23 ms·

Social Networks: It's worse than you think (2020)

373 points by ColinWright 5y ago

BarryMilo 5y ago
As always, it's a bad time to be an imaginary person. It's a big leap to pretend the model reflects the real world, let alone today's real world. As far as I can tell, sharing has become largely fenced into communities (reddit subs, Facebook groups). People who still share with people they know personally appear to me to be a minority. Don't get me wrong, the principle is sound, but the world changes fast and the described model doesn't seem very relevant nowadays.
- swivelmaster 5y ago
  My experience watching my older family members share memes on Facebook suggests otherwise. Also, the entirety of Twitter, in a completely different way.
- arglebarglegar 5y ago
  facebook has billions of monthly users, there’s no way you interact with even 1% of that, so anecdotal feelings are completely meaningless!
- rossdavidh 5y ago
  Well, it's simpler than the real phenomenon it is simulating, but the fact that even that simplified model gives the same result we see in reality, is itself quite significant. It suggests that it is not some quirk of FB algorithm that is the issue, it's the very essence of what a general purpose social network IS, that's the issue. It suggests that tweaking the algorithm is unlikely to solve the problem.
- herbst 5y ago
  As contrast in my social circle nearly everything is spoken / shared in private messenger groups today. From my POV this is the current trend. Then again my environment is mostly online privacy aware.
3np 5y ago
Somehow this post takes the least interesting part of the source article[0] and draws false conclusions from it. > In the simulation, the decision whether to rebroadcast is random, rather than being driven by “virality” or cognitive bias, so the simulation is an optimistic one. > It turns out that message propagation follows a power law: the probability of a meme being shared a given number of times is roughly proportional to an inverse power of that number. So they implement a textbook model and a textbook result comes out - surprise? There’s nothing to be drawn by this. I may share the authors sentiment but frankly this blog post is bunk. There’re some interesting parts in the source though once you get through all the grand-standing fluff. [0]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/information-overload-helps-fake-news-spread-and-social-media-knows-it/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/information-overl...
- d110af5ccf 5y ago
  The Scientific American article does bring up a number of interesting social dynamics. However the modeling described seems bogus to me. The algorithms sound like they are incredibly oversimplified. It seems unreasonable to assume that all people interact with social media in the same way or to assume that their behavior is random. For perspective, genetic algorithms are a biased random walk and they clearly work quite well.
- ummwhat 5y ago
  If it's the paper I'm thinking of then I read the original and that's not really a fair representation of what they did. What they actually did was they started with some data on things which had gone viral but could only see how many were "infected" (number of views over time). They didn't have direct access to the granular information of who had seen what and who they shared or didn't share with. They decided to work backwards and model virality for some assumed network properties and contagiousness properties and then see which of their models had the similar statistics to actual viral posts. Network topology: iirc they tested the case of a gaussian distribution of connections meaning on average 95% of nodes had n connections +- 2sigma and they tested a power law type distribution meaning some thin minority of "influencers" had connections to nearly everyone". Contagious property: they tested the case where different content had a different virality property r0 with more or less contagious content all competing at the same time. They also tested the case of sheer randomness wherein all content is equally likely to be shared and which goes viral basically depends on the luck of who's eye it catches. The end result was that a power law and random contagiousness best fit the real world statistics.
ctoth 5y ago
https://archive.ph/dwpPS https://archive.ph/dwpPS
crdrost 5y ago
Related to this, there is an intimacy of small community which makes you feel valued and a proper contributor, that social networks really seem to oppose: they want to make the network bigger, you are part of the biggest world context, everybody on TikTok is eating a habanero while watching Bob Ross, so only if I do the same nonsense do I have a chance of 100 people noticing and liking the video and maybe opting to see more of my content. When I put it that way it feels banal, but like, you know the “fast-growing subreddits” list on Reddit? There were meetings! Someone worked on that! People literally sat in a room and said effectively, “Hey Fatimeh, what is the status of the ‘make subreddits suck faster’ feature? Management is very interested in delivering that in Q3.” Right? Like this connection from global to personal is just automatically assumed, nobody spends a waking moment thinking it could be anything but that way.
- stavros 5y ago
  Nitpick: There's no ñ in habanero.
  - tacostakohashi 5y ago
    Don't be such a ñitpicker.
  - Stratoscope 5y ago
    And in fact that informs how to pronounce the word. It's not hah-buh-NYAIR-oh, it's hah-buh-NAIR-oh. A similar one that I used to get wrong all the time is empanada. No ñ in that either, but I always said em-puh-NYAH-duh. Then one day I noticed it was just a regular n and it is pronouced em-puh-NAH-duh. Now for a really embarrassing one. This was back in the day when I was working with my friend and colleague Alan Cooper (of interaction design fame) on what became Visual Basic. We were on a phone call and I said something about a zhuh-NAIR of music. Alan asked "what's that?" I explained that it was like a category or a particular style. He said "do you mean ZHAHN-ruh?" It's funny how these embarrassing moments stick in your brain. I could tell you exactly where I was, and even which direction I was facing when we had that conversation. But I was grateful that Alan corrected me and I won't sound like a fool any more when I talk about a genre. I had one friend who would never gracefully accept a correction like that. One time he told me about a neighbor who "took his dog to the pond." I said "that's nice, does the dog like to go swimming?" He said "no, the POND, the place where they put dogs to sleep." He went through his whole life mispronouncing "dog pound", and many, many other words.
motohagiography 5y ago
This explains why the crappiest of efforts are so viral, and why things that try harder fail. When I think of the meme templates I've seen, they're all grade 2 mental level, and they don't engage your critcal faculties, but this is their point. They just pass right by. There is a kind of bias where we must think, "this is so crappy, it has to be real!" which is the complement bias to, "this looks too polished to be real." I wonder what examples of things other than memes would be the effect of that bias.
