[HN Gopher] Social Networks: It's worse than you think (2020) ___________________________________________________________________ Social Networks: It's worse than you think (2020) Author : ColinWright Score : 56 points Date : 2021-09-11 20:57 UTC (2 hours ago) (HTM) web link (meta.ath0.com) (TXT) w3m dump (meta.ath0.com) | BarryMilo wrote: | 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 wrote: | My experience watching my older family members share memes on | Facebook suggests otherwise. | | Also, the entirety of Twitter, in a completely different way. | arglebarglegar wrote: | facebook has billions of monthly users, there's no way you | interact with even 1% of that, so anecdotal feelings are | completely meaningless! | 3np wrote: | 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- | overl... | ctoth wrote: | https://archive.ph/dwpPS | crdrost wrote: | 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. | motohagiography wrote: | 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 wrote: | Example: free software can't be good, we should buy SAP. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-09-11 23:00 UTC)