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So I've been thinking about this a little bit and I'm not sure if I'm the outlier here but when I really want to focus on something, I'll turn off social media

by maverick2007 8y ago

So I've been thinking about this a little bit and I'm not sure if I'm the outlier here but when I really want to focus on something, I'll turn off social media completely. The medium is the distraction in itself, no matter who I follow. With that being said, I think that this tech has a ton of potential. One use case off the top of my head would be for fantasy football. I'd love to see some sort of mode where I can get high quality news for my chosen few players or teams. I run into an issue right now where there's a ton of noise around "is this player injured or not" and it'd be great to have some sort of AI that could do a better job than I can in filtering what's fake or not. Plenty of other interesting use cases for this tech, this is just one that jumps out for me!

jedwhite 8y ago
Thank you! Your feedback is similar to a lot of the feedback I've received from friends I've shown it to, so I don't think you're an outlier at all. I think most people do something similar to you, and block themselves from social media. I know I do. People resort to deleting their accounts, temporarily blocking access using browser extensions, or removing the apps completely. The problem I've found is that there is interesting work-related content that I do want to know about that gets shared through social media (and even more messaging). And I get work messages through facebook and twitter, and then half my day is blown. I think that's worse for people on a maker's schedule. You need the important content (say new deep learning research) but you blink and you've shot half a day after glancing at facebook. The direction I'm heading with Orac is to use the topic modelling and a doc2vec approach to match up clusters of concepts between content, and your todo list. That's still a way off but this is intended to be a step in that direction. The deep learning models are still in progress, but they're already getting pretty good at ranking content and identifying topics etc. One friend described them as "scary" and I don't think they are quite there but they are improving. Adding "build your own" filters is definitely on the road map - so something like the fantasy football tracking is a great use of that!
- lj3 8y ago
  I look forward to trying this out. I tend to share your opinion that social media is full of junk, but every once in a while you learn something new and interesting. If your app can help separate the wheat from the chaff then I think there will be plenty of interest.
- maverick2007 8y ago
  I didn't think about it that way but you're totally right! The reason I don't open up social media right now is because I know there's going to be garbage there that distracts me. If I could open Orac up and it would block anything that it deemed as distracting then I don't see a reason why I wouldn't use it. I really look forward to seeing what becomes of this!!
  - jedwhite 8y ago
    Hey thank you - yes that's a key driver. You don't want to have to throw the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak :) There is incredibly useful and inspiring content out there on social media. I just don't want to have to trawl through a cesspool of crap to find the nuggets of usefulness buried in it!

jedwhite 8y ago

Thank you! Your feedback is similar to a lot of the feedback I've received from friends I've shown it to, so I don't think you're an outlier at all. I think most people do something similar to you, and block themselves from social media. I know I do. People resort to deleting their accounts, temporarily blocking access using browser extensions, or removing the apps completely. The problem I've found is that there is interesting work-related content that I do want to know about that gets shared through social media (and even more messaging). And I get work messages through facebook and twitter, and then half my day is blown. I think that's worse for people on a maker's schedule. You need the important content (say new deep learning research) but you blink and you've shot half a day after glancing at facebook. The direction I'm heading with Orac is to use the topic modelling and a doc2vec approach to match up clusters of concepts between content, and your todo list. That's still a way off but this is intended to be a step in that direction. The deep learning models are still in progress, but they're already getting pretty good at ranking content and identifying topics etc. One friend described them as "scary" and I don't think they are quite there but they are improving. Adding "build your own" filters is definitely on the road map - so something like the fantasy football tracking is a great use of that!

lj3 8y ago
I look forward to trying this out. I tend to share your opinion that social media is full of junk, but every once in a while you learn something new and interesting. If your app can help separate the wheat from the chaff then I think there will be plenty of interest.
maverick2007 8y ago
I didn't think about it that way but you're totally right! The reason I don't open up social media right now is because I know there's going to be garbage there that distracts me. If I could open Orac up and it would block anything that it deemed as distracting then I don't see a reason why I wouldn't use it. I really look forward to seeing what becomes of this!!
- jedwhite 8y ago
  Hey thank you - yes that's a key driver. You don't want to have to throw the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak :) There is incredibly useful and inspiring content out there on social media. I just don't want to have to trawl through a cesspool of crap to find the nuggets of usefulness buried in it!