- edoceo 5y ago
  Example: free software can't be good, we should buy SAP.
- BeefWellington 5y ago
  > I wonder what examples of things other than memes would be the effect of that bias. Looking at a similar phenomenon in a different medium, I'd argue that both Nickelback and Adam Sandler films fall into this same category. People everywhere love to shit on Nickelback but when they were touring they were selling out stadium after stadium after stadium, having albums go platinum, etc. They were an outright commercial success despite being panned critically and seemingly "universally hated." Adam Sandler films get the same treatment. My theory is: Sometimes you just want to not think deeply about a thing and turn your brain off and enjoy, and I think that applies to music, film, and memes equally. There's something inoffensive but satisfying about mediocrity in these things.
civilized 5y ago
I have no idea what the logic of this post is supposed to be. Message sharing follows a power law and so therefore... something about quality going down when messages go up? And something about filtering? What on earth is he talking about? ...Well, it turns out he's sharing the conclusions of the linked SciAm article, but the SciAm article just says "the super smart researchers plugged numbers into their simulation and this result magically came out". There's no insight or explanation. Are we expected to just believe that computer simulations built by credentialed scientists prove things about the real world?
- 6510 5y ago
  > Are we expected to just believe that computer simulations built by credentialed scientists prove things about the real world? We could model it... 1) each node is an imaginary scientist with a random set of in and outgoing citations, they can only read and cite a finite number of randomized publications, the publications are assumed to vary randomly in quality... 2) ????? 3) Conclusion: As the number of publications in the network rises, the quality of those which propagate falls.
awinter-py 5y ago
> as the number of messages in the network rises, the quality of those which propagate falls The job of technology here should be to reduce noise, both on open platforms like twtr and closed platforms like slack channels and forums. Computers are good at categorization -- now just use it to restrict what I see rather than recommend extra stuff. Spam detection for things not traditionally considered spam.
- mananaysiempre 5y ago
  That’s what they call a “filter bubble”, though. (Still not convinced that’s an inherently evil thing, yeah, but somewhat convinced an implicit and unavoidable one may not be good.)
  - awinter-py 5y ago
    yes fully agreed, it can be bad but there's a political version of a filter bubble which is getting the same news, but opposite interpretations vs things like industry-specific updates -- I get a much smaller volume of, say, biology news than someone who works in it
  - tdsamardzhiev 5y ago
    It's good to get some exposure to content outside of your bubble. But not to a never-ending stream of crap that is trying to hack your brain.
sneak 5y ago
You can't promote certain content to the front without demoting other content downward. The algorithmic filtering/ordering of items in a feed is really just censorship of the items that don't benefit Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/YouTube. These tools serve their owners, not the society they ostensibly serve to connect. It's censorship on a huge scale, and it's terribly damaging.
- BeFlatXIII 5y ago
  What realistic alternatives are there to an algorithmic feed that don't immediately devolve into high-volume posters drowning out the one status a month club?
habibur 5y ago
Now compare it with real life gossiping. And things won't look that bad to you.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
abnry 5y ago
I am trying to get into self hosting. Can anyone recommend a Twitter or Facebook self hosted app? The idea would be that it would be an invite only social network where I choose who can join.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  Nextcloud is probably among your better packaged options. Free Software / OSS: Share and collaborate on documents, send and receive email, manage your calendar and have video chats without data leaks. https://nextcloud.com/ https://nextcloud.com/ For a Twitter equivalent, Mastodon. Facebook's a bit more of a challenge --- longer-form content, the ability to group contacts, and the like. Principally there are Diaspora*, Friendica, and Hubzilla, all based on or near the ActivityPub standard. https://joinmastodon.org/ https://joinmastodon.org/ https://friendi.ca/ https://friendi.ca/ https://project.hubzilla.org/ https://project.hubzilla.org/ There are limits and compromises to these, though all should handle small-scale (family/community) sharing easily. Mastodon's at millions of users, the others are probably smaller. At scale, moderation and administration of Diaspora* is a bit of a pain, though that's (slowly) improving.
- bjt 5y ago
  Invite-only and self-hosted are different things. Discord is invite-only but not self-hosted. Maybe that would work for you?
  - abnry 5y ago
    I want both. Basically I want something federated but not connected to the "fediverse" as in Mastedon. Perhaps I need to look into Mastedon.
    - basmango 5y ago
      Maybe flarum
    - fsiefken 5y ago
      alternatives: scuttlebutt https://scuttlebutt.nz/ https://scuttlebutt.nz/ twtxt https://indieweb.org/twtxt https://indieweb.org/twtxt iris.to (hypercore protocol) meshtastic https://meshtastic.org/ https://meshtastic.org/ bbs https://www.ipingthereforeiam.com/bbs/?step=name&all=0 https://www.ipingthereforeiam.com/bbs/?step=name&all=0
coffeefirst 5y ago
This makes sense. The lowest common dominator is watered down to the point of banality. The lowest common denominator that gets reshared is totally batshit.
dredmorbius 5y ago
Mathew's blog post is mostly just commentary on a quite excellent Scientific American article from November 2020, "Information Overload Helps Fake News Spread, and Social Media Knows It". This is based on a simulation of social media which shows that, at least in the model (and with strong evidence that reality follows suit): [The] winner-take-all popularity pattern of memes, in which most are barely noticed while a few spread widely, could not be explained by some of them being more catchy or somehow more valuable: the memes in this simulated world had no intrinsic quality. Virality resulted purely from the statistical consequences of information proliferation in a social network of agents with limited attention. Even when agents preferentially shared memes of higher quality, researcher Xiaoyan Qiu, then at OSoMe, observed little improvement in the overall quality of those shared the most. Our models revealed that even when we want to see and share high-quality information, our inability to view everything in our news feeds inevitably leads us to share things that are partly or completely untrue. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/information-overload-helps-fake-news-spread-and-social-media-knows-it/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/information-overl... That was discussed exctensively at the time on HN (166 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25153716 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25153716
