10 ms·

And you will know us by the company we keep

280 points by jger15 5y ago

themark 5y ago
Shout out to https://www.trailofdead.com/ https://www.trailofdead.com/
anejrcc 5y ago
HN doesnt build a social graph or an interest graph but its still interesting to me. Now if they can just do something about comments. Like just randomly cull a chuck every hour or so and it will be a nice energy generating space to hang out.
- burnished 5y ago
  What is a chuck?
  - AutumnCurtain 5y ago
    I assume he meant "chunk"
    - 1270018080 5y ago
      What does cull a chunk mean?
      - burnished 5y ago
        If it does mean chunk, I think it means randomly removing clusters on the network graph. I'm guessing the idea is that it would promote healthier networks because you'd periodically be removing portions and only the parts you thought were really worthwhile would get reconnected?
    - ChefboyOG 5y ago
      Alternatively, we delete comments by whichever user's screen name reminds us most of the name "Chuck"
    - burnished 5y ago
      That makes way more sense. I thought it was something rude but I couldn't figure it out.
Invictus0 5y ago
Great essay, very insightful, very smart--but zoom out a bit and we get the old adage: The brightest minds of our generation are working on getting us addicted to social media.
hbarka 5y ago
I wish I can ride onto an interest graph without having to wait for the algorithm to decide it for me by inference of who I (have to) follow.
renewiltord 5y ago
YouTube is another company that builds an interest graph without a social graph. I think I would often like to edit my interest graph myself. It’s not that I don’t like being targeted. I just want to help them do it right.
- laurent92 5y ago
  I’ve always wondered whether annoying videos (or rather, thumbnails) were necessary as part of making us notice the upsides.
- Nition 5y ago
  Twitter allows editing the list of interests it thinks you might have but the implementation leaves a lot to be desired. It's at Settings -> Privacy and safety -> Ads preferences -> Interests. The interface is presented as a giant list of hundreds of potential interests, all ticked by default, but which must be unticked one at a time. If you start actually unticking them all or try to automate it with a script (which is the only way to stop Twitter from suggesting tweets from those interests to you, until it comes up with some new ones), the unchecking gets progressively slower until it starts throwing 500 Internal Server Errors, showing the state as changing but silently failing.
Tomorrw 5y ago
Is Reeds law holding up? Whats the latest on that? Thought the Dunbar number prevents exponential scaling.
- xmprt 5y ago
  The Dunbar number is about individual connections. The exponential scaling comes from the number of possible subgroups. I might have 5 close friends but each pair of friends has a different interest. From 5 friends, we have 15 interests. With 10 friends, we can have 90 interests.
Lammy 5y ago
I've never seen anyone use the phrase "social capital subsidy" before but really like it.
swamp40 5y ago
"But what if there was a way to build an interest graph for you without you having to follow anyone? What if you could skip the long and painstaking intermediate step of assembling a social graph and just jump directly to the interest graph?...And what if the algorithm that pulled this off could also adjust to your evolving tastes in near real-time, without you having to actively tune it?" I have to say, Facebook has this working well for me. Their "Suggested for you" posts are 99% interesting to me. I have no idea how they do it.
- dkarl 5y ago
  Facebook never worked that way for me, and I always assumed the explanation given by the article is the reason. The social connections I had on Facebook (family, old classmates, wife's friends, etc.) had virtually no overlapping interests with me. On Twitter I choose whom to follow, and on YouTube I choose which channels to subscribe to. The problem with Facebook for me was that it was too warped by social obligations. An old friend from high school sends me a friend request, and his parents have been talking with my parents about how he isn't doing great, eh, easiest to accept it. Oh, shit, they weren't kidding about him not doing great, and he's consoling himself with some weird ideas. Twitter for me is 98% non-personal. YouTube is completely impersonal. No social interaction == much better fit to my interests.
himaraya 5y ago
Eugene could really use an editor for his top-notch insights.
- icelancer 5y ago
  He has one. Perhaps it's not enough.
  - himaraya 5y ago
    His writing needs more aggressive editing, for sure.
- mdoms 5y ago
  I got about a third of the way through the article and gave up. If there's anything "top notch" in that mess it's certainly not in that portion of the piece.
- bawolff 5y ago
  It's a bit rambly, but that seems more like a stylistic choice than a flaw.
  - himaraya 5y ago
    Either way, his writing could use more organizing. Brevity would considerably broaden his readership.
    - bawolff 5y ago
      I didn't find it disorganized. There seemed to be a clear progression of ideas and it kept my interest throughout. Readership isn't everything. The best way to appeal to a broad base is to say nothing of import; i'm not sure a pared down version would be as interesting a piece.
      - himaraya 5y ago
        Readership remains a side effect of respect for other people's time, which concise writing delivers, in contrast to rambling.
strogonoff 5y ago
> Western social apps also rely much more heavily on advertising revenue. I’m surprised this is only mentioned in passing, as it most certainly relates to the problem of “over-attributing how people behave on a social app to their innate nature”. To paraphrase, perhaps the single most important influence on users’ behavior in social media is platforms’ existential requirement to generate ad revenue from it? The author mostly misses this factor in favor of overthinking what technically is its consequences. Seems blindingly obvious that such a business model would shape everything from high-level design to implementation to strategy—all that causes social media dynamics to be what they are.
