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Prioritisation of information is a hard problem to solve. And that's why I think Facebook is doing so well - it takes this problem and uses social means to sol

by runn1ng 15y ago

Prioritisation of information is a hard problem to solve. And that's why I think Facebook is doing so well - it takes this problem and uses social means to solve it. You probably need the information most of your friends needed. And if you "like" some of what your friend post a lot, you will probably like what he posts next. That's why RSS is dead and Facebook is thriving. People don't want linear flow of all possible information, especially today with too much information. You need to take the important stuff out - that's why newspapers have frontpages, that's what google news is doing, that's what slashdot/digg/reddit/hacker news is doing. Facebook do it socially.

Gormo 15y ago
Is it? There are a quite a few high-quality blogs I read (via RSS feeds, of course), but I usually discover them via aggregators such as HN, Reddit, Metafilter, etc. I've found Facebook and Twitter to be a terrible way to identify high-quality content sources: they ironically lack the social-filter function. It's the cultural norms of a community like HN, combined with its also socially-mediated ranking mechanism, that enable aggregators to function so well as content filters. Facebook and Twitter are disjointed in that no one is taking to precisely the same group of people, and there's no evaluative mechanism at all: if someone you follow posts it, it shows up on your front page. Linear flow of all information is exactly what you get. Facebook is excellent as a glorified contact list, but I still can't found a purpose for Twitter in my life. Reddit is the real winner: the subreddits are coherent communities, and they can be viewed and subscribed to independently of each other, so you're joining a community of communities, each with its own content-filtering mechanism. Of course, Reddit is essentially a modern version of USENET.

by runn1ng 15y ago

Gormo 15y ago

Is it? There are a quite a few high-quality blogs I read (via RSS feeds, of course), but I usually discover them via aggregators such as HN, Reddit, Metafilter, etc. I've found Facebook and Twitter to be a terrible way to identify high-quality content sources: they ironically lack the social-filter function. It's the cultural norms of a community like HN, combined with its also socially-mediated ranking mechanism, that enable aggregators to function so well as content filters. Facebook and Twitter are disjointed in that no one is taking to precisely the same group of people, and there's no evaluative mechanism at all: if someone you follow posts it, it shows up on your front page. Linear flow of all information is exactly what you get. Facebook is excellent as a glorified contact list, but I still can't found a purpose for Twitter in my life. Reddit is the real winner: the subreddits are coherent communities, and they can be viewed and subscribed to independently of each other, so you're joining a community of communities, each with its own content-filtering mechanism. Of course, Reddit is essentially a modern version of USENET.