xg15 5y ago
I don't get it. If quality is random and decision to rebroadcast is also random - and independent of quality - then why is the result more low-quality messages?
- eternalban 5y ago
  Because quality is rare.
  - xg15 5y ago
    I'm talking about the simulation, not the real thing - and there, "low quality"/"high quality" are just markers that were assigned randomly. Did they write anywhere that they tag posts "low quality" with higher probability than "high quality"?
AboveTheGame 5y ago
/// UNPOPULAR OPINION WARNING for open-minded and “tolerant” people /// What the fuck? The social network is merely a magnet for the retarded dredges of our pathetic organization of organisms. You ban anything that is outside of the norm, have disdain for any dissent and still are unable to observe why your idiotic consent doesn’t manufacture new ideas? In this reality, tension makes knowledge. Critical states, self-organized criticality. Fuck your money fuck your bans you dumb fucks are going to be condescended to now. Why are only dumb people sensitive about being reminded of their position? LOL. Y’all are really clowns.
tobbykop 5y ago
> as the number of messages in the network rises, the quality of those which propagate falls ... if you assume people don`t read the message at all, but use a coin flip to decide if they should reshape it. I cannot for the life of me fathom how anyone could make a model that completely ignores content quality in respect to distribution and then use that model to make a statement about average quality of content that gets distributed. This really is the “sperical cow in a vacuum”equivalent of modeling social networks.
- fighterpilot 5y ago
  Garbage in garbage out. The conclusions necessarily follow from the assumptions they used. It's astounding that anyone is paying attention to this. "Simulation shows that coinflip leads to 50/50 outcome." Genius.
bickeringyokel 5y ago
In reference to the mentioned article https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/information-overload-helps-fake-news-spread-and-social-media-knows-it/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/information-overl... I can't determine what this article means by "quality", is it gauged by validity or some subjective notion? If it's the latter, I'm not sure how any of this is useful.
karaterobot 5y ago
You will not find someone who dislikes social media and its effects more than I do, but: > In the simulation, the decision whether to rebroadcast is random, rather than being driven by “virality” or cognitive bias, so the simulation is an optimistic one. Why not model the decision to rebroadcast based on something other than a simple dice roll? Why not drive it by virality? Why not drive it by quality? Why not model tribal affiliation? These things seem significant when talking about the "information hellscape" we've created.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
KasianFranks 5y ago
This is why Google cannot be compared to Facebook.
rg111 5y ago
As soon as your news feed becomes too big for you to read all of it and then decide whether to repost anything, the quality of information you propagate is going to fall because of that filtering process. I avoid this by unfollowing people very frequently. I see one stupid candid or a pout or a food shot, I just unfollow that person. Same goes for SJW/White Supremacy types. Whether you are OP or a sharer, you get muted/unfollowed. This is how I use Quora. When I used Facebook five years ago, I used it this way. Twitter I use only for professional content. Very strictly. I also set the trending country to Namibia, so that I don't even know what they are talking about. I am less and less active on social media with the passing of days, but a good social media experience can be achieved by strictly filtering normies, politics, food porn, etc.
- dbtc 5y ago
  I just use good old bookmarks for specific accounts on youtube and twitter.
- wolverine876 5y ago
  > SJW/White Supremacy types In what way are these 'types' equated?
  - ultramundane828 5y ago
    I'm assuming they're referencing the type of content they see from opposite sides of the political spectrum. I'm also not assuming any value attribution. In the context of the comment, it seems that they simply do not want political noise in their social network in any form.
    - corpo_punisho 5y ago
      "Political noise" is completely subjective. There was a time within the last 10 years when claiming "White supremacists are a serious problem" got you branded as a SJW.
  - seventhtiger 5y ago
    Participation in the culture war, weaponizing social media, and politicizing every space they pollute. There is no space for science, art, culture, day to day experience, or just fun and joy when they try to recruit every social media user and their content into their cause. I'm saying this even if I actually do agree with their cause.
RNCTX 5y ago
Perhaps we really are in the (clickbait) matrix. An blog post about a pointless research project aimed at drawing a conclusion that could be drawn from common sense without any research at all. All of which is a somewhat circular exercise in bad content announcing itself to the world in an ontological sense.
- volkk 5y ago
  this is actually something that's been bothering me heavily, lately. i've noticed a lot of content is created in these convoluted and grandiose borderline word vomit. honestly, a lot of the stuff frequently makes me feel a bit dumb as a reader. by the time i get through it, i realize that the main thesis is actually extremely simple but surrounded by flowery words. furthermore, i'm also noticing at my workplace many people saying a lot of things, to the point of utter rambling and going off topic, in extremely verbose ways but communicating ideas that could have been said in the most basic of ways. i'm not sure if i'm just slowing down as i get older and get dumber, but i am feeling like a lot of information hasn't gotten more complex, but the way its communicated very much has.
  - RNCTX 5y ago
    I would argue the reason is because no one rewards silence, there's still a need for people to distinguish themselves from a crowd, but as the technological age starts to wane, we are at a point where less people have something worthwhile to say. You can see the same thing in the humanities, which went through all of this before there was a tech world. There's only so much you're going to find digging through Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer, and Ovid for the 10,000,000th time. So people create new discourses, new fields of study, and new languages to describe them that aren't really new at all, but rather just a roundabout saying that the author didn't know what else to say.
