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This footnote is almost more interesting than the post itself: > There's a deep beauty to the thought that untold millions of people using the app

This footnote is almost more interesting than the post itself: > There's a deep beauty to the thought that untold millions of people using the app randomly, but oh so slightly habitually, aggregated together, makes such a predictable pattern That 'beauty' can be extremely scary from another angle. It's evidence of what makes Facebook, and other social media, such powerful mass manipulation tools.

retrocryptid 4y ago
Yes. But just about every big service has marked diurnal and weekly patterns.
- 13of40 4y ago
  One service I used to work on processed business-to-customer and business-to-business emails almost exclusively, so you could see a recurring weekly pattern, bumps throughout the day when the US east coast, US west coast, Asia, and Europe woke up, and spikes at the top of the hour from automation. So one day we got a new boss, and he called me into his office in a panic so I could explain why his chart of the traffic kept going up and down. Took about four tries, but I think he eventually got it. I also recall seeing someone push a global update to that system that was packaged wrong, and watching the graph gradually drop and flatline as 20,000 VM hosts across the planet stopped taking traffic. That had its own subtle beauty, in no way diminished by the fact I was just a bystander and couldn't get in trouble for it.
none_to_remain 4y ago
I don't see the fright. So many things do this - electricity for example - you turn the lights on and off and run the laundry machine whenever it pleases you, but on the scale of millions of people the power companies predict the daily usage patterns very well.
- ricardobeat 4y ago
  Imagine if the power company could see everything you do at home, and control your lights, laundry machine and other electronics to influence your behavior. They don't have that kind of power, but social networks do.
euroderf 4y ago
You just described Hari Seldon's psychohistory.

retrocryptid 4y ago

Yes. But just about every big service has marked diurnal and weekly patterns.

13of40 4y ago
One service I used to work on processed business-to-customer and business-to-business emails almost exclusively, so you could see a recurring weekly pattern, bumps throughout the day when the US east coast, US west coast, Asia, and Europe woke up, and spikes at the top of the hour from automation. So one day we got a new boss, and he called me into his office in a panic so I could explain why his chart of the traffic kept going up and down. Took about four tries, but I think he eventually got it. I also recall seeing someone push a global update to that system that was packaged wrong, and watching the graph gradually drop and flatline as 20,000 VM hosts across the planet stopped taking traffic. That had its own subtle beauty, in no way diminished by the fact I was just a bystander and couldn't get in trouble for it.

none_to_remain 4y ago

I don't see the fright. So many things do this - electricity for example - you turn the lights on and off and run the laundry machine whenever it pleases you, but on the scale of millions of people the power companies predict the daily usage patterns very well.

ricardobeat 4y ago
Imagine if the power company could see everything you do at home, and control your lights, laundry machine and other electronics to influence your behavior. They don't have that kind of power, but social networks do.

euroderf 4y ago

You just described Hari Seldon's psychohistory.