I stop using this BBS I'll lose contact with my friends and family". Beyond the very basic fact that people sometimes communicated with each other over BBSes, there is absolutely no comparison between them and what is happening right now.
Spooky23 9y ago
BBS was a totally different phenomenon... a network based community of interest. Facebook is different. It is a scaffold built around your existing relationships. Like a scaffold, it appears to support that fundamental structure. But unlike a scaffold, it tries to shape the underlying structure. Unlike a BBS, whose constraint was enabling people to access, it is optimized to maximize consumption of itself. Facebook can be a community, and used to be more community like, but it’s designed to be something entirely different.
crpatino 9y ago
> Social media merely amplifies who people are. How one handles this amplification determines the utility one derives from social media. In a world where most people are, - for the lack of a better term, - idiots, any eaglitarian amplification technology has a negative net value added to society. This is specially true if the meanest and biggest idiots are celebrated and emulated by the kind-of-not-so-bad majority of citizens.
prostoalex 9y ago
There are slight UI hints and overall content creation experience that drives the quality of the dialog. On consumption side, even if someone creates a long and thoughtful well-balanced post, on Facebook it's likely to be hidden with a "see more" link after the first sentence or two, so long and thoughtful doesn't get as heavy of distribution as short, witty and too often simplistic. On creation side, the single-line text-field does not encourage a long and thoughtful point-by-point debate either, it's designed for "omg, lol, this sucks" type of feedback.
RonanTheGrey 9y ago
What strikes me about the experience you are describing (your own on social media) is how active a role you have taken in your experience of it. You should know that very, very few do this: they absorb the medium as it is presented. I have watched people completely tune out to their children playing with knives, cars coming at them, etc. because their focus is so absorbed with what is being presented. This behavior is directly traceable to the reward mechanism in the brain and our ever-increasing need for it if we indulge the addiction. When the entirety of a platform is created with the intent to addict you, and ever color, line, word, behavior is designed with that intent, you have to be particularly strong-willed to resist it, much less even to notice it. Subtlety is the key, and these systems are getting very very good at making you believe you are willingly participating when really, you just can't make yourself stop. Facebook has a place, and the way you've described your use of it is a great example. I try very hard to use it in much the same way. But for most people, there's a great line I loved from Stargate SG-1 all those years ago that describes the path they must take to having a healthy life where social media is concerned: "The only way to win is to deny it battle."
forapurpose 9y ago
> You would think the more intelligent someone is, the more of a critical thinker they would be IME, many intelligent, successful people are merely manipulated in a different way, by appealing to their egos. They don't believe they are vulnerable to manipulation; they believe that they can detect if someone is lying and that if something is persuasive to them then it meets a high standard. I've known salespeople who sell to the wealthy and successful; it's just a different sales pitch, AFAICT.
Splines 9y ago
> If you follow the right folks on Twitter, you'll get to overhear a lot of conversations about the important issues in Python, R, or what have you, and gain a context that eludes most people who learn programming languages from books. I've tried this a few times, but discoverability on Twitter is impossible. I don't know who's an authority, digging through someone's past posts is hard, following a discussion is really difficult. It feels like I'm tasked with digging through a SMS chat log looking for content. Am I just doing it wrong? I can't keep up with twitter. I follow 20-30 accounts and inevitably every time I open up the app and there's 600+ unread posts. I couldn't imagine following any more than that.
- wenc 9y ago
  It takes a bit of work to figure out who the influencers are. For instance, in R you will want to follow Hadley Wickham (tidyverse), figure out who replies to his threads and build out your list from there. In Python, I started off following folks whose PyCon talks I liked. Certain names come up often in the Python world, names like Dave Beazley, Raymond Hettinger, Wes McKinney, Jake VanderPlas, etc. I started there and built out my list. I'll admit some days there is low signal to noise because lots of folks interleave their technical tweets with tweets about their personal lives or tweets of (sometimes very funny) jokes. But I accept it because life is like that. When you meet people at a social gathering, you can only talk shop for so long. Software development is as much sociology as it is code slinging. It's often as important to know why (the motivations, use cases) something is done a certain way as it is how it is done (algorithms). There is explicit knowledge, and there is tacit knowledge, and the latter is harder to mine but gives one a deeper understanding of the whys as opposed to the hows. Yes it is easily to be overwhelmed, but that is the price one pays for picking the brains of people who build the tools you use every day. Once in a while you pick up something valuable which makes it all worthwhile.
- patmcguire 9y ago
  The much-maligned "things you may have missed" box helps. Also giving up on reading every tweet.

by wenc 9y ago

659087 9y ago

BBSes weren't collecting psychological profiles, facial recognition data, credit card transaction histories, public records, etc.. to build profiles with which to manipulate their users on a mass scale. BBSes didn't encourage users to share information about their friends and family who weren't on those BBSes with them. BBSes didn't follow their users around on other BBSes and document everything they did or said on them. BBSes didn't track their users' physical locations 24/7. They also didn't have psychologists on staff helping them to figure out how to make their services as addictive as possible by exploiting various flaws in human psychology. Nobody ever said "if I stop using this BBS I'll lose contact with my friends and family". Beyond the very basic fact that people sometimes communicated with each other over BBSes, there is absolutely no comparison between them and what is happening right now.