tapgnid 5y ago
This is cool but the next one about the Texas power grid failure was awesome. Thank you. Sorry for the off-topic.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
8eye 5y ago
it’s as bad as the centralization of television or cable networks into the hands of a few companies controlling the blinders.
fighterpilot 5y ago
I would like to see a large social network tax. Any social network with more than 300 million people gets an additional 20 percent tax on profits. Any revenues from this tax can be used to reduce other taxes. There's three reasons for this. One, this is compensation for negative externalities, such as the Myanmar massacres, fake news proliferation and so on. Second, social networks are the ultimate network effects companies, where their enduring success is less about provision of a fantastic product and more about the staying power of the network once the ball got rolling initially. Third, their success is built on the exploitation of our evolved dopamine systems, similar to opiates and gambling, and their product in many cases isn't actually improving the lives of their customers. This is seen in circumstantial evidence of rising teen depression, especially among young girls. Google, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon would of course all be exempt from this tax.
rblion 5y ago
Facebook is the next AOL, Yahoo. Watch.
Ambolia 5y ago
The lies and conspiracy theories were always there. The difference now is that there are lies and conspiracies in different directions rather than a consensus of lies and conspiracy theories. Of course it remains to be seen if it's possible to create a consensus of a nation without centralized media like we had until now. If it's not, we will have to get used to the population fragmenting into different groups with different chains of trust, or we will have to accept the government imposing totalitarian measures on the internet to reestablish a centralized consensus. I guess each option has issues.
- joelbluminator 5y ago
  > we will have to get used to the population fragmenting into different groups with different chains of trust This is becoming harder to do with the current culture wars. If each group would have respected the other that would have been possible, but it seems each group (especially the radical left if we are being honest) wants the other to comply to a new set of rules and philosophies. In schools, in the workplace and even when privately talking to each other. This makes it very difficult.
  - bckr 5y ago
    I think "the radical left" is mostly reacting to upbringings that quashed personal expression, which phenomenon has been documented in the USA for centuries. So, they (and I, past tense) are reactive, unselfawarely using the tools they learned from their oppressors to try to do the opposite. And boy ever is the USA's right wing oppressive, but the oppression is in private, at home, in church, and in religious schools. What we're seeing is a breaking open and spilling over in a reverse direction of this oppression: an equal and opposite force. Yes, the "radical left" could really learn to be more respectful, but the examples of how to do so will be hard to find. Mr. Rogers comes to mind.
    - dragonwriter 5y ago
      > And boy ever is the USA's right wing oppressive, but the oppression is in private No, its not; its just that when its been public, its been broadly supported, because the center of US political power is ideologically on the Right, or at least has been for most of modern history. So right-wing, whether economic (anti-socialist/anti-communist) or cultural (like PMRC’s push against naughty music, or the spate of internet censorship laws of the 1990s) tends to be supported not look partisan, because ot has support across both parties (the exact divide changes with partisan realignments, but for the more recent instances the Republican Party and the dominant centrist faction of Democrats tend to be in support.)
notanzaiiswear 5y ago
I don't quite understand: it seems to me there is an infinite stream of news, and everybody has to find a way to extract bits and pieces relevant to them. Social networks just make it easier to access the news stream, in that sense. But they are not responsible for creating the news, or at least, not in a significant way - as infinite+whatever amount of "news" SN create is still infinite. This just in relation to the article - of course SNs create all kinds of problems, but the amount of information is not really the problem caused by SNs.
amelius 5y ago
Perhaps make reposting more difficult, e.g. let the user solve a captcha. That will make the user think twice before reposting something.
streamofdigits 5y ago
People may find the original simulation studies [0] oversimplifying but that is the more or less the state-of-the-art of our understanding of social networks using agent models. There is always the nagging concern that your get out what you put in. We don't have to theorize though. Given all the open source platforms of the fediverse [1] people can setup networks, tweak to their heart's content and explore what "works" when actual humans are involved. Maybe what is really missing is some sort of crowdsourced framework for collecting and sharing that information. [0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/information-overload-helps-fake-news-spread-and-social-media-knows-it/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/information-overl... [1] https://fediverse.party/ https://fediverse.party/
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
unityByFreedom 5y ago
> As soon as your news feed becomes too big for you to read all of it and then decide whether to repost anything, the quality of information you propagate is going to fall because of that filtering process. So, curation is needed. Yet the curated groups do not have sufficient cross pollination of ideas. Why is that?
xyzzy21 5y ago
Of course it does. As a generating function, all you need to get a "Power Law" distribution of connections is a "preferential attachment" probability either statically or dynamically/transiently. Finite attention automatically creates that preferential attachment because you want to avoid "wasting the precious resource of attention"!!
bluepoint 5y ago
I don’t get it. The probability a message gets shared n times is the inverse of a power of n. How do you go from here to low quality messages get shared more as the total number of messages. I guess I could go and read the original research, but if anyone can explain, I will not mind.
- bluepoint 5y ago
  I guess the question is how is quality measured (message length?) and how it is considered.