mooreds 5y ago
Like always, Eugene blows my mind. I don't have a lot to add in commentary, but almost every time I read one of his essays, I learn something. Here are some particularly insightful snippets from the article. > A higher fidelity social product would automatically nip and tuck our social graphs over time as they observed our interaction patterns. YES! I remember reading about someone advocating for an app to make unfollowing easy (daily, present someone on a social network and if you swiped right, unfollow them). But it'd be even better if the network did it; they have the data, after all. > Twitter favors pure play Twitter accounts that focus on one niche. This so much. And it's one of the reasons I struggle with Twitter. > First, [TikTok] runs videos through one of the most terrifying, vicious quality filters known to man: a panel of a few hundred largely Gen Z users. LOL. > TikTok is an interest graph built as an interest graph. Note that the entire article is built around the concept that western social media companies have used the social graph as a proxy for the content graph, to their detriment. > It's no surprise that many tech companies install Slack and then suddenly find themselves, shortly thereafter, dealing with employee uprisings. When you rewire the communications topology of any group, you alter the dynamic among the members. Shout it from the rooftops! > [On linkedin:] It turns out if you map out the professional graph, not just today but also across long temporal and organizational dimensions, recruiters will pay a lot of money to traverse it. A friend calls LinkedIn "a rolodex that someone else keeps up to date". I don't think we've seen the peak of LI's value. Such a smart acquisition by MS.
- RobRivera 5y ago
  i dont want my network -optimizing- my social graph, and facebook has done this to a point where I need to supplement my social graph external to their product since i simply have different communication profiles for different (equally important) nodes in my graph.
  - mooreds 5y ago
    Facebook optimizes the content from the social graph to try to make the derived interest graph better. I would love if Facebook pruned my social graph. I still have a ton of FB friends from 2008-2010 when I joined FB and was active. But most of those people don't matter to my life much anymore. Why does FB think they do? Because they haven't pruned my graph based on my interactions. So FB becomes less useful to me. That said, I think any network with a monolithic graph (or incentives to have one) will run into the problem you outline (where you need to supplement the network with external tools/solutions).
bdangubic 5y ago
I think social media companies need to build two graphs: 1. interest graph 2. s(he) spends money on graph There are A LOT of things that I am interested in that social media companies cannot monetize on. But there is also A TON of things they can. While number of companies are fairly great at #1, absolutely not a single on is even remotely decent at the #2.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  How do you expect successful implementation of #2 to look like? I'd expect it to be pretty similar to the state of Amazon product recommendations. The problem is that users and platforms have a very different definition of what a good use of a graph is. This comes from their business model - advertising. For #1, you want to see things that are interesting to you, but the platforms want things that will keep you "engaged" the most (maximizing your exposure to advertising, which they sell as a service). The result is, you get content that, while related to your interest, is mostly a bottom-feeding, lowest-common-denominator material geared towards pushing your emotional buttons. So with #2, again, the platforms may know perfectly well what you're spending money on, but what they'll show you won't be the perfect deals for you - they'll be the worst deals for you, from customers of theirs who spent most money on getting their offers in front of people.
  - bdangubic 5y ago
    I do not believe for one second (I could be dead wrong of course!) that platforms know what I am spending money on. It is not that I am not getting perfect deals fed to me in ads, it is that I am getting fed things I do not have a slight interest in and would absolutely never purchase. I play tennis and if I was getting fed ads for racquets that cost $500 or tennis ball machines that cost $3k that would be one thing (not a very good deal and I would never spend that much money) but what I am getting are ads for hoola hoops which I would not buy even if someone was selling them for $1.
simonebrunozzi 5y ago
As expected, another amazing post by Eugene. This might be the best sentence: > One of my favorite heuristics for spotting flaws in a system is to look at those trying to break it. I use this "technique" quite often and I kind of think of it as a secret mini-weapon, and I loved seeing it mentioned here.
- shoto_io 5y ago
  Can you elaborate on your secret? ;-) maybe give an example?
  - Jemaclus 5y ago
    One example might be influencers buying followers. If simply paying money for bots (or people?) to follow you is enough to create "influence," then that may be a flaw in the system.
  - simonebrunozzi 5y ago
    I thought it was quite clear: look at people trying to break a system, it highlights flaws in the system.
  - jimkleiber 5y ago
    Another social media example might be finstas, where people create a separate private IG account to complement their public IG account because IG has binary privacy settings: either public or private.
  - pferde 5y ago
    Yet another example could be people making a path across a lawn over time because existing paths are insufficient, and they prefer to take a shortcut.
- dapids 5y ago
  So basically "you spot flaws in systems by watching people break them". Uh -- duh! Some revelation ... I don't think something that is common knowledge is a secret weapon, but to each their own I guess.
bobthechef 5y ago