Spooky23 9y ago

BBS was a totally different phenomenon... a network based community of interest. Facebook is different. It is a scaffold built around your existing relationships. Like a scaffold, it appears to support that fundamental structure. But unlike a scaffold, it tries to shape the underlying structure. Unlike a BBS, whose constraint was enabling people to access, it is optimized to maximize consumption of itself. Facebook can be a community, and used to be more community like, but it’s designed to be something entirely different.

crpatino 9y ago

> Social media merely amplifies who people are. How one handles this amplification determines the utility one derives from social media. In a world where most people are, - for the lack of a better term, - idiots, any eaglitarian amplification technology has a negative net value added to society. This is specially true if the meanest and biggest idiots are celebrated and emulated by the kind-of-not-so-bad majority of citizens.

prostoalex 9y ago

There are slight UI hints and overall content creation experience that drives the quality of the dialog. On consumption side, even if someone creates a long and thoughtful well-balanced post, on Facebook it's likely to be hidden with a "see more" link after the first sentence or two, so long and thoughtful doesn't get as heavy of distribution as short, witty and too often simplistic. On creation side, the single-line text-field does not encourage a long and thoughtful point-by-point debate either, it's designed for "omg, lol, this sucks" type of feedback.

RonanTheGrey 9y ago

What strikes me about the experience you are describing (your own on social media) is how active a role you have taken in your experience of it. You should know that very, very few do this: they absorb the medium as it is presented. I have watched people completely tune out to their children playing with knives, cars coming at them, etc. because their focus is so absorbed with what is being presented. This behavior is directly traceable to the reward mechanism in the brain and our ever-increasing need for it if we indulge the addiction. When the entirety of a platform is created with the intent to addict you, and ever color, line, word, behavior is designed with that intent, you have to be particularly strong-willed to resist it, much less even to notice it. Subtlety is the key, and these systems are getting very very good at making you believe you are willingly participating when really, you just can't make yourself stop. Facebook has a place, and the way you've described your use of it is a great example. I try very hard to use it in much the same way. But for most people, there's a great line I loved from Stargate SG-1 all those years ago that describes the path they must take to having a healthy life where social media is concerned: "The only way to win is to deny it battle."

forapurpose 9y ago

> You would think the more intelligent someone is, the more of a critical thinker they would be IME, many intelligent, successful people are merely manipulated in a different way, by appealing to their egos. They don't believe they are vulnerable to manipulation; they believe that they can detect if someone is lying and that if something is persuasive to them then it meets a high standard. I've known salespeople who sell to the wealthy and successful; it's just a different sales pitch, AFAICT.

Splines 9y ago

> If you follow the right folks on Twitter, you'll get to overhear a lot of conversations about the important issues in Python, R, or what have you, and gain a context that eludes most people who learn programming languages from books. I've tried this a few times, but discoverability on Twitter is impossible. I don't know who's an authority, digging through someone's past posts is hard, following a discussion is really difficult. It feels like I'm tasked with digging through a SMS chat log looking for content. Am I just doing it wrong? I can't keep up with twitter. I follow 20-30 accounts and inevitably every time I open up the app and there's 600+ unread posts. I couldn't imagine following any more than that.

wenc 9y ago
It takes a bit of work to figure out who the influencers are. For instance, in R you will want to follow Hadley Wickham (tidyverse), figure out who replies to his threads and build out your list from there. In Python, I started off following folks whose PyCon talks I liked. Certain names come up often in the Python world, names like Dave Beazley, Raymond Hettinger, Wes McKinney, Jake VanderPlas, etc. I started there and built out my list. I'll admit some days there is low signal to noise because lots of folks interleave their technical tweets with tweets about their personal lives or tweets of (sometimes very funny) jokes. But I accept it because life is like that. When you meet people at a social gathering, you can only talk shop for so long. Software development is as much sociology as it is code slinging. It's often as important to know why (the motivations, use cases) something is done a certain way as it is how it is done (algorithms). There is explicit knowledge, and there is tacit knowledge, and the latter is harder to mine but gives one a deeper understanding of the whys as opposed to the hows. Yes it is easily to be overwhelmed, but that is the price one pays for picking the brains of people who build the tools you use every day. Once in a while you pick up something valuable which makes it all worthwhile.
patmcguire 9y ago
The much-maligned "things you may have missed" box helps. Also giving up on reading every tweet.