373 points by ColinWright 5y ago

As always, it's a bad time to be an imaginary person. It's a big leap to pretend the model reflects the real world, let alone today's real world. As far as I can tell, sharing has become largely fenced into communities (reddit subs, Facebook groups). People who still share with people they know personally appear to me to be a minority. Don't get me wrong, the principle is sound, but the world changes fast and the described model doesn't seem very relevant nowadays.

swivelmaster 5y ago
My experience watching my older family members share memes on Facebook suggests otherwise. Also, the entirety of Twitter, in a completely different way.
arglebarglegar 5y ago
facebook has billions of monthly users, there’s no way you interact with even 1% of that, so anecdotal feelings are completely meaningless!
rossdavidh 5y ago
Well, it's simpler than the real phenomenon it is simulating, but the fact that even that simplified model gives the same result we see in reality, is itself quite significant. It suggests that it is not some quirk of FB algorithm that is the issue, it's the very essence of what a general purpose social network IS, that's the issue. It suggests that tweaking the algorithm is unlikely to solve the problem.
herbst 5y ago
As contrast in my social circle nearly everything is spoken / shared in private messenger groups today. From my POV this is the current trend. Then again my environment is mostly online privacy aware.

3np 5y ago

Somehow this post takes the least interesting part of the source article[0] and draws false conclusions from it. > In the simulation, the decision whether to rebroadcast is random, rather than being driven by “virality” or cognitive bias, so the simulation is an optimistic one. > It turns out that message propagation follows a power law: the probability of a meme being shared a given number of times is roughly proportional to an inverse power of that number. So they implement a textbook model and a textbook result comes out - surprise? There’s nothing to be drawn by this. I may share the authors sentiment but frankly this blog post is bunk. There’re some interesting parts in the source though once you get through all the grand-standing fluff. [0]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/information-overload-helps-fake-news-spread-and-social-media-knows-it/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/information-overl...

d110af5ccf 5y ago
The Scientific American article does bring up a number of interesting social dynamics. However the modeling described seems bogus to me. The algorithms sound like they are incredibly oversimplified. It seems unreasonable to assume that all people interact with social media in the same way or to assume that their behavior is random. For perspective, genetic algorithms are a biased random walk and they clearly work quite well.
ummwhat 5y ago
If it's the paper I'm thinking of then I read the original and that's not really a fair representation of what they did. What they actually did was they started with some data on things which had gone viral but could only see how many were "infected" (number of views over time). They didn't have direct access to the granular information of who had seen what and who they shared or didn't share with. They decided to work backwards and model virality for some assumed network properties and contagiousness properties and then see which of their models had the similar statistics to actual viral posts. Network topology: iirc they tested the case of a gaussian distribution of connections meaning on average 95% of nodes had n connections +- 2sigma and they tested a power law type distribution meaning some thin minority of "influencers" had connections to nearly everyone". Contagious property: they tested the case where different content had a different virality property r0 with more or less contagious content all competing at the same time. They also tested the case of sheer randomness wherein all content is equally likely to be shared and which goes viral basically depends on the luck of who's eye it catches. The end result was that a power law and random contagiousness best fit the real world statistics.

ctoth 5y ago

https://archive.ph/dwpPS https://archive.ph/dwpPS

crdrost 5y ago

Related to this, there is an intimacy of small community which makes you feel valued and a proper contributor, that social networks really seem to oppose: they want to make the network bigger, you are part of the biggest world context, everybody on TikTok is eating a habanero while watching Bob Ross, so only if I do the same nonsense do I have a chance of 100 people noticing and liking the video and maybe opting to see more of my content. When I put it that way it feels banal, but like, you know the “fast-growing subreddits” list on Reddit? There were meetings! Someone worked on that! People literally sat in a room and said effectively, “Hey Fatimeh, what is the status of the ‘make subreddits suck faster’ feature? Management is very interested in delivering that in Q3.” Right? Like this connection from global to personal is just automatically assumed, nobody spends a waking moment thinking it could be anything but that way.

stavros 5y ago
Nitpick: There's no ñ in habanero.
- tacostakohashi 5y ago
  Don't be such a ñitpicker.
- Stratoscope 5y ago
  And in fact that informs how to pronounce the word. It's not hah-buh-NYAIR-oh, it's hah-buh-NAIR-oh. A similar one that I used to get wrong all the time is empanada. No ñ in that either, but I always said em-puh-NYAH-duh. Then one day I noticed it was just a regular n and it is pronouced em-puh-NAH-duh. Now for a really embarrassing one. This was back in the day when I was working with my friend and colleague Alan Cooper (of interaction design fame) on what became Visual Basic. We were on a phone call and I said something about a zhuh-NAIR of music. Alan asked "what's that?" I explained that it was like a category or a particular style. He said "do you mean ZHAHN-ruh?" It's funny how these embarrassing moments stick in your brain. I could tell you exactly where I was, and even which direction I was facing when we had that conversation. But I was grateful that Alan corrected me and I won't sound like a fool any more when I talk about a genre. I had one friend who would never gracefully accept a correction like that. One time he told me about a neighbor who "took his dog to the pond." I said "that's nice, does the dog like to go swimming?" He said "no, the POND, the place where they put dogs to sleep." He went through his whole life mispronouncing "dog pound", and many, many other words.