BigTech can use the social graph combined with additional knowledge they are collecting on you to shape social outcomes in subtle, but controlled ways. For example, if you begin to be seen as unfavorable by certain people or by some algorithm, the information you see might quietly begin to change: the jobs you see posted, the health care will be offered, the schools you apply to. These would not result in some massively obvious punishment for certain behaviors, but in a way that might be viewed as a marriage between shadowbanning and bias in ML models, which is to say that the bias would be fully controlled and quietly implemented in a continuous way. Now, LinkedIn and Facebook can track social milieus, but are they using that knowledge to direct social phenomena, so to speak? For example, if a group of people in opposition to BigTech begins to coalesce, are they using social media to discourage, shape, and manage the discourse in a way that diminishes the likelihood that such a group can mount a cohesive threat to BigTech (for example, by increasing fragmentation or cooling by increasing the amount of conflicting information different people in that group receive, or impeding the spread of certain kinds of information within that group)?
da39a3ee 5y ago
Only read first third but seems like a very good essay, even though not everyone wants to read 10k words on Western social media. I recently tried to use Twitter and came to the same conclusion - I followed some people cos they are interesting on computer science, but why the fuck would i want to see their nature photos from their weekend walk?
skmurphy 5y ago
I think there is a significant opportunity for an app or platform that allows me to make helpful introductions in the right context. I am not aware of any that allow me to curate my network and suggest who to connect (and provide a context for the suggested conversation). Please leave a comment if you are aware of one or working on it or contact me via my profile.
Jemaclus 5y ago
My wife and I were discussing Facebook vs Instagram vs TikTok the other day. Neither of us use Facebook. My wife pointed out that our friends aren't interesting. Their posts are often their kids or their families or politics or something that just isn't that interesting to us. They're still friends, but they just aren't interesting to follow on social media. On the flip side, I love TikTok. It's full of strangers! New, exciting strangers doing wild, strange things in trendy and funny and smart and annoying and cringe-filled ways! TikTok is an entire world of social media that could never exist on Facebook. (Or maybe it did back when it started? I can't remember.) Instagram is the more interesting one for me. I observed over the course of this conversation that if you look at my feed, it's boring stuff I don't care about. I follow my friends and they post pictures of their kids and blah blah blah. But if you click the "Discover" tab, it's almost entirely three of my biggest interests: horses, fitness, and D&D. To Eugene's point, my feed is my social graph, but my Discover tab is my interest graph. Like Eugene, one of the things I like about TikTok is that it's an interest graph and I happen to be connected to a few of my friends. But since I spend most of my time on the For You Page, I never see my friend's stuff. That's totally fine with me! I'd love more social media apps to understand that connecting with my friends doesn't mean I want to know everything they're doing, and instead I want to meet at the intersection of my social graph and my interests. Those two things don't often overlap, but when they do, it's a recipe for fun and engagement. FWIW, despite having dramatically increased the number of ads they display, I still maintain that Instagram's ads are far and away better than Facebook's, TikTok's, Twitter's, and even Google's. I see an ad on IG and I very often say, "huh, that looks cool" whereas I would just gloss over it on other platforms.
- wenc 5y ago
  > My wife pointed out that our friends aren't interesting. Their posts are often their kids or their families or politics or something that just isn't that interesting to us. They're still friends, but they just aren't interesting to follow on social media. This is a fascinating insight. Facebook is optimized for in groups whereas Instagram and TikTok are platforms for creators. Naturally the latter is going to be more interesting especially if your peer group is pretty stable. I guess I’m unusual in that I move around a lot (different countries, different parts of the country) and my peer group gets refreshed (or gets reshuffled) every few years. I often get to know people who have very little in common with my previous social groups so Facebook continues to be interesting for me. There’s also something to be said about continually upgrading or changing one’s peer group. Not practical for everyone of course but for me it just kinda happens.
thatoneguy 5y ago
Google patented a social graph that decays based on level of interactions awhile ago: https://patents.google.com/patent/US9020965B1/ https://patents.google.com/patent/US9020965B1/
- Grimm1 5y ago
  The fact I had that thought at little earlier in this thread before reading your comment leads me to believe two things, one it's a somewhat trivial idea to arrive upon and that two our patent system is broken that something like that could be patented when it's really not a hard thought to arrive at.
- gnicholas 5y ago
  Google's social graph decayed a little more quickly than they'd hoped...
jger15 5y ago
good companion with eugene and kevin kwok: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbnDay35L8I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbnDay35L8I
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Sophistifunk 5y ago
> When designing an app that shapes its user experience off of a social graph, how do you ensure the user ends up with the optimal graph to get the most value out of your product/service? This is the heart of what's wrong. Nobody running these companies gives a flying fuck if the users get the most value out of their service. They want the service to get the most value out of the users.
yaofeng_wang 5y ago
A very interesting essay. Are there any resources that delves deeper into theories related to "interest graph", "social graph", etc, from a product design point of view?

