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tl; dr: 1. Joel Spolsky, co-founder of stack-overflow, and well-known software commentator disavows twitter/facebook. 2. Theorizes that twitter's low-characte

tl; dr: 1. Joel Spolsky, co-founder of stack-overflow, and well-known software commentator disavows twitter/facebook. 2. Theorizes that twitter's low-character limit leads to misunderstanding, which leads to conflict, which leads to drama, which is addictive to our "rubber-necker" tendencies. Cites personal experience and hashtag wars in a comedic example. 3. Furthers that facebook's machine-learning is (advertantly?) accomplishing the same effect, by selecting for things that elicit a strong response (mistaken as "engagement"). 4. Proposes that facebook uses "intermittent reinforcement" to ration out its good content slowly, forcing users to spend excess time on the site to get to the small amounts of interesting material they enjoy. 5. Proposes that these naive attention-optimizing algorithms can lead to much "shriller" political battles. Raises a moral obligation to engineers to acknowledge the large-scale social consequences of simple algorithms.

mundo 9y ago
Perhaps an essay arguing that Twitter flamewars, "...emerged from the fact that we’ve taken a medium, text, which is already bad at conveying emotion and sentiment and high-bandwidth nuance, and [by limiting message length] made it even worse, and the net result is a lot of outrage and indignation" is not the best one to summarize with a tl;dr?
- alexandercrohde 9y ago
  I don't see any merit to that other than as a cute irony. Joel criticizes twitter's forced summarization because it leads to oversimplification and resentment. I don't think he's arguing that all forms of summary lead to oversimplification and resentment. Think of it as bullet-point abstract to journal article.
  - mundo 9y ago
    It is fair to say that the irony was the reason I commented, rather than downvoting and moving on, but the point stands that summarizing a brief, non-technical article distorts the author's views (as Spolsky said, you lose nuance when summarizing your own thoughts - how could it be otherwise when your thoughts are summarized by a stranger?) and leads to pointless, flame-bait-y semantic argments of the kind he complained about (cf: this post , and the 3 above it, and (god forbid) those below it). And by the by, any time you find yourself using words like "all", "always" or "never" in describing someone else's position is a good time to pause and reflect on whether you're honoring the Principle of Charity, as paraphrased in the HN comment guidelines thusly: > Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. The good faith interpretation of my post was that I was complaining about your summary, not about summaries generally and certainly not about summaries in wildly different contexts like journal abstracts. However, just to reiterate: please understand that I'm not attacking you, or saying that you mis-characterized anyone's position on purpose, or out of malice or incompetence. The whole point of the essay we're discussing is that conveying a complex and nuanced position through a short block of text is hard, and that when someone tries, a distorted view of the author's position is the expected outcome.
lttlrck 9y ago
An almost Tweet sized chunk summary. Is this supposed to be ironic?

mundo 9y ago

Perhaps an essay arguing that Twitter flamewars, "...emerged from the fact that we’ve taken a medium, text, which is already bad at conveying emotion and sentiment and high-bandwidth nuance, and [by limiting message length] made it even worse, and the net result is a lot of outrage and indignation" is not the best one to summarize with a tl;dr?

alexandercrohde 9y ago
I don't see any merit to that other than as a cute irony. Joel criticizes twitter's forced summarization because it leads to oversimplification and resentment. I don't think he's arguing that all forms of summary lead to oversimplification and resentment. Think of it as bullet-point abstract to journal article.
- mundo 9y ago
  It is fair to say that the irony was the reason I commented, rather than downvoting and moving on, but the point stands that summarizing a brief, non-technical article distorts the author's views (as Spolsky said, you lose nuance when summarizing your own thoughts - how could it be otherwise when your thoughts are summarized by a stranger?) and leads to pointless, flame-bait-y semantic argments of the kind he complained about (cf: this post , and the 3 above it, and (god forbid) those below it). And by the by, any time you find yourself using words like "all", "always" or "never" in describing someone else's position is a good time to pause and reflect on whether you're honoring the Principle of Charity, as paraphrased in the HN comment guidelines thusly: > Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. The good faith interpretation of my post was that I was complaining about your summary, not about summaries generally and certainly not about summaries in wildly different contexts like journal abstracts. However, just to reiterate: please understand that I'm not attacking you, or saying that you mis-characterized anyone's position on purpose, or out of malice or incompetence. The whole point of the essay we're discussing is that conveying a complex and nuanced position through a short block of text is hard, and that when someone tries, a distorted view of the author's position is the expected outcome.

lttlrck 9y ago

An almost Tweet sized chunk summary. Is this supposed to be ironic?