motohagiography 5y ago

This explains why the crappiest of efforts are so viral, and why things that try harder fail. When I think of the meme templates I've seen, they're all grade 2 mental level, and they don't engage your critcal faculties, but this is their point. They just pass right by. There is a kind of bias where we must think, "this is so crappy, it has to be real!" which is the complement bias to, "this looks too polished to be real." I wonder what examples of things other than memes would be the effect of that bias.

edoceo 5y ago
Example: free software can't be good, we should buy SAP.
BeefWellington 5y ago
> I wonder what examples of things other than memes would be the effect of that bias. Looking at a similar phenomenon in a different medium, I'd argue that both Nickelback and Adam Sandler films fall into this same category. People everywhere love to shit on Nickelback but when they were touring they were selling out stadium after stadium after stadium, having albums go platinum, etc. They were an outright commercial success despite being panned critically and seemingly "universally hated." Adam Sandler films get the same treatment. My theory is: Sometimes you just want to not think deeply about a thing and turn your brain off and enjoy, and I think that applies to music, film, and memes equally. There's something inoffensive but satisfying about mediocrity in these things.

civilized 5y ago

I have no idea what the logic of this post is supposed to be. Message sharing follows a power law and so therefore... something about quality going down when messages go up? And something about filtering? What on earth is he talking about? ...Well, it turns out he's sharing the conclusions of the linked SciAm article, but the SciAm article just says "the super smart researchers plugged numbers into their simulation and this result magically came out". There's no insight or explanation. Are we expected to just believe that computer simulations built by credentialed scientists prove things about the real world?

6510 5y ago
> Are we expected to just believe that computer simulations built by credentialed scientists prove things about the real world? We could model it... 1) each node is an imaginary scientist with a random set of in and outgoing citations, they can only read and cite a finite number of randomized publications, the publications are assumed to vary randomly in quality... 2) ????? 3) Conclusion: As the number of publications in the network rises, the quality of those which propagate falls.

awinter-py 5y ago

> as the number of messages in the network rises, the quality of those which propagate falls The job of technology here should be to reduce noise, both on open platforms like twtr and closed platforms like slack channels and forums. Computers are good at categorization -- now just use it to restrict what I see rather than recommend extra stuff. Spam detection for things not traditionally considered spam.

mananaysiempre 5y ago
That’s what they call a “filter bubble”, though. (Still not convinced that’s an inherently evil thing, yeah, but somewhat convinced an implicit and unavoidable one may not be good.)
- awinter-py 5y ago
  yes fully agreed, it can be bad but there's a political version of a filter bubble which is getting the same news, but opposite interpretations vs things like industry-specific updates -- I get a much smaller volume of, say, biology news than someone who works in it
- tdsamardzhiev 5y ago
  It's good to get some exposure to content outside of your bubble. But not to a never-ending stream of crap that is trying to hack your brain.

sneak 5y ago

You can't promote certain content to the front without demoting other content downward. The algorithmic filtering/ordering of items in a feed is really just censorship of the items that don't benefit Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/YouTube. These tools serve their owners, not the society they ostensibly serve to connect. It's censorship on a huge scale, and it's terribly damaging.

BeFlatXIII 5y ago
What realistic alternatives are there to an algorithmic feed that don't immediately devolve into high-volume posters drowning out the one status a month club?

habibur 5y ago

Now compare it with real life gossiping. And things won't look that bad to you.

deleted 5y ago
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abnry 5y ago

I am trying to get into self hosting. Can anyone recommend a Twitter or Facebook self hosted app? The idea would be that it would be an invite only social network where I choose who can join.

dredmorbius 5y ago
Nextcloud is probably among your better packaged options. Free Software / OSS: Share and collaborate on documents, send and receive email, manage your calendar and have video chats without data leaks. https://nextcloud.com/ https://nextcloud.com/ For a Twitter equivalent, Mastodon. Facebook's a bit more of a challenge --- longer-form content, the ability to group contacts, and the like. Principally there are Diaspora*, Friendica, and Hubzilla, all based on or near the ActivityPub standard. https://joinmastodon.org/ https://joinmastodon.org/ https://friendi.ca/ https://friendi.ca/ https://project.hubzilla.org/ https://project.hubzilla.org/ There are limits and compromises to these, though all should handle small-scale (family/community) sharing easily. Mastodon's at millions of users, the others are probably smaller. At scale, moderation and administration of Diaspora* is a bit of a pain, though that's (slowly) improving.
bjt 5y ago
Invite-only and self-hosted are different things. Discord is invite-only but not self-hosted. Maybe that would work for you?
- abnry 5y ago
  I want both. Basically I want something federated but not connected to the "fediverse" as in Mastedon. Perhaps I need to look into Mastedon.
  - basmango 5y ago
    Maybe flarum
  - fsiefken 5y ago
    alternatives: scuttlebutt https://scuttlebutt.nz/ https://scuttlebutt.nz/ twtxt https://indieweb.org/twtxt https://indieweb.org/twtxt iris.to (hypercore protocol) meshtastic https://meshtastic.org/ https://meshtastic.org/ bbs https://www.ipingthereforeiam.com/bbs/?step=name&all=0 https://www.ipingthereforeiam.com/bbs/?step=name&all=0

coffeefirst 5y ago

This makes sense. The lowest common dominator is watered down to the point of banality. The lowest common denominator that gets reshared is totally batshit.