280 points by jger15 5y ago

Shout out to https://www.trailofdead.com/ https://www.trailofdead.com/

HN doesnt build a social graph or an interest graph but its still interesting to me. Now if they can just do something about comments. Like just randomly cull a chuck every hour or so and it will be a nice energy generating space to hang out.

burnished 5y ago
What is a chuck?
- AutumnCurtain 5y ago
  I assume he meant "chunk"
  - 1270018080 5y ago
    What does cull a chunk mean?
    - burnished 5y ago
      If it does mean chunk, I think it means randomly removing clusters on the network graph. I'm guessing the idea is that it would promote healthier networks because you'd periodically be removing portions and only the parts you thought were really worthwhile would get reconnected?
  - ChefboyOG 5y ago
    Alternatively, we delete comments by whichever user's screen name reminds us most of the name "Chuck"
  - burnished 5y ago
    That makes way more sense. I thought it was something rude but I couldn't figure it out.

Invictus0 5y ago

Great essay, very insightful, very smart--but zoom out a bit and we get the old adage: The brightest minds of our generation are working on getting us addicted to social media.

hbarka 5y ago

I wish I can ride onto an interest graph without having to wait for the algorithm to decide it for me by inference of who I (have to) follow.

renewiltord 5y ago

YouTube is another company that builds an interest graph without a social graph. I think I would often like to edit my interest graph myself. It’s not that I don’t like being targeted. I just want to help them do it right.

laurent92 5y ago
I’ve always wondered whether annoying videos (or rather, thumbnails) were necessary as part of making us notice the upsides.
Nition 5y ago
Twitter allows editing the list of interests it thinks you might have but the implementation leaves a lot to be desired. It's at Settings -> Privacy and safety -> Ads preferences -> Interests. The interface is presented as a giant list of hundreds of potential interests, all ticked by default, but which must be unticked one at a time. If you start actually unticking them all or try to automate it with a script (which is the only way to stop Twitter from suggesting tweets from those interests to you, until it comes up with some new ones), the unchecking gets progressively slower until it starts throwing 500 Internal Server Errors, showing the state as changing but silently failing.

