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An aspect never mentioned is that this data only fed from active users, which are the minority of people. Majority of online users are lurkers, so all of these
by sogen 3y ago
An aspect never mentioned is that this data only fed from active users, which are the minority of people.
Majority of online users are lurkers, so all of these models are extremely biased on whom they got their information from.
- asdff 3y agoThe demography and expertise of your typical lurker probably vary over time as well. E.g. someone writing in a physics newsgroup in the usenet era I would guess is more likely to have relevant expertise than one writing in a physics subreddit today, now that the internet has grown beyond a population of predominantly academics and techies.
- thghtihadanacct 3y agoInteresting you say 'subreddit' ... like thats a thing beyond the social platform ... while responding in an HN comment.
- thghtihadanacct 3y ago[flagged]
- kuhewa 3y agoHow dare someone mention a common publicly accessible discussion board.. on a different publicly available discussion board that isn't focused on the same topic
- zogrodea 3y agoIt is kind of odd wording though to speak of "a physics subreddit" since it seems like it would make sense for there to be only one ("the physics subreddit" instead of "a physics subreddit"). That's not how things are though with /r/math, /r/maths and /r/mathematics existing all at the same time despite focusing on the same topic.
- kuhewa 3y agoDo you really think so? I imagine if you aren't familiar with Reddit from context a subreddit just means a topical discussion board, and if you are familiar with Reddit your default assumption would be there isn't only one subreddit for topics unless they are really niche like a mid sized city or sports team. I suppose if you are only vaguely familiar with Reddit you might it assume it's like a vBulletin setup where only a handful of subforums are set up by admins rather than users.
- thghtihadanacct 3y agoEither way, thats like saying an oil worker from the 1950's is different than an oil worker now. Yeah, thanks for the obvious
- hnaccount141 3y agoMore like saying that an oil worker is different from some guy quoting There Will Be Blood. The problem is that the difference in credibility between the two isn't easily accounted for once their posts are vacuumed up into a giant dataset.
- sogen 3y agoYep, exactly. For example Saurik only pops up here on HN from time to time. Same thing could be said of people that aren't online too much or barely never on tech forums, like John Carmack.
- HellDunkel 3y agoCarmack is on twitter.
- YetAnotherNick 3y agoYes, that's why Google will likely have immense advantage in this. I think content present in things like Google docs or Gmail is likely many times of public internet. And they have data for typing speed, human like randomness detection, backspace etc. which can very reliably detect human generated content.
- tlb 3y agoHuman social media users get a similarly biased sample of information. The thing is, there's no objectively unbiased sample of information. You could weight towards tweets or books, NYT or the Economist, arXiv or journals. The books could be bestsellers or classics. There's no right answer, just preferences.