dredmorbius 5y ago

Mathew's blog post is mostly just commentary on a quite excellent Scientific American article from November 2020, "Information Overload Helps Fake News Spread, and Social Media Knows It". This is based on a simulation of social media which shows that, at least in the model (and with strong evidence that reality follows suit): [The] winner-take-all popularity pattern of memes, in which most are barely noticed while a few spread widely, could not be explained by some of them being more catchy or somehow more valuable: the memes in this simulated world had no intrinsic quality. Virality resulted purely from the statistical consequences of information proliferation in a social network of agents with limited attention. Even when agents preferentially shared memes of higher quality, researcher Xiaoyan Qiu, then at OSoMe, observed little improvement in the overall quality of those shared the most. Our models revealed that even when we want to see and share high-quality information, our inability to view everything in our news feeds inevitably leads us to share things that are partly or completely untrue. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/information-overload-helps-fake-news-spread-and-social-media-knows-it/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/information-overl... That was discussed exctensively at the time on HN (166 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25153716 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25153716

xg15 5y ago

I don't get it. If quality is random and decision to rebroadcast is also random - and independent of quality - then why is the result more low-quality messages?

eternalban 5y ago
Because quality is rare.
- xg15 5y ago
  I'm talking about the simulation, not the real thing - and there, "low quality"/"high quality" are just markers that were assigned randomly. Did they write anywhere that they tag posts "low quality" with higher probability than "high quality"?

AboveTheGame 5y ago

/// UNPOPULAR OPINION WARNING for open-minded and “tolerant” people /// What the fuck? The social network is merely a magnet for the retarded dredges of our pathetic organization of organisms. You ban anything that is outside of the norm, have disdain for any dissent and still are unable to observe why your idiotic consent doesn’t manufacture new ideas? In this reality, tension makes knowledge. Critical states, self-organized criticality. Fuck your money fuck your bans you dumb fucks are going to be condescended to now. Why are only dumb people sensitive about being reminded of their position? LOL. Y’all are really clowns.

tobbykop 5y ago

> as the number of messages in the network rises, the quality of those which propagate falls ... if you assume people don`t read the message at all, but use a coin flip to decide if they should reshape it. I cannot for the life of me fathom how anyone could make a model that completely ignores content quality in respect to distribution and then use that model to make a statement about average quality of content that gets distributed. This really is the “sperical cow in a vacuum”equivalent of modeling social networks.

fighterpilot 5y ago
Garbage in garbage out. The conclusions necessarily follow from the assumptions they used. It's astounding that anyone is paying attention to this. "Simulation shows that coinflip leads to 50/50 outcome." Genius.

bickeringyokel 5y ago

In reference to the mentioned article https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/information-overload-helps-fake-news-spread-and-social-media-knows-it/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/information-overl... I can't determine what this article means by "quality", is it gauged by validity or some subjective notion? If it's the latter, I'm not sure how any of this is useful.

karaterobot 5y ago

You will not find someone who dislikes social media and its effects more than I do, but: > In the simulation, the decision whether to rebroadcast is random, rather than being driven by “virality” or cognitive bias, so the simulation is an optimistic one. Why not model the decision to rebroadcast based on something other than a simple dice roll? Why not drive it by virality? Why not drive it by quality? Why not model tribal affiliation? These things seem significant when talking about the "information hellscape" we've created.

deleted 5y ago

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KasianFranks 5y ago

This is why Google cannot be compared to Facebook.

rg111 5y ago

As soon as your news feed becomes too big for you to read all of it and then decide whether to repost anything, the quality of information you propagate is going to fall because of that filtering process. I avoid this by unfollowing people very frequently. I see one stupid candid or a pout or a food shot, I just unfollow that person. Same goes for SJW/White Supremacy types. Whether you are OP or a sharer, you get muted/unfollowed. This is how I use Quora. When I used Facebook five years ago, I used it this way. Twitter I use only for professional content. Very strictly. I also set the trending country to Namibia, so that I don't even know what they are talking about. I am less and less active on social media with the passing of days, but a good social media experience can be achieved by strictly filtering normies, politics, food porn, etc.

dbtc 5y ago
I just use good old bookmarks for specific accounts on youtube and twitter.
wolverine876 5y ago
> SJW/White Supremacy types In what way are these 'types' equated?
- ultramundane828 5y ago
  I'm assuming they're referencing the type of content they see from opposite sides of the political spectrum. I'm also not assuming any value attribution. In the context of the comment, it seems that they simply do not want political noise in their social network in any form.
  - corpo_punisho 5y ago
    "Political noise" is completely subjective. There was a time within the last 10 years when claiming "White supremacists are a serious problem" got you branded as a SJW.
- seventhtiger 5y ago
  Participation in the culture war, weaponizing social media, and politicizing every space they pollute. There is no space for science, art, culture, day to day experience, or just fun and joy when they try to recruit every social media user and their content into their cause. I'm saying this even if I actually do agree with their cause.

RNCTX 5y ago

Perhaps we really are in the (clickbait) matrix. An blog post about a pointless research project aimed at drawing a conclusion that could be drawn from common sense without any research at all. All of which is a somewhat circular exercise in bad content announcing itself to the world in an ontological sense.

volkk 5y ago
this is actually something that's been bothering me heavily, lately. i've noticed a lot of content is created in these convoluted and grandiose borderline word vomit. honestly, a lot of the stuff frequently makes me feel a bit dumb as a reader. by the time i get through it, i realize that the main thesis is actually extremely simple but surrounded by flowery words. furthermore, i'm also noticing at my workplace many people saying a lot of things, to the point of utter rambling and going off topic, in extremely verbose ways but communicating ideas that could have been said in the most basic of ways. i'm not sure if i'm just slowing down as i get older and get dumber, but i am feeling like a lot of information hasn't gotten more complex, but the way its communicated very much has.
- RNCTX 5y ago
  I would argue the reason is because no one rewards silence, there's still a need for people to distinguish themselves from a crowd, but as the technological age starts to wane, we are at a point where less people have something worthwhile to say. You can see the same thing in the humanities, which went through all of this before there was a tech world. There's only so much you're going to find digging through Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer, and Ovid for the 10,000,000th time. So people create new discourses, new fields of study, and new languages to describe them that aren't really new at all, but rather just a roundabout saying that the author didn't know what else to say.