Tomorrw 5y ago

Is Reeds law holding up? Whats the latest on that? Thought the Dunbar number prevents exponential scaling.

xmprt 5y ago
The Dunbar number is about individual connections. The exponential scaling comes from the number of possible subgroups. I might have 5 close friends but each pair of friends has a different interest. From 5 friends, we have 15 interests. With 10 friends, we can have 90 interests.

Lammy 5y ago

I've never seen anyone use the phrase "social capital subsidy" before but really like it.

swamp40 5y ago

"But what if there was a way to build an interest graph for you without you having to follow anyone? What if you could skip the long and painstaking intermediate step of assembling a social graph and just jump directly to the interest graph?...And what if the algorithm that pulled this off could also adjust to your evolving tastes in near real-time, without you having to actively tune it?" I have to say, Facebook has this working well for me. Their "Suggested for you" posts are 99% interesting to me. I have no idea how they do it.

dkarl 5y ago
Facebook never worked that way for me, and I always assumed the explanation given by the article is the reason. The social connections I had on Facebook (family, old classmates, wife's friends, etc.) had virtually no overlapping interests with me. On Twitter I choose whom to follow, and on YouTube I choose which channels to subscribe to. The problem with Facebook for me was that it was too warped by social obligations. An old friend from high school sends me a friend request, and his parents have been talking with my parents about how he isn't doing great, eh, easiest to accept it. Oh, shit, they weren't kidding about him not doing great, and he's consoling himself with some weird ideas. Twitter for me is 98% non-personal. YouTube is completely impersonal. No social interaction == much better fit to my interests.

himaraya 5y ago

Eugene could really use an editor for his top-notch insights.

icelancer 5y ago
He has one. Perhaps it's not enough.
- himaraya 5y ago
  His writing needs more aggressive editing, for sure.
mdoms 5y ago
I got about a third of the way through the article and gave up. If there's anything "top notch" in that mess it's certainly not in that portion of the piece.
bawolff 5y ago
It's a bit rambly, but that seems more like a stylistic choice than a flaw.
- himaraya 5y ago
  Either way, his writing could use more organizing. Brevity would considerably broaden his readership.
  - bawolff 5y ago
    I didn't find it disorganized. There seemed to be a clear progression of ideas and it kept my interest throughout. Readership isn't everything. The best way to appeal to a broad base is to say nothing of import; i'm not sure a pared down version would be as interesting a piece.
    - himaraya 5y ago
      Readership remains a side effect of respect for other people's time, which concise writing delivers, in contrast to rambling.

strogonoff 5y ago

> Western social apps also rely much more heavily on advertising revenue. I’m surprised this is only mentioned in passing, as it most certainly relates to the problem of “over-attributing how people behave on a social app to their innate nature”. To paraphrase, perhaps the single most important influence on users’ behavior in social media is platforms’ existential requirement to generate ad revenue from it? The author mostly misses this factor in favor of overthinking what technically is its consequences. Seems blindingly obvious that such a business model would shape everything from high-level design to implementation to strategy—all that causes social media dynamics to be what they are.

mooreds 5y ago

Like always, Eugene blows my mind. I don't have a lot to add in commentary, but almost every time I read one of his essays, I learn something. Here are some particularly insightful snippets from the article. > A higher fidelity social product would automatically nip and tuck our social graphs over time as they observed our interaction patterns. YES! I remember reading about someone advocating for an app to make unfollowing easy (daily, present someone on a social network and if you swiped right, unfollow them). But it'd be even better if the network did it; they have the data, after all. > Twitter favors pure play Twitter accounts that focus on one niche. This so much. And it's one of the reasons I struggle with Twitter. > First, [TikTok] runs videos through one of the most terrifying, vicious quality filters known to man: a panel of a few hundred largely Gen Z users. LOL. > TikTok is an interest graph built as an interest graph. Note that the entire article is built around the concept that western social media companies have used the social graph as a proxy for the content graph, to their detriment. > It's no surprise that many tech companies install Slack and then suddenly find themselves, shortly thereafter, dealing with employee uprisings. When you rewire the communications topology of any group, you alter the dynamic among the members. Shout it from the rooftops! > [On linkedin:] It turns out if you map out the professional graph, not just today but also across long temporal and organizational dimensions, recruiters will pay a lot of money to traverse it. A friend calls LinkedIn "a rolodex that someone else keeps up to date". I don't think we've seen the peak of LI's value. Such a smart acquisition by MS.