tapgnid 5y ago

This is cool but the next one about the Texas power grid failure was awesome. Thank you. Sorry for the off-topic.

deleted 5y ago

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8eye 5y ago

it’s as bad as the centralization of television or cable networks into the hands of a few companies controlling the blinders.

fighterpilot 5y ago

I would like to see a large social network tax. Any social network with more than 300 million people gets an additional 20 percent tax on profits. Any revenues from this tax can be used to reduce other taxes. There's three reasons for this. One, this is compensation for negative externalities, such as the Myanmar massacres, fake news proliferation and so on. Second, social networks are the ultimate network effects companies, where their enduring success is less about provision of a fantastic product and more about the staying power of the network once the ball got rolling initially. Third, their success is built on the exploitation of our evolved dopamine systems, similar to opiates and gambling, and their product in many cases isn't actually improving the lives of their customers. This is seen in circumstantial evidence of rising teen depression, especially among young girls. Google, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon would of course all be exempt from this tax.

rblion 5y ago

Facebook is the next AOL, Yahoo. Watch.

Ambolia 5y ago

The lies and conspiracy theories were always there. The difference now is that there are lies and conspiracies in different directions rather than a consensus of lies and conspiracy theories. Of course it remains to be seen if it's possible to create a consensus of a nation without centralized media like we had until now. If it's not, we will have to get used to the population fragmenting into different groups with different chains of trust, or we will have to accept the government imposing totalitarian measures on the internet to reestablish a centralized consensus. I guess each option has issues.

joelbluminator 5y ago
> we will have to get used to the population fragmenting into different groups with different chains of trust This is becoming harder to do with the current culture wars. If each group would have respected the other that would have been possible, but it seems each group (especially the radical left if we are being honest) wants the other to comply to a new set of rules and philosophies. In schools, in the workplace and even when privately talking to each other. This makes it very difficult.
- bckr 5y ago
  I think "the radical left" is mostly reacting to upbringings that quashed personal expression, which phenomenon has been documented in the USA for centuries. So, they (and I, past tense) are reactive, unselfawarely using the tools they learned from their oppressors to try to do the opposite. And boy ever is the USA's right wing oppressive, but the oppression is in private, at home, in church, and in religious schools. What we're seeing is a breaking open and spilling over in a reverse direction of this oppression: an equal and opposite force. Yes, the "radical left" could really learn to be more respectful, but the examples of how to do so will be hard to find. Mr. Rogers comes to mind.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > And boy ever is the USA's right wing oppressive, but the oppression is in private No, its not; its just that when its been public, its been broadly supported, because the center of US political power is ideologically on the Right, or at least has been for most of modern history. So right-wing, whether economic (anti-socialist/anti-communist) or cultural (like PMRC’s push against naughty music, or the spate of internet censorship laws of the 1990s) tends to be supported not look partisan, because ot has support across both parties (the exact divide changes with partisan realignments, but for the more recent instances the Republican Party and the dominant centrist faction of Democrats tend to be in support.)

notanzaiiswear 5y ago

I don't quite understand: it seems to me there is an infinite stream of news, and everybody has to find a way to extract bits and pieces relevant to them. Social networks just make it easier to access the news stream, in that sense. But they are not responsible for creating the news, or at least, not in a significant way - as infinite+whatever amount of "news" SN create is still infinite. This just in relation to the article - of course SNs create all kinds of problems, but the amount of information is not really the problem caused by SNs.

amelius 5y ago

Perhaps make reposting more difficult, e.g. let the user solve a captcha. That will make the user think twice before reposting something.

streamofdigits 5y ago

People may find the original simulation studies [0] oversimplifying but that is the more or less the state-of-the-art of our understanding of social networks using agent models. There is always the nagging concern that your get out what you put in. We don't have to theorize though. Given all the open source platforms of the fediverse [1] people can setup networks, tweak to their heart's content and explore what "works" when actual humans are involved. Maybe what is really missing is some sort of crowdsourced framework for collecting and sharing that information. [0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/information-overload-helps-fake-news-spread-and-social-media-knows-it/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/information-overl... [1] https://fediverse.party/ https://fediverse.party/

deleted 5y ago

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unityByFreedom 5y ago

> As soon as your news feed becomes too big for you to read all of it and then decide whether to repost anything, the quality of information you propagate is going to fall because of that filtering process. So, curation is needed. Yet the curated groups do not have sufficient cross pollination of ideas. Why is that?

xyzzy21 5y ago

Of course it does. As a generating function, all you need to get a "Power Law" distribution of connections is a "preferential attachment" probability either statically or dynamically/transiently. Finite attention automatically creates that preferential attachment because you want to avoid "wasting the precious resource of attention"!!

bluepoint 5y ago

I don’t get it. The probability a message gets shared n times is the inverse of a power of n. How do you go from here to low quality messages get shared more as the total number of messages. I guess I could go and read the original research, but if anyone can explain, I will not mind.

bluepoint 5y ago
I guess the question is how is quality measured (message length?) and how it is considered.