RobRivera 5y ago
i dont want my network -optimizing- my social graph, and facebook has done this to a point where I need to supplement my social graph external to their product since i simply have different communication profiles for different (equally important) nodes in my graph.
- mooreds 5y ago
  Facebook optimizes the content from the social graph to try to make the derived interest graph better. I would love if Facebook pruned my social graph. I still have a ton of FB friends from 2008-2010 when I joined FB and was active. But most of those people don't matter to my life much anymore. Why does FB think they do? Because they haven't pruned my graph based on my interactions. So FB becomes less useful to me. That said, I think any network with a monolithic graph (or incentives to have one) will run into the problem you outline (where you need to supplement the network with external tools/solutions).

bdangubic 5y ago

I think social media companies need to build two graphs: 1. interest graph 2. s(he) spends money on graph There are A LOT of things that I am interested in that social media companies cannot monetize on. But there is also A TON of things they can. While number of companies are fairly great at #1, absolutely not a single on is even remotely decent at the #2.

TeMPOraL 5y ago
How do you expect successful implementation of #2 to look like? I'd expect it to be pretty similar to the state of Amazon product recommendations. The problem is that users and platforms have a very different definition of what a good use of a graph is. This comes from their business model - advertising. For #1, you want to see things that are interesting to you, but the platforms want things that will keep you "engaged" the most (maximizing your exposure to advertising, which they sell as a service). The result is, you get content that, while related to your interest, is mostly a bottom-feeding, lowest-common-denominator material geared towards pushing your emotional buttons. So with #2, again, the platforms may know perfectly well what you're spending money on, but what they'll show you won't be the perfect deals for you - they'll be the worst deals for you, from customers of theirs who spent most money on getting their offers in front of people.
- bdangubic 5y ago
  I do not believe for one second (I could be dead wrong of course!) that platforms know what I am spending money on. It is not that I am not getting perfect deals fed to me in ads, it is that I am getting fed things I do not have a slight interest in and would absolutely never purchase. I play tennis and if I was getting fed ads for racquets that cost $500 or tennis ball machines that cost $3k that would be one thing (not a very good deal and I would never spend that much money) but what I am getting are ads for hoola hoops which I would not buy even if someone was selling them for $1.

simonebrunozzi 5y ago

As expected, another amazing post by Eugene. This might be the best sentence: > One of my favorite heuristics for spotting flaws in a system is to look at those trying to break it. I use this "technique" quite often and I kind of think of it as a secret mini-weapon, and I loved seeing it mentioned here.

shoto_io 5y ago
Can you elaborate on your secret? ;-) maybe give an example?
- Jemaclus 5y ago
  One example might be influencers buying followers. If simply paying money for bots (or people?) to follow you is enough to create "influence," then that may be a flaw in the system.
- simonebrunozzi 5y ago
  I thought it was quite clear: look at people trying to break a system, it highlights flaws in the system.
- jimkleiber 5y ago
  Another social media example might be finstas, where people create a separate private IG account to complement their public IG account because IG has binary privacy settings: either public or private.
- pferde 5y ago
  Yet another example could be people making a path across a lawn over time because existing paths are insufficient, and they prefer to take a shortcut.
dapids 5y ago
So basically "you spot flaws in systems by watching people break them". Uh -- duh! Some revelation ... I don't think something that is common knowledge is a secret weapon, but to each their own I guess.

bobthechef 5y ago

BigTech can use the social graph combined with additional knowledge they are collecting on you to shape social outcomes in subtle, but controlled ways. For example, if you begin to be seen as unfavorable by certain people or by some algorithm, the information you see might quietly begin to change: the jobs you see posted, the health care will be offered, the schools you apply to. These would not result in some massively obvious punishment for certain behaviors, but in a way that might be viewed as a marriage between shadowbanning and bias in ML models, which is to say that the bias would be fully controlled and quietly implemented in a continuous way. Now, LinkedIn and Facebook can track social milieus, but are they using that knowledge to direct social phenomena, so to speak? For example, if a group of people in opposition to BigTech begins to coalesce, are they using social media to discourage, shape, and manage the discourse in a way that diminishes the likelihood that such a group can mount a cohesive threat to BigTech (for example, by increasing fragmentation or cooling by increasing the amount of conflicting information different people in that group receive, or impeding the spread of certain kinds of information within that group)?

da39a3ee 5y ago

Only read first third but seems like a very good essay, even though not everyone wants to read 10k words on Western social media. I recently tried to use Twitter and came to the same conclusion - I followed some people cos they are interesting on computer science, but why the fuck would i want to see their nature photos from their weekend walk?

skmurphy 5y ago

I think there is a significant opportunity for an app or platform that allows me to make helpful introductions in the right context. I am not aware of any that allow me to curate my network and suggest who to connect (and provide a context for the suggested conversation). Please leave a comment if you are aware of one or working on it or contact me via my profile.

Jemaclus 5y ago

My wife and I were discussing Facebook vs Instagram vs TikTok the other day. Neither of us use Facebook. My wife pointed out that our friends aren't interesting. Their posts are often their kids or their families or politics or something that just isn't that interesting to us. They're still friends, but they just aren't interesting to follow on social media. On the flip side, I love TikTok. It's full of strangers! New, exciting strangers doing wild, strange things in trendy and funny and smart and annoying and cringe-filled ways! TikTok is an entire world of social media that could never exist on Facebook. (Or maybe it did back when it started? I can't remember.) Instagram is the more interesting one for me. I observed over the course of this conversation that if you look at my feed, it's boring stuff I don't care about. I follow my friends and they post pictures of their kids and blah blah blah. But if you click the "Discover" tab, it's almost entirely three of my biggest interests: horses, fitness, and D&D. To Eugene's point, my feed is my social graph, but my Discover tab is my interest graph. Like Eugene, one of the things I like about TikTok is that it's an interest graph and I happen to be connected to a few of my friends. But since I spend most of my time on the For You Page, I never see my friend's stuff. That's totally fine with me! I'd love more social media apps to understand that connecting with my friends doesn't mean I want to know everything they're doing, and instead I want to meet at the intersection of my social graph and my interests. Those two things don't often overlap, but when they do, it's a recipe for fun and engagement. FWIW, despite having dramatically increased the number of ads they display, I still maintain that Instagram's ads are far and away better than Facebook's, TikTok's, Twitter's, and even Google's. I see an ad on IG and I very often say, "huh, that looks cool" whereas I would just gloss over it on other platforms.

wenc 5y ago
> My wife pointed out that our friends aren't interesting. Their posts are often their kids or their families or politics or something that just isn't that interesting to us. They're still friends, but they just aren't interesting to follow on social media. This is a fascinating insight. Facebook is optimized for in groups whereas Instagram and TikTok are platforms for creators. Naturally the latter is going to be more interesting especially if your peer group is pretty stable. I guess I’m unusual in that I move around a lot (different countries, different parts of the country) and my peer group gets refreshed (or gets reshuffled) every few years. I often get to know people who have very little in common with my previous social groups so Facebook continues to be interesting for me. There’s also something to be said about continually upgrading or changing one’s peer group. Not practical for everyone of course but for me it just kinda happens.

thatoneguy 5y ago

Google patented a social graph that decays based on level of interactions awhile ago: https://patents.google.com/patent/US9020965B1/ https://patents.google.com/patent/US9020965B1/

Grimm1 5y ago
The fact I had that thought at little earlier in this thread before reading your comment leads me to believe two things, one it's a somewhat trivial idea to arrive upon and that two our patent system is broken that something like that could be patented when it's really not a hard thought to arrive at.
gnicholas 5y ago
Google's social graph decayed a little more quickly than they'd hoped...

jger15 5y ago

good companion with eugene and kevin kwok: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbnDay35L8I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbnDay35L8I

deleted 5y ago

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Sophistifunk 5y ago

> When designing an app that shapes its user experience off of a social graph, how do you ensure the user ends up with the optimal graph to get the most value out of your product/service? This is the heart of what's wrong. Nobody running these companies gives a flying fuck if the users get the most value out of their service. They want the service to get the most value out of the users.

yaofeng_wang 5y ago

A very interesting essay. Are there any resources that delves deeper into theories related to "interest graph", "social graph", etc, from a